People often ask me if I speak Italian, and I never know what to say.
I do, but it’s broken Italian at best. I understand if people speak slowly.
When I am in Sicily visiting my relatives, the language of my childhood seeps into my vocabulary.
I sometimes dream in Italian, the phrases and words weaving their way into my subconscious. The Sicilian dialect stitched into my muscle memory from the slips and knots of my grandmother’s crochet needle. She would speak to me in her regional tongue, sharing her soap opera updates while I sat beside her on the sofa with my afterschool milk and cookies.
By the time I started learning Italian in high school, the modernized version of the language had become widely standardized. Teachers would look at me strangely when a dialectic word slipped into the rote responses to their questions.
I once took a conversational literature class after being tested on the phone by “la professoressa.” The course involved reading “un giallo con investigativo” and discussing it in person bi-weekly. I struggled through those twelve weeks, reading about the gumshoe detective, flipping through an Italian-American dictionary for every other word. The in-person sessions were equally disastrous–“perso con un’isola.”
I’ve tried Duolingo and Babbel apps, and I watch Italian programs on Netflix — my favorite, “Guida astrologica per cuori infranti” to remind myself what live discourse could be like.
But it’s the time with my family when I learn the most, truly immersed in the sights, sounds, and words of my ancestral home.
On my last trip to Sicily, I was traveling with a friend, and by the third day, he couldn’t understand me at all. I had no idea when the switch of my conscious brain crossed over into Italian, but I can’t wait for it to happen again.
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