Tell me your inspiring language stories

and help me choose the 12th language

Dear language-speaking friends,

I can hardly believe it but I’m nearing the end of my year-long challenge. I have one more language left to learn and I have given myself until the end of 2024 to wrap this whole thing up.

My problem is that I don’t know which of the remaining 7153 languages to pick.

For every language I tackled this year, there was always a compelling reason for choosing that particular language and not another.

For example, I set out to learn Thai because I had promised to talk to an injured monolingual Thai person. If it weren’t for Somchai, and his terrible circumstances, I would have never voluntarily put my vocal cords and ears through the stress of learning to distinguish and produce the five different tones in a week.

And before that, while hiding in my room during a long school holiday, I opened Duolingo and settled on Finnish because it’d been ten years since I learned a new language and because it looked like nothing I’d seen before. (That was in the olden days before October 7th, 2023, before we started stocking our safe room with canned tuna, and before my mom was diagnosed with rapidly progressing dementia — back when trying to carve out a bit of personal space on a school holiday was my main concern in life.)

Later, I picked Rusyn and not the closely related Ukrainian because it’s a lesser-known language of the two, and because I’d heard about it when I was little from my Ukrainian-born ethnomusicologist father.

I learned Swahili when I found out that a friend at my fitness studio grew up in Kenya.

I chose Portuguese after hammering a nail into the wall and accidentally waking my Portuguese-speaking neighbors from their pre-Sabbath nap.

I learned Arabic because I didn’t like the version of myself that would get off the bus before her stop at the sound of this language.

I picked Maori because it was the closest I could get to moving to a desert island, and Manx because I wanted a language I could learn on the go and it was one of the few languages available for free on Glossika.

I chose Yiddish because I was finally mature enough to not cringe at the sound of the Yiddish songs that I heard throughout my childhood.

I settled on Kurmanji the week after learning about a Yezidi woman being rescued from 10-year captivity.

I picked Buru because I kept getting emails in Indonesian asking me if I’d enjoyed my latest taxi ride.

As you see, in each case, there was a clear, compelling, and irresistible reason for me to settle on that particular language and not any other one.

I have one more language and one more month to go and it seems I have lost touch with the voice of fate that guided me so clearly the previous 11 times.

So I’m turning to you for help.

If you have an idea for what should be my 12th language and most importantly why, I want to hear it. I will say that my brain is pretty fried by now, so it has to be something super exciting. Meaning, unless there is a really compelling reason, Polish or German probably won’t do it for me.

Please also tell me your language stories so I can get inspired. Why did you learn or have always wanted to learn a particular language?

While you give it a think, I’ll tell you a story of how and why, about 20 years ago, I decided to learn Oji-Cree, an Algonquian language, that would become the focus of my academic research for the next 10 years.

The embarrassing story of why I decided to study a native Canadian language

People often asked me why I chose Oji-Cree. (People who weren’t linguists, that is. For linguists, my interest in the morphosyntactic structure of polysynthetic languages and phonology-syntax interface was reason enough.)

But even for a linguist, it was a very non-intuitive choice. More often, people settled on something closer to home.

A colleague who grew up in British Columbia, studied Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), one of the native languages of that region.

An Italian colleague researched Sardinian, a minority language in Italy.

A Russian-born linguist focused on Mari, a Uralic language spoken in parts of Russia.

What could inspire a Russian-born Israeli-raised linguist pick a native Canadian language?

I always just shrugged this question off. But there was a story behind it. I just never told it to anyone before.

Until now.

Sometime circa 2003, I was finishing my BA in linguistics, in Jerusalem, living with my parents, and wondering what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I had a feeling I wanted to go somewhere else for graduate studies. Someplace that wasn’t as hot or as crowded as Israel and did not have quite as many suicide bombings every week.

At the time, my older brother was also living at home and trying to figure out what he wanted to do when he grew up. He had Carlos Castaneda's books lying around and, in between translating The Upanishads for a Sanskrit course, and writing term papers in syntax, I started reading those.

Castaneda is an American anthropologist who has written several books about his experiences living with the Yaqui people in Mexico. A central figure in those books is Don Juan, a Yaqui shaman, who becomes a sort of mentor for Castaneda and teaches him the Yaqui way to achieve heightened inner awareness and spiritual insight through what he calls “seeing.”

I later learned that there is a lot of controversy surrounding those books, including debates about their authenticity but that doesn’t negate the impact that "The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge" had on my personal development.

I was completely captivated by those books.

I wanted to be like Castaneda. I too wanted to go and live in a distant village among Native Americans, find a mentor, eat psychedelic mushrooms, and learn to see the true nature of things.

An appropriately blurry photo of me and my younger brother, on our parents’ couch, circa 2003. We’re smoking hookah and I’m pretending to be Carlos Castaneda “seeing” things even though I must have just been watching TV here.

Naturally, I decided to go and do my graduate studies in Canada and study Oji-Cree.¹

I didn’t know (or willfully ignored) the fact that “Native Americans” are not a homogenous group — not linguistically and not culturally. Yaqui is a language that belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family spoken in Mexico. Oji-Cree belongs to the Algonquian language family that is spoken across Northern America. There is no connection between these two languages and cultures.

It was akin to eating French onion soup for the first time in your life, and getting inspired to learn Uzbek.

Tell me your inspiring WHY stories

With this story as your inspiration, I want to hear your inspiring language stories OR your ideas as to what should be my 12th language and why.

As you see, your why can be anything. It can be “My grandmother sang me a lullaby in this language when I was a baby and now I want to learn it so I can understand the words” or “I like Swedish because it sounds hot” or “There is an injured monolingual Quechua speaker in a hospital in my town and I want you to learn Quechua, get on a plane and come and save him from loneliness” or even “I decided to learn Uzbek after trying French onion soup.”

I hope to get inspired from your stories and I will also share the most interesting reasons for people learning different languages in next week’s post.

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If you’re a writer on Substack, consider recommending Friends with Words to your readers (go to Dashboard>Settings>Publication details>Recommend other publications on Substack) so they too can help me decide what language to learn before the end of the year.

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Friends with Words is the main thing I do this year. If you like this post consider buying me a virtual coffee ☕

1. That’s not the whole story. The whole story is that I was also getting married and my future husband was admitted to a graduate program in Canada before I was. I took it as a sign that I should pick a native Canadian language so I could be like Castaneda when I grow up. Canada and Mexico seemed more or less then same thing from my vantage point back then.