I’ve always been a linguistics geek, dating back at least to Grade 8 when I did a presentation on the language family tree (none of my classmates found it as fascinating as I did). I still get lost in Wikipedia learning new things. (Did you know that Romanian has a lot of Slavic in it, despite being a Romance language like French, Spanish, and Italian?)
And don’t even get me started on writing systems. One of the things I found most fascinating about India, when I visited ten (!) years ago, was that every state had not only its own language (many unrelated to the others) but its own alphabet. Northern India uses Hindi as its common tongue, and southern India uses Tamil, but if they’re going to speak north to south, they resort to English. Which is why there’s more English on the signs than you might expect, even in non-tourist areas…
Unfortunately for me, I’m not a polyglot (fluently multilingual), though not for lack of trying. I’ve learned tiny bits and pieces of Klingon (really!), Spanish, ASL, and Hindi. Like most Canadians, I studied French in school and came away with enough knowledge to read food packaging (and occasionally other things) but not to converse fluently — especially in Quebec.
I also studied Norwegian in university, enough for me to get by quite well on my first solo trip overseas, visiting extended family in Norway. That meant I could more or less understand written Danish and spoken Swedish, due to how they’re related (it has to do with who conquered whom…history is another keen interest of mine). Of course, university was a long time ago. I tried to brush up on it using Duolingo during the you-know-what, with only middling success.
(Side note: This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Jon Fosse, writes in Nynorsk, a minority language in Norway. It’s mutually intelligible with the majority language, Bokmål (the one Duolingo teaches). Nynorsk is seen by some as “country” speak, and by others as a more “unadulterated” Norwegian language, Bokmål having been heavily influenced by Danish.)
Most recently, I’ve come full circle.
My spouse is working on his French, largely by listening to music with lyrics, so while we cook together I get to listen to Les Mis in the original language. Last weekend, we decided to practice by watching Beauty and the Beast (the animated version) in French. It worked brilliantly.
Belle is one of my favourite classic Disney princesses (along with Ariel), and I still remember the movie well. So I didn’t have to focus on trying to grasp the plot or characters. Since it’s a children’s movie, the dialogue is fairly simple and the voice acting sufficiently dramatic to help a lot with conveying the meaning.
(Side note: The Francophone voice actors were great. I didn’t even miss the English ones — except for Angela Lansbury, of course.)
(Other side note: I put the French subtitles on, but had to turn them off because I realized right away that they didn’t match the dialogue!)
Having said all that…neither of us could catch much of the dialogue or lyrics, to our dismay. Listening was hard enough work that we had to take a break in the middle and finish the next day. Even so, it was the most I’ve enjoyed a movie in quite a while. (Not sure what that says about my current mental state regarding movies…) We might just have to do it again next weekend.
(Note: I never got into conlanging, that is, making up one’s own language as part of worldbuilding, the way Tolkien did. Probably just as well. That would be a deeeeep rabbit hole.)