Danish is my First Language

A couple of years ago I had a bit of a conversation on Facebook about a certain word’s pronunciation, I was corrected and I felt defensive but Peter wrote “Sanne, remember English is your second language”.  It made me laugh and my irritation fell away.  While I pride myself on speaking and writing proper English there are moments in these latter years where I lose my words (menopause has something to do with that, they tell us) but frequently I also find myself at a loss because while I can find it in one language it doesn’t come to me in the alternate language.

I don’t remember NOT speaking English.  It seems to me that Jeanette and I went out into the street and began playing with kids, no problem.  We were first in Little Italy in Toronto so for all I know I could have been speaking Italian to begin with!  But Dad very quickly after we got our own apartment bought a television set for Mom and all of us naturally learned English through the TV.  Certainly a year later when I went to kindergarten I was fluent in English and never had a problem in school.

However since we spoke only Danish at home sometimes wires could get crossed for us if we suddenly heard an English word that sounded like a Danish word but we had no co-relation to it.  Case in point,

When we were living in Grimsby John would have been 4 years old, before kindergarten.  One day a kid down the road came by and they started playing together.  At some point the kid asked John “wanna wrestle?” and John said “okay” and then proceeded to rattle around, shaking and spazzing about because in Danish “rustle” was . . . not wrestling.  John laughed as we recalled it the other day because he did recall it exactly as I did.  I think that is the only time I really remember any of us getting it SO WRONG.

As I have said before my Dad had read that immigrants should never attempt to speak the new language to their children because it could cause serious errors in grammar as well as accents.  I know we had friends who made the mistake of speaking English to their kids and their English was very poor in comparison to ours (and I DON’T blush to say it).  I feel proud that my parents took our upbringing very seriously and that we turned out such good citizens!  We might not be stars, but we aren’t jailbirds either.

Thanks Mom and Dad.