The Language I Could Speak but Couldn't Think In

For years, some of the words in my head meant the wrong thing. Not so wrong that a teacher would stop me. I could use them in a sentence, recognize them on a page, repeat the definition and get the mark. Then I would meet one again, much later, and discover a distinction I had been missing all along. The new meaning disturbed more than the word. I had used the old one to understand other things, sometimes for years.

Nobody had noticed, including me, because I spoke Arabic fluently. I could read it, write it, answer questions and pass exams in it. The school could measure all of that. It could not see how far I sometimes had to travel to reach the idea being discussed.

I grew up near Agadir with Tachelhit and Darija. I learned them from family, neighbors, games, arguments and errands. A word for care came with the person who cared for me. Danger had an adult’s voice attached to it. Respect involved knowing how to stand near an elder, when to answer, and when the same silence could mean obedience or hurt. These languages entered through an entire body before either of them ever entered through text.

There were weddings, music, the reply from the other side of the ahwach. I could share in a joke before I understood every layer of it. By the time I went to school, I knew quite a lot about the world. The classroom seemed to have little use for the languages in which I knew it.

We were taught in Arabic. We could speak it; we were not sitting there unable to follow instructions. But the Arabic of the textbook had a different place from the languages at home. It was in the answer key, the examination, the certificate. Darija could explain that someone was hungry, ashamed, generous or lying, and carry a whole argument about what to do. In school, the same language did not have the authority to carry an answer.

No teacher needed to announce a hierarchy. I could see which language belonged in the book and which one I was expected to leave behind when I wrote. I could become a good student by learning to move between them. That did not mean the movement had stopped costing me anything.

A student who is visibly struggling with a language can ask for help. I had learned enough to keep the lesson moving. If a word was uncertain, I guessed from the rest of the sentence. If the question in my head was too difficult to form, I asked a smaller one I could manage. Sometimes I said nothing. The silence looked like understanding, and I was often helping it look that way.

I would be working out whether a word had its religious meaning or a scientific one, looking for something nearby in Darija or Tachelhit, and checking whether I could make the thought sound respectable before I said it. By then another student could already be answering. Some of what looked like a difference in speed was work that happened before I could even start on the subject.

I was also capable of being wrong in every language available to me. Sometimes I had not studied enough; sometimes the idea was difficult. I do not want to give language credit for every failure. What bothers me is how easily the additional work could disappear from the account. If the answer was bad, the examination had a number ready for the student. It had no number for the distance he had crossed to get there.

If I learn the definition of erosion but cannot connect it to land I have seen change after rain, I own a password, not a concept. A sentence can survive the journey from board to notebook to examination without joining much else in my head. I could know its words and still be unable to use the idea somewhere unfamiliar. That was a very convenient arrangement for passing an exam, until I needed the understanding afterward.

The teachers knew something about the distance too. A difficult explanation would begin in formal Arabic. Faces would stay still. The teacher would try again, perhaps more slowly, and eventually Darija would enter. In an Amazigh area, Tachelhit might enter if the teacher shared it. There would be a familiar example, a laugh, a few more hands. I knew that change in the room. The concept had found somewhere to attach.

Then we would write the answer in Arabic. The explanation that had reached us did not appear on the examination sheet. The record could show a lesson succeeding in one language while much of the understanding had been built in another. I watched Darija do that work and still heard it dismissed as broken, informal, not a real language. Tachelhit could help a child understand and receive no acknowledgment in the answer at all.

I noticed a different use of distance around subjects called 7chouma: sex, love, desire, the body, sometimes ordinary emotion. People who normally spoke Darija or Tachelhit could reach for formal Arabic just as the subject became intimate. A borrowed register made it possible to sound educational or medical rather than exposed. Arabic was not incapable of intimacy; we were using formality to get some room between ourselves and what we wanted to say.

That room could become too large. Knowing an approved term did not necessarily make it easier to speak about consent, tenderness or confusion with someone close. A person could repeat the explanation and still have no words they could bear to use at home. We think we have protected people from the taboo, but often we have protected the taboo from understanding.

At university my mathematics changed to French. The notation was familiar. The definitions, instructions and little words connecting one step of a proof to the next were not in the language in which I had first met the ideas. I could recognize a procedure and still be working out exactly what was being asked of me.

Others had been closer to French for longer, through family, school or ordinary conversation. One student had learned French and could now study science in it. Another had to do both at once. The difference could be recorded as a difference in science. It is difficult to talk about that without also talking about class: who had the language before the exam made it a condition, and who was expected to acquire it while being judged through it.

The language can then launder inequality. “Everyone sat the same examination” sounds fair until you look at the preparation that statement leaves out.

That pressure also reaches into the home. A parent may choose the language that seems most likely to make a child’s future easier. Tachelhit can remain with the grandparents, while a child who understands answers in Darija and the next child understands less. Each decision can be made with care. The result can still be a language with fewer places to go.

I do not want it to survive only as something people are fond of. It could carry a wedding, an old song, a conversation with a grandmother; it could be welcomed as heritage while the serious future was imagined somewhere else. We could record an old singer and still leave the next poet with no reason to expect that a poem about a modern life would be wanted in the same language.

That is what I mean when I say it was denied the future tense. I want people to be able to do something new in Tachelhit, including something difficult, something that requires words we have not made ordinary yet. The absence of technical vocabulary is work to undertake. It should not be a verdict on the minds speaking the language.

There is also knowledge waiting to be heard in the other direction. People arrive at an institution knowing things about land, water, construction, care and the particular form a problem takes where they live. If that knowledge has to be translated into an approved language before it can count, the failure to translate can look like the absence of an idea. The institution hears nothing and congratulates itself on having nothing to learn. A language is accused of being unable to carry the weight it has never been allowed to lift.

English eventually gave me access to research, computing, papers and people I might never have reached otherwise. I am writing this in it. I do not want fewer languages, or a child near Agadir shut out of Arabic poetry, Francophone literature or global science. I want the languages to add to what the child already has. I spent too long experiencing each new one as a demand that the previous part of me retreat.

UNESCO’s guidance on multilingual education recommends beginning with languages children understand and building toward others with appropriate teachers and support. I know that leaves difficult practical work: different Amazigh varieties, regional differences, scripts, materials, teachers and shared national languages. None of that can be solved by pretending every classroom has one language. The children are already doing the complicated work privately. I would like the school to take on more of it.

I sometimes wonder what I would have understood sooner if I could have spent more of that effort on the idea itself. I cannot know. I made it through, and it is tempting to treat that as an answer. But I also remember the expense of translating thoughts I had not yet finished forming, and how long a nearly right meaning could stay in place because the results were good enough.

The languages are less separate for me now. They interrupt one another, supply missing words, make me notice something I could not quite say in the others. Tachelhit is still where some meanings arrive before I can explain them. English is somewhere I can work and think. I would not know how to divide myself cleanly among them, and I am relieved that I do not have to.

I still do not remember the first word I had understood incorrectly. There were too many small corrections for one to become the story. I can remember the larger confusion, though: I could speak the language, pass through it, make myself legible to the institutions that required it, while the language I already thought in was not allowed to count.