Diary of a Bridge: part 1. Ljubljana

A project about languages is also, inevitably, about place.

We decide on a point in time in which to dis-place ourselves and travel to a new place. The participants from that place have dis-placed themselves from their ordinary reality in order to host us.

Everything has been organized and the schedule sent out beforehand by IGLU. We are chaotic in the morning and arrive 10-15 minutes late to the appointment and Vid is annoyed with us two days in a row. The place we meet is IGLU headquarters in Šiška, a neighborhood outside the center of Ljubljana, Slovenia. It is a part of Ljubljana that expanded after World War II into what used to be farms, fields and small villages. We meet in a refurbished office space in a Modernist office building whose windows offer a stunning view on the Carinthian alps to the North.

We are outside the Roman city of Emona, precursor of Ljubjana, but Šiška was the site of a Roman aqueduct that supplied the city of Emona with water. I can’t help wonder what our life would have been like in the Roman era, if travelers like us would have had the opportunities we have. We have the privilege to jump on a plane or a train or a car and whip past customs with our European passports. There are few countries that will not welcome us for at least a brief period. If we emigrate, we are called “expats”, never “immigrants”, which is often used by the governments of our countries as a bad word, or, even worse, “refugees”. It is always somehow our choice to emigrate, and this is the true privilege. While we meet in Slovenia, thousands of migrants are trapped at different European borders, in detention centers, awaiting deportation, or hiding deep undercover.

When I was 23 I had to leave the United States country that I loved profoundly, where I felt I belonged, and where I would have gladly continued to live, because my visa was expiring. I returned to Italy, where I had not lived since I was two years old, to begin all over again. I spend the weekend reminiscing with Dalia about U.S cultural references and all the American things that were part of my youth and are not recognizable to Europeans. We talk about how not having an accent is a curse because people are less forgiving toward your mistakes. We speak English most of the time, other languages briefly for clarifications with our compatriots.

English is our lingua franca. Communication flows easily, we begin to be more and more honest with each other, fear each other less and less. We make ourselves comfortable on the couches in the hallway with a dark 80s-style carpet. Our meals are mostly what we could call metropolitan-vegetarian. Salads, curries, soups, couscous. Friday night, we eat at a restaurant in the center of Ljubjana where all the dishes are somehow reminiscent but never directly referencing Southeast Asia and the decor is fancily casual. The waitress speaks to us in perfect English with what I guess to be a slight Farsi accent. The restaurant website reads: “We cook simple, honest, fresh, seasonal, green, sane & delicious.” This could literally be anywhere in Europe.

A bridge language

A lingua franca, also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers' native languages.

After the show with IGLU we have a drink at a “Sir William’s Pub”, a pub that feels surprisingly British and even the barkeep (owner?) barely has an accent. After the show, I stand outside a pub for five minutes with Juš reading the blackboard so that I can learn the words for “best” (najboljši) “city” (mesto), and “elderflower” (bezgov). He is infinitely patient with me. I say, as I always say when I come, I really need to learn Slovenian. Often my Slovenian friends will say, don’t bother, it’s pointless. Only 2 million people speak it. It’s too difficult.

At the pub I look up the etymology of France on my phone, since it had come up earlier in the day. The term “franca” or “Frankish” has the same root as “France” and is related to a Germanic tribe that invaded what is now France starting in the 3rd century and living at the borders of the Roman empire. It was used by the arab-byzantine world to designate the Western European populations that they came into contact with through war and commerce. It may come from an early word for “free”. But using English means sacrifice. We sacrifice the richness of our native languages for a simple means of communicating.

Language is a bridge but also a wall

On our way out of the city, Dalia and I play with Vid’s three-year-old, Iva. She asks us questions in Slovenian and fully expects an answer. It is not enough for us to smile and nod. She is not stupid. She has spent the last three years perfecting this skill and now it is her main mode of communication. We can read all the statistics we want about how large parts of communication are non-verbal, but here it only takes us so far. When I try to talk to Timo in French, some of the words don’t come. Instead, what comes to mind is every single word in every language I have ever learned.

As always, I make the intensely irritating choice of correcting everyone’s English, parroting my English teachers back in high school. I realize I have unsconsciously adopted the idea that is necessary to “speak correctly”, that our language proficiency is based on not making grammatical errors and having a “correct accent” (whatever that means, countries have different regions, dialects and language groups, often one has been chosed over another for purely political reasons, see the Fascists and Tuscan Italian) but on understanding each other? Is the non-violent, non-colonialist option to craft our own lingua franca out of all the languages we know, maintaining the richness of everyone’s experience instead of forcing a supremacy of English?

In 2015 Swiss psycholinguist Francois Grosjean wrote: "bilingualism is the regular use of two or more languages or dialects in everyday life”. As far as accent is concerned, Grosjean rejects the idea that a bilingual speaker necessarily has no accent. He dissociates knowledge of a language from the accent and mentions not only personalities who had a strong accent, starting with Napoleon or Marie Curie, but also people who have no accent because they learned the language in childhood, but no longer practice it, and are no longer fluent speakers: “It is time to do away with the ‘accent’ criterion of bilingualism” (Grosjean 2015, 39). It goes without saying that the people who speak with an accent had no problems of intelligibility and intercomprehension with the French-speaking world in which they lived. So the question of accent is part of a continuum and implies a threshold of social acceptability. Today’s language teaching specialists, when assessing learners’ performance, are moving towards “comfortable intelligibility” (Arroyo Hernández 2020) instead of imitation of a “native accent”. (article)

If everyone knew every language, there would be no need for a bridge.

There would be continuous landmass and no rivers to cross. But rivers are what make the land fertile, and so we must build bridges to cross over.

We finish our meetings as the sun sets behind the skyscrapers, after painting Grintovec and the other peaks a deep orange. When night falls we play our first show as BRIDGES in a small underground theatre in the center of Ljubljana. We bring our different styles and outlooks but quickly find a sort of easy harmony in our play. The scene that is voted by the audience is one in which we all play parodies of the leaders of our respective countries. It makes me wonder if our leaders really represent us. How much? To whom?

The next day, on my way back across the border in my tiny Italian rental car I am moved by the song “Immigrant” from the Hamilton Mixtapes. I play it over and over on loop and try to decipher the Spanish parts. As I cross the border with Italy with no passport, no visa, and no police checks, I hear this text:

“Here is something funny you can be an immigrant without risking your lives Or crossing these borders with thrifty supplies All you got to do is see the world with new eyes.”

- K’NAAN - “Immigrant” - The Hamilton Mixtapes