Interview

This interview was mainly focused on the different languages that Jhumpa has learned over the years. However, Italian is the one language that she says she is in love with. For her, Italy and the Italian language have always felt like home to her. Before she knew Italian she knew Bengali and English. Growing up, whenever she was in the safety of her childhood home, Jhumpa and her family would speak Bengali. When they would leave their home and go out into the world, they spoke English. Jhumpa not only learned those two languages but also learned Russian and Latin. Latin was the language that lead her to fall in love with Italian. As much as she loves the Italian language, she does admit that there are some days she becomes frustrated with it. She admits that although she knows a great amount of it, there is still a bit of barrier between her and the language and would sometimes have to look up words in the dictionary. Now that she is married and is a mother, she said that within their home they do speak English, but when her first son was born she did speak to him in Bengali for a bit.

It is very interesting to see just how language can effect our life. Jhumpa mentions how language is not just a spoken word but it “is an entire ocean, an entire world, an entire universe without bounds”. Language is a beautiful thing especially with writing. Language is what helps us define who we are as people. Language is everything. So it is important that we try and get over those barriers that may come in-between us. Before, I never really understood why in school we had to take another language especially in high school. To me, I thought it was a waste of time because I assumed I would never need to use Spanish for anything because most people do speak English. Now that I’m older, I completely understand the importance of learning another language. Language is the one thing that can separate people from meeting other people. If someone only knew English they could potentially miss out meeting someone great because they knew a different language. Even if they only knew a little bit of that language they could at least understand each other and as time goes on they both could learn more from each other. As I stated before, language is a beautiful thing that I believe more people should be involved with. Just because you live in America does not mean you are limited only to English and I think that’s why most people will not go further and learn another language. They assume that they do not need too because most of America speaks English, but I believe learning more than one language brings a lot of opportunity to a person and we need to take more advantage of that.