Three Tongues

My mother tongue is Igbo. My school tongue is English. My street tongue is Pidgin. I live in all three and belong fully to none of them, which is the normal condition of a Nigerian who went to school in Lagos and came out the other side speaking like three different people depending on who's in the room. Igbo is the language I hear when I'm not listening. My mother speaks it, my aunts speak it, the women in the kitchen at Christmas speak it so fast that the words lose their edges and it sounds like water over stones. I understand most of it. I speak some of it. I dream in it occasionally, which means it's still in there somewhere, deeper than the other two, stored in whatever part of the brain keeps the things you learned before you knew you were learning. English is the language I work in. Technical English, specifically — I'm a structural engineer, and the language of engineering is English the way the language of cooking is French, which is to say not because it's better but because the people who wrote the textbooks happened to speak it. I can describe a load-bearing wall in English with precision. I cannot describe what my grandmother's kitchen smelled like in English at all. The words exist. The feeling doesn't transfer. Pidgin is the language I relax in. It's English melted down and reassembled by people who had better things to do than follow grammar rules. "How body?" means how are you. "E dey pain me" means it hurts. "Na so" means that's how it is, and it means this with a finality that English can't match, because English always wants to explain and Pidgin is willing to shrug. I switch between them without thinking. This is called code-switching, and linguists study it like it's a phenomenon, but for most of us it's just talking. You match the language to the listener. You wouldn't speak English to your mother any more than you'd speak Pidgin to your boss. Unless your boss is also Nigerian, in which case the Pidgin comes out by the second beer and nobody's pretending anymore. My children are growing up in Abuja. They speak English at school and Pidgin with their friends and very little Igbo, which is my fault. I should have taught them. My mother says this often. She says it in Igbo, and my children look at me for translation, and I translate, and the thing that gets lost in translation is the weight of it. Languages die the way coral reefs die — not all at once, but one generation at a time, each one thinner than the last. My mother is fluent. I'm conversational. My children know the greetings and the food words and a few phrases they bring out when their grandmother visits, like souvenirs. I'm going to teach them. I say this every year. This year I bought a workbook. It's on the shelf. The shelf is real. The intention is real. The teaching hasn't started. But the language is there, in the house, in the phone calls, in the kitchen when my mother visits and the Igbo fills the room and my children listen even when they don't understand, which is how I learned it too, come to think of it. You listen long enough and the water over stones starts to make sense.