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Do You Know How Smart I Am in My Own Language? · Just Julia

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know how smart I am in my own language?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: On accents, intelligence, and the parts of ourselves that can get lost in translation.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: There is a scene from Modern Family that has stayed with me.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Gloria, frustrated by not being able to express herself properly in English, says,
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know how frustrating it is to have to translate everything in my head
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: before I say it?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I laughed when I heard it, and then I thought, God, I know that feeling.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: I left Brazil in 2006.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Since then,
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I have studied, worked,
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: fallen in love,
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: built a career,
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: married, and become a mother in languages that weren't originally mine.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Today I speak Portuguese, English, and Italian fluently.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: That sentence should make me feel powerful.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And yet...
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it doesn't.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I'm in a meeting and I know exactly what I want to say.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: I know the idea.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: I know the argument.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I can't find the word.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Or more precisely, the word arrives in the wrong language.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Portuguese comes when I need Italian.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: English appears instead.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: I reject one word,
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: search for another,
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: rearrange the sentence,
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: check the grammar,
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: all while trying not to lose the thought I was trying to communicate in
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: the first place.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: There is this strange linguistic mathematics happening constantly in my head,
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: and sometimes somewhere in all that calculation.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: I lose the story I was trying to tell.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: From the outside,
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: perhaps what you see is a woman hesitating,
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: searching,
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: restarting a sentence, but inside her head, three languages are moving at once.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: The pause doesn't necessarily mean there is less going on.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it means there is more.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And yet,
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: when this happens often enough,
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: you can start confusing your ability to express your intelligence
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: with your intelligence itself.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I have felt this at work.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: I have been in meetings where I knew my subject deeply.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: But couldn't argue my point in Italian with the precision I wanted.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Someone would correct a word.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Someone would imitate my pronunciation.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Someone would laugh at the way I said something.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And while I usually laugh too,
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: there were times when I could feel myself getting smaller,
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: less articulate, less authoritative, less certain of something.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: I had been completely certain about five minutes earlier.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: I've caught myself focusing on my grammar instead of my idea.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've listened to the sound of my own accent when I was supposed to be listening to myself.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And when you do that often enough, something subtle happens.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: You start editing yourself before anyone else has the chance.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: You make the sentence simpler.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: You tell the
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: You don't say it at all.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's the strange thing about confidence.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it isn't taken from us in one dramatic moment.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we give it away in tiny pieces.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: And yet some of the places
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: where I have felt most comfortable speaking imperfectly have been
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: the most international rooms of my life.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: My university in New Zealand was extraordinarily multicultural.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: People came from all over the world.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And for many of us, English wasn't our first language.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody needed to explain what it felt like to search for a word.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: We were all searching.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Years later, I interned at the United Nations in New York.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: I remember rooms filled with accents,
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, languages I couldn't even identify.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: People paused.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: People searched for words.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: People pronounced things differently.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And somehow none of that made anyone seem less intelligent.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, it reminded you how much existed behind the language being spoken.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: You weren't listening to someone's English and wondering why it wasn't perfect.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: You were listening to their ideas.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: This summer at Mindvalley University in Tallinn,
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time, that same sensation.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Different nationalities, different accents, different stories.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: People meeting each other somewhere in the middle.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: It reminded me of the United Nations.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps that's one of the reasons I feel so alive in multicultural environments.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody owns the room linguistically.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: We all have to cross a small bridge to reach one another.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And there is something incredibly equalizing about that.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Lately I've also started wondering whether I've been thinking about accents in the wrong way.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because perhaps it's not just an accent, it's an identity.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Language carries culture, and culture carries identity.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Ask someone who speaks several languages whether exactly
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: the same personality emerges in each one,
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: and I suspect many will tell you, no, I'm funnier in Portuguese.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: There is a rhythm to my humor there that doesn't always travel with me.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: There are parts of me that became independent in English,
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: and there are parts of my adult life,
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: my career, my marriage, becoming a mother, that were built in Italian.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're not different women.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: They're all me.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: The funny thing is that after almost 20 years abroad,
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not even completely safe in Portuguese anymore.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I speak to my family in Brazil and an Italian word slips into a Portuguese sentence.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: My accent has changed.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: They laugh.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I laugh too.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: But occasionally I think...
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Where exactly is the language in which I sound completely like myself now?
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there isn't one anymore.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe parts of me live in all three.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's not linguistic confusion.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's what 20 years of living between cultures sounds like.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm writing a lot about confidence lately because I'm trying to understand
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: where some of mine went.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking backward at the little moments when I learned to question things
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: about myself that I once didn't question so much.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And language might be one of them.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because somewhere along the way,
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: I allowed the missing word,
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: like the accent,
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: the grammatical mistake,
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: like the extra second I needed to respond,
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: you know, to become evidence against myself.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Something that should have made me feel more capable somehow started making me feel less.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm starting to think, I had it backwards and I'm not less because I speak with an accent.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: I am more because I speak three languages.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because I have lived through them,
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: they carry different countries, different people, different versions of my life.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: My accent isn't evidence that I don't belong in the conversation.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's evidence that I learned how to enter it in another language.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, several.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps the goal was never to erase the accent.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps the goal is simply to stop hearing it as evidence of something missing.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because an accent isn't evidence that you know less.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's evidence that you know more than one way to name the world.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: I know there will still be moments when I forget the word.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Moments when Portuguese comes first and refuses to leave.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Moments when I begin a story and lose myself somewhere between three different languages.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: But perhaps I can stop turning those moments into judgments about who I am because
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: the woman behind the pause isn't less intelligent.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: She simply has a lot of languages to search through.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's something I should stop apologizing for.