Precerpt from My 20th Language: L4 French

French

Although French was technically the fourth language I began to study (after English, my native tongue, Latin, and Spanish), in some ways it could also be considered my second language or even a shared first language since I was surrounded by French from birth. I was born in New Hampshire some 60+ years ago and grew up in a small village there until I was 14, at which time my parents moved across the Salmon Falls River to a farm in Maine. In the 1940s and 1950s (and even in the 1960s), Maine and New Hampshire were strongholds of French-speaking Americans, not immigrants but families who had been there for generations, often with relatives in Canada (like we Anglophones among them), and an interesting mix of languages developed.

Growing up in a francophone region in a New Hampshire village and, later, on a Maine farm meant that I always had heard French around me. I did not pay much attention to it, however, my parents usually frequented Anglophone haunts. I decided to take it up in high school, beginning actually only in my sophomore year, but nonetheless achieving near-native level by the time I had reached college classes. That level of proficiency was later confirmed by an ILR score of 4/4 on the Defense Language Proficiency Test—a score that in those days, but not today, required not just bilinguacy but also biculturalism to be awarded. My “home” in Maine/New Hampshire was considered a French milieu, so that gave me the ability to achieve that score, in more ways than just a formality.

What growing up in a francophone region gave me was access to the sound system before any lateralization occurred in my brain (seriously, I am not sure my brain ever lateralized much, which is a distinct advantage in language learning). It also taught me, at least subliminally, that foreign languages are not just for learning, but they are also for use—every day, helpful, and sometimes necessary use. And there was the opportunity to use it in a wide variety of venues: stores, radio broadcasts (TV was just starting out, and we did not have one until I was older), food packaging, newspapers, magazines, socially, and more.

Growing up in a francophone area, where 75% of my classmates spoke French as their first language, meant a very different school program for learning French than high schools elsewhere offered. Indeed, in high school I was in French classes with peers who had been speaking French from birth and who had completed elementary school at Holy Rosary School, a Catholic school conducted in French. (Holy Rosary High School closed when I was in eighth grade, so all those kids who had been schooled in French came to the public high school, which was English-based, and highly enriched our French classes!

For more precerpts from My 20th Language, click HERE.