Excerpt from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

By the time a newborn emerges into the cool air, its mind flares with recognition when it hears the language that flowed outside the flesh walls that cradled it. Scientists can measure this: they place pacifiers in the mouths of newborns, wired to record the vigor of their sucking, and note that infants suck more eagerly when they hear their mother tongue—even if spoken by strangers over a loudspeaker—than when a foreign language is emitted from the speaker. In the womb, they have absorbed the click-clack of the rhythms of their language, its cadences and rising-falling motifs, its predilections for herding consonants together or for spacing them out as sparse counterpoints to the airiness of vowels.

It is then, and in the months that follow, that an infant and her native language come to possess each other—before naming, before meaning, before there is even a notion that sound bears the burden of meaning. Something like love is there in the depth of familiarity that has settled into the infant's neurons. It can be measured by pacifiers connected to electrical devices.

It can also be measured like this: in my daughter's first minutes of life in open air, as she was held by a nurse, I spoke; her head turned in my direction; she was profoundly silent, her still dark eyes seeking out the voice that rang out clear and known to her amid the boiling sea of sound into which she'd been plunged. Perhaps an infant's love for her native language is something like this searching love for a mother's voice.

I can also describe it this way: it's like the jolt of pleasure you feel in the milliseconds before you recognize your lover in a crowd at the train station. Before the brain has identified him, before it can drive his name toward your lips, it has registered and leaped with joy at the sight of his unique lope, cadence of limbs, precise angle of shoulder meeting collarbone, the click-clack of his step.

This love I have felt for a language not once, twice, three, or four times, but five. In those months with Maura, there was little of Italian that I understood. Nevertheless, I belonged to it, and it to me, in a familial way that had nothing to do with reason or with wanting or with deciding. I felt entitled to it, as one might feel to a birthright; it was mine by virtue of the warm flush of familiarity that precedes comprehension.

In high school, I decided to add Spanish to my store of languages. It did not flow in a boiling stream around me. It was doled out to us piecemeal by an aging nun who had spent a year or two at a mission in Guatemala. Simple templates of sentences, with units that could be predictably swapped in and out: Me llamo Julie. Me llamo Teresa. Me llamo Andrea. Lists pairing Spanish words with their English doppelgängers, always with the masculine or feminine tag—el or la—preceding the Spanish word, tags that we were instructed to commit to memory, because confusing them would cause Spanish speakers to wince. Tables of verb conjugations, in orderly rows and columns. It was only after we had properly digested each serving that Sister Mooney dished out the next one.

Those who create language courses seem to believe that a language must be carefully titrated, that it needs to be controlled as a slow drip into learners' minds, lest they be flooded with the magnitude of the new language, overwhelmed by a glimpse of its horizonless ocean, or drowned in the fast-moving current of sound not yet congealed into meaning.

Students, unlike newborns, are judged capable of the patient, deliberate labor of learning, so they are corralled onto the dry land of curriculum. They are not left to bob about in the liquidity of language; they are handed solid bricks of it and encouraged to build things, things that are useful and that conform to building codes. Sitting at my desk, in my designated spot—third from last in the row closest to the windows—I learned to build questions, salutations, instructions, useful assertions about where I was from, how many and which rooms there were in my home, what I liked to do in my spare time. These were called conversations.

Excerpted from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy. Copyright © 2024 by Julie Sedivy. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.