Do you remember learning language for the first time?
The adults cooed over your first word as if you’d solved the Fermi paradox. They had infinite patience as you struggled to piece out the parts of the alphabet, solve the mystery of homonyms, and pronounce “chameleon”.
Language was a triumph, and we were still the true prizes. Then — as babyhood faded — things got harder.
You learned what language was good for: communicating with others. Communication had all these new rules. Who you should talk to and not; how you should address each person; what you were expected to say, and when, and how.
Learning language seemed simple beside the endless set of spoken and unspoken norms that determined its use.
But you learned, because you had to. You learned with a specific type of people: your parents, their friends, and later on your own friends and their parents too. You learned on the schoolteachers and the principal. You learned on the girl or boy you were crushing on. What style of speaking drew them close, and what pushed them away?
Everyone had slightly different expectations, so you had to generalize.
Maybe you developed a couple of strategies, which is common in split households or across mixed cultural backgrounds. With one family…
