Polyglots

I had a small sixth grade at Sunnyview with a couple of daily incursions from a very small seventh grade. One day, on a whim, I polled the classes as to how many languages they spoke amongst them. The results astonished me.

Most of the students spoke English and Spanish as a matter of course. Some also spoke French. But there was also an albino girl from Peru who spoke Quechuan, she and a few million Incas. Then there was the girl who grew up in Hong Kong but whose family was moving their assets to Europe. She claimed to speak a passable Mandarin. I believed her. Another spoke Swahili, the lengua franca of Africa.

Seventh-grader Dorica de la Fuente was raised in the Philippines and spoke Tagalog. She and her brother, Tony, were chauffeured to school every day in a bullet proof Cadillac. The Cadillac shed bullets like Wonder Woman’s bracelet, but it leaked water through the windshield whenever it rained. I guess bullets are bigger than rain drops.

The star linguist in the sixth grade, hands down and thumbs up, was Thanos Sioris, a Greek and Finnish boy. He spoke English and Spanish, of course, as well as Greek (his father was Minister of Education for Greece) and Finnish (his mother was with the Finnish diplomatic corps). Later, when his mother was sent to the Philippines, he added Tagalog to his arsenal of languages, and German when they were stationed in Vienna.

All told we came up with almost a dozen languages spoken in that select group of sixth- and seventh-graders. And I came up with that amount without even counting English, American and Canadian as separate languages.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009