One & Everything

"Yes, it’s a picture book. It’s really more about endangered alphabets than endangered languages, but some of these alphabets are from endangered languages. One story swallows all the others, but the others can still be found within this one story. I thought that was very powerful. English is a magpie language. We borrow from so many different languages, including Arabic and Yiddish. All these words have filtered into English. Sam Winston uses 50 scripts to illustrate his book, including cuneiform. So it’s really lovely. I bought it to read to my son when he was about six. I wanted to explain what an endangered language was—how his grandparents speak a language that will be dead by the time he grows up. So I bought this picture book, and we found it really helpful. Yes. When my son was about two, I was talking to a French mother in a playground. She said she was bringing up her child bilingual. I said I wanted to send my son to the French nursery down the road, because it would be nice for him to be bilingual too. She said: But you’re not French! Why don’t you send him to a nursery for your language? I found myself saying that my language was dead, then I absolutely burst into tears. For years I couldn’t go back to that playground, because I really did make a bit of a scene. After that, I started researching. Everyone originally told me that Judaeo-Iraqi Arabic is always written in Hebrew. This made no sense to me, because my grandmother, who was then in her nineties, didn’t read or speak Hebrew. So how could she be writing it? Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It seems that, originally, it was written in the Hebrew alphabet but, later on, women who were writing didn’t necessarily have the religious education in Iraq, so they were writing in the alphabet they used the rest of the time—the Arabic script. Then, as people became more secular, more people wrote in Arabic. But it wasn’t written down much; it was mainly an oral language. When Iraqi Jewish writers wrote books, they wrote it either in fusha , which is classical Arabic, or in the languages where they ended up. So there are lots of books by Iraqi Jews in French and English and Hebrew. If you are in a small language group, you are almost by definition going to be absorbing and changing and moving. That’s what your language will do with you. It adapts to your life. My family in Iraq were always code switching. They’d leave the house and go straight into the Muslim Arabic, the Iraqi Arabic that was more generally spoken. And then if they were writing or reading textbooks at school, they would be using Modern Standard Arabic. Then They’d come home and go straight into the Jewish dialect. Some people call it a language, others a dialect. I think in a small language you are always absorbing words, but there’s a beautiful reason for that—which is that everyone is talking to everyone else. I think we get quite fixated on whether something is a language or a dialect. You know—the purity of a language. But actually we are always borrowing words from other languages all the time and from other people. Even in this conversation I will have heard something you say—a turn of phrase—and a few days later I will probably use it, and vice versa. That’s how language works. Certainly, in Iraq, everyone was speaking to everyone else and all the languages borrowed from each other. The Jews came to Iraq in 597 BCE, and they were speaking Hebrew. They switched to the local language, Aramaic, but they carried over all these Hebrew constructions and words. Then, when the Arab Conquest came, everyone switched to Arabic, but again they carried over a lot of Aramaic and Hebrew constructions and kept them."