Two languages, one mind
On the bilingual brain and how it explores, understands, and processes the world
Thank you for being here! In the first edition of the Atlas newsletter, you will find a meditation on “The Design of Return” podcast first episode about “Two languages, one mind” with Dr. Alicia Luque; unedited extra Q&A shared with you only, show notes, additional resources on the theme, and a curated prompt to join the discussion in our subscriber-only Friday thread.
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The nostalgia of bilingualism
I am sitting in the cold of an air-conditioned safe zone at Starbucks. The summer makes Milan an inhospitable place.
After coming back from the United States to my original home in Italy, a place like this — stranded in the middle of a traditional neighborhood — has been a comforting neutral land in my endless transition. Only with caramel tones, plants, and grass floors now, a new design compared to the brown and green box I was used to.
In this neutrality, I feel understood. I am now a half-breed. Half Italian by birth and half a foreigner by experience, mixing my thoughts in half sentences.
Just like the landscape here I am constantly trying to reconcile what I left that never changed, with what I found abroad that changed me.
My last Starbucks signpost was in California. A parking lot, no bikes, an overlook on hills and palm trees, a CVS pharmacy, a locksmith, a gas station, the morning fog of the Ocean mist, the morning dogs. A place so alienating and new it didn’t need me and my story to exist, so that every morning I could be as new as the day ahead.
I am happy I can work from here again, masks permitting. The reason being air conditioning, but mostly nostalgia.
The United States for me was a place big enough to lose myself and weird enough for my own kind of “weird” to feel at home. I don’t think I will ever fully recover from the grieving feeling of having lost that as a permanent address. But I also don’t know if I am asking myself the right question.
Our guest in The Design of Return podcast first episode is Doctor Alicia Luque, a neurolinguist who studies the bilingual brain. She is from Spain. At the time of our interview, she was on the verge of leaving the United States after ten years to return to Europe and move to the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. An island floating in a glacial sea and a place she has never been before.
As I was struggling with my own longing for America, my former land, and my former self, I wanted to know what her experience had been like.
(unedited question # 1)
Donatella Caggiano - 1:02:00 : Is there anything America taught you that you aren't ready to let go of?
Alicia Luque - 1:02:02 : America taught me so many things, but if I have to choose one I think it's humility. Some people may think this to be counterintuitive to the idea of America, but let me contextualise. I found in this country some of the most brilliant people and the most humble. I have been able to work with the people that I used to read when I was an undergrad student. I never thought this would be possible because unfortunately European Universities are still rooted in this idea of privilege and “casta”, and sometimes it feels like University professors are as unapproachable as gods. I came to the US thinking it was going to be the same thing. And I actually found the opposite. All the most amazing researchers you can imagine, the most prolific, most renowned people were the most accessible, the most humble, the most, you know, normal. And that was something mind-blowing for me. And a huge life lesson.
My experience of the States is not in Academia, but in corporate business and cultural social circles like media, creators, and artists. But I agree with her that the innate sense of possibility is what makes this land feel like it is geographically vast and spiritually infinite.
What Alicia calls humility is for me anonimity, the humble possibility to be no one and someone at the same time, as long as you put in the work. At the same time, the opportunity to never be reminded of your past too much, because the place itself is designed to forget.
When I was living in New York, I discovered a cute vintage stationery shop in the West Village, where I bought minuscule optical postcards in which a mouth would turn into a kiss when you moved it back and forth.
I was so happy with my finding that I bought twenty of them. I was sure I was going to make it a tradition to curate this little spread for my friends every year. But the year after I found out the store was put up for rent and turned into an office space with no name.
Renewal there was a law. Forgetting, a practice.
The recurrent lack of reminders of the past created something I wasn’t used to. A constant clean slate that made it easier for me to redesign myself. Like a ship at sea forced to navigate because the anchor is broken.
The more I experienced it, the faster I would change. The process was intoxicating and became something I learned to turn to for comfort.
How was it possible a place that forced me to forget so easily made me feel more at home than one that constantly reminded me of who I was?
This is a paradox I entered then and I am still trying to figure out after my return to Italy where I experience the opposite tension.
Right now, sipping a matcha latte, my eyes follow a Tesla at a traffic light. It’s white, shiny, and silent, a daytime ghost in the loud honking of old tracks and smoke spitting cars. An old lady walks slowly in front of a tall office building. There are two large meditative rocks in the middle of a pool of artificial water. I can see her reflection covering the distance between the two, pacing herself not to fall under the weight of the grocery bags on her wrist. In a glass window, as large as the wall, a frappuccino board sign invites strollers to pause for a moment. On the other side of the street, a florist with its floppy curtain painted in nighttime fading graffiti and a beat-up vintage Vespa at the curb.
The street outside here is a mix of what I have been seeing since the 90s along with a grandiose attempt at switching codes to something new, something forward.
Compared to the States, in Italy, my original home, the anchor seems to be constantly dropped, dragging the ship through the sand.
In the past three years after my return, I have been trying to reconcile with a constant reminder of the past.
