This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
My relationship with English began by force. Growing up in A Coruña, Spain, in the early 2000s, we were told that learning a second language was just as important as memorizing the multiplication table. After the 2008 financial crisis left the Spanish economy “melting down like a Dali horrorscape,” as one Atlantic writer put it, English became what seemed like our national salvation, a one-way ticket to a better future abroad.
Nobody in my household spoke the language, but American pop culture was my gospel; every song on my iPod Nano brought me closer to the leafy promised land of Elk River, Minnesota, and the crisscrossing highways that stitch together the United States. Glee’s image of America lured me—a city boy living in the Galicia region—into believing that I could also belong within those suburban high-school walls. All I had to do was learn some new words.
Only when I moved to Lawrenceville, Georgia, as a foreign-exchange student in 2011, did I realize how naive I had been: Despite its shiny basketball court, Peachtree Ridge High School was a far cry from Glee, and my British English phrases often left me lost in translation. (I still remember my classmates’ faces when I misplaced my eraser and asked them if they had seen my “rubber.”) The language I was taught in Spain was just one of the “several languages called English,” as the writer Barbara Wallraff explained in The Atlantic in 2000. Within the “family” of English languages, there are country-specific versions—Scottish English, Indian English—and the fragmented versions that millions of second-language speakers use. Then there is slang, which can vary depending on generation and location. In southern suburbia, adding rad and YOLO to my lexicon seemed like the easiest way to blend in, but my accent would always unmask me for the foreigner I was. My second language, once an escape from my life in A Coruña, had turned into a magnifying glass.
Atlantic writers have reflected on linguistic duality for a long time. The flexibility of the English language lends “itself so easily to the expression of every thought and every emotion,” an unnamed Atlantic contributor argued in 1895. That became particularly clear to me in college, where I absorbed the English-centric internet culture that popularized slay and salty, and then in 2021, when I moved to New York and fully embraced my English-speaking identity, using the language to write, argue, think, and fall in love. But there are limits to what English alone can grasp. Accessing untranslatable ideas—I still can’t find a word for rosmar, a Galician term evoking the subtle grumbling of old people—is just one of the benefits of multilingualism, as Cody C. Delistraty wrote in The Atlantic in 2014: “Those who speak multiple languages have also been shown to be more self-aware spenders” and could even be “better decision-makers.”
In traditional Atlantic fashion, Delistraty’s arguments were soon challenged. Two years later, Ed Yong wrote for this magazine that some of the evidence backing the cognitive benefits of bilingualism “is actually a house of cards, built upon flimsy foundations.” Knowing a second language may not definitively improve certain mental abilities, but “there are plenty of other advantages to being bilingual,” Yong explains. If fiddling with Duolingo is not in your plans and you find yourself stranded in a foreign country, you might try engaging in an exercise of “linguistic camouflage,” as Louis Mcintosh suggested in The Atlantic in 1956. Simply pick up a few “strategically chosen words and phrases”; for travelers in Spain, he recommends saying según (“It all depends”), which supposedly “indicates ineffable wisdom on any topic under the sun,” as well as filling “awkward gaps in the conversation” by quoting the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. How would you fare if you quoted a verse from Poet in New York to a Spaniard today? It all depends.
A future in which people can communicate without speaking a single shared word seems nearer, though, due to technological advancements that could eventually render language learning obsolete. Last month, Apple announced a new version of AirPods that uses artificial intelligence to perform real-time translations. Breaking down linguistic barriers could help cultural exchanges flourish—soon, people who don’t speak Spanish may no longer need to rely on Lorca to communicate. They could follow a conversation in Spain with ease or enjoy any Pedro Almodóvar movie, no captions needed. Maybe all it takes to finally build the Tower of Babel is a group of people with a strong enough Bluetooth connection.
Yet so many imagined selves will be lost when learning is forsaken. To master a foreign language is to embrace an odyssey far from the comforts of your mother tongue. When Ta-Nehisi Coates was learning French more than a decade ago, he traveled to Corseaux, Switzerland, and stayed with a host family. Although they often had to use gestures to converse with him, he still understood, “in some unnameable way, that they were good people,” he wrote in The Atlantic. “I experienced the ignorance of words and grammar as a physical distance, as a longing for something that was mere inches away.”
That longing brought me to where I am today. My home country’s obsession with English made my foreign identity a reality. Otherwise, I might have remained in A Coruña, confined to my native tongue, my native self.