This alienating feeling of not fully belonging here anymore extended to my language as well.
My words and the way I communicate have become a constant negotiation with the world around me, my relationship with Italian something I don’t pursue easily. I work hard at finding refuge in the symbolic “matcha latte”, now having the comforting sound of a familiar word to make me feel at home.
I look around and I see many other people like me. There are at least four continents sitting next to me. I wonder if they feel the same relief in a globalised language to soothe their multilingual experience.
I also get mad at English at times. Mainly for taking over the space Italian once had and leaving me with a bittersweet sense of injustice.
Language is fascinating that way. As kids, we inherit it and it defines us while we are not aware of it. As adults, it can redesign us depending on what new relationship we develop with it.
When I asked Alicia how to make sense of it all, I learned that it is a matter of constantly navigating the divide between our identity and the language(s) we speak. And that when we think of bilingualism and its consequences, we have to consider not only the new languages we learn, but all the different registers we have dwelled with.
For her too it was something that started when she was a kid.
(unedited question # 2)
Donatella Caggiano - 12:09 : In your own upbringing, were there different languages spoken at the dinner table?
Alicia Luque - 12:11: I am from Andalusia, that's a region in the Southern part of Spain, where we speak a different variety of Spanish. The Spanish that I heard on TV or in movies or that I learned at school was different from the Spanish I heard at home or in my community. The variety of Spanish that I speak is considered, by many people, not to be the norm. And a lot of people make fun of the way we speak and comment on my own Spanish. I've noticed growing up that depending on who I was talking to, that I would modulate the way that I speak and I'm pretty sure that everyone can relate to this experience. What happens when you have been exposed to all these different languages and there is a societal standard you should conform to? When we think about bilingualism, we're thinking about two distinct languages. But we are not only about that. As we constantly navigate these different registers and varieties, we are also navigating their social, linguistic, or racial implications. Language and power go hand in hand. And so again, how does our brain navigate this constant divide between our identity in the languages we speak?
Hearing her talk about “varieties” made me alert to language as something that is not insular and absolute. Language can be anything we have to dwell with to be able to communicate. It can be a dialect, a different accent, a body language too. We all have been directly affected by it and it is intimately connected to who we are and how we behave in society.
It is also intrinsically linked to privilege and exclusion. The experience of having learned a new language by choice is different from having no choice but to learn another language.
To me, my Starbucks refuge is together a place and a language I cannot wait to return to, cause it makes me feel my identity can somehow be complete while in it.
I don’t feel otherwise whole, in a society that still has a long way to go to be able to design for the multitude I contain, and not only for the monolingual part of me.
_
Is there a language you cannot wait to return to that makes you feel more at home?
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The Design of Return podcast, Episode # 1: “Two languages, one mind” - Show notes
In our first episode of “The Design of Return” podcast, we explore what it means to have two languages in one mind, and what can we learn from the way the bilingual brain explores, understands, and processes the world.
I interview Doctor Alicia Luque, a neurolinguist who specializes in the bilingual brain.
Our interview took place before the American presidential election, while in the midst of the first wave of pandemic lockdown and as Alicia was about to return to Europe and move to the Arctic University of Tromsø in Norway after a decade in the United States.
In our time together, Alicia shares incredible insights about how the bilingual brain works, the bias we have, and her own experience as a bilingual, both as a Spanish born expat to the United States and Norway and a queer woman having to design a new language for herself.
I also interviewed my parents about why they decided to give me and my brother an Italian and English bilingual upbringing and how it was all inspired by an Emily Dickinson Poem.
In this episode we speak about:
- Who is a bilingual?
- Why is the bilingual brain different from the monolingual brain
- The bias we have against accents (and what they really are instead)
- How monolingualism has been used to eradicate diversity
- The process of assimilation and one thing or two about power..
- “Language forgetting” and the loss of self-esteem of heritage bilinguals
- When should parents start teaching kids a second language?
- The challenge of returnees and coming back home after becoming bilingual
- Designing a second language when you are queer
- Alicia’s return from the United States to Europe
The #libraryoftransit - Read, watch, learn
Our book of the month is writer Jhumpa Lahiri “In other words”, a love story of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of an English writer for the Italian language. Written in Italian, printed with a side by side translation in English by Bloomsbury.
Dr. Alicia Luque recommends “The bilingual brain and what it tells us about the science of language” , a reader-friendly dive into the bilingual brain science as neurolinguist Albert Costa explains it with surprising insights.
“Why you shouldn’t judge an accent”, by Ethan Kutlu is a TED X talk about why accents shouldn’t be trusted as something to categorise people by.
Kasandra Brabaw for Refinery 29 on the importance of language for the LGBTQIA community and “the power of taking back the words used against us”.
Francois Grosjean’s blog “Life as a bilingual” is a great resource for everyone out there experiencing bilingualism. Which, contrary to what they taught us, is the majority of the world.
“Come se il mare separandosi” is the Emily Dickinson’s poem that inspired my parents to give us a bilingual upbringing.
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