School has been the legally and socially enforced structure of my life for the better part of my sixteen years. At age twelve, as part of my academic experience, I was required to select a language from a list of four printed on lime green copy paper and learn it for two to six years in a concrete tupperware of a classroom with thirty other students who decidedly didn’t want to be there. I chose Spanish, the language my mother taught when I was little, not out of interest or passion, but because I didn’t know anything about French, didn’t like going to church where they sang in Latin, and didn’t feel dextrous enough for American Sign Language. In sophomore year of high school I made the radical decision to choose a new language in addition to my prescribed two-to-six-year Romance language: the ever mischaracterized Irish. Irish, the romantic non-Romance language with little practical purpose – and yet I’ve fallen head over heels for this dying language overflowing with life. The one class I am not required to take and where my work is not graded, the one class I chose solely because I love it, the one class that the pressures of school can’t spoil.

In seventh grade, my family drove the west coast of Ireland from house to house visiting our extended family. The culture immediately transfixed me, with the landscape and the foreign logainmneacha, place names that sounded like they were straight out of Star Wars and looked like someone had spilled a bowl of alphabet soup on the sign posts. While at my cousins’ house, we all decided to play hide and seek. My siblings and I were clearly winning, so my cousin decided that to level the playing field he would count in Irish so that us American kids couldn’t tell how much time we had left to hide. I lost that round, not because I couldn’t hide fast enough, but because I was so transfixed by the numbers. They were rounded and guttural but still flowed smoothly. It sounded like a nursery rhyme I had forgotten. There was something so familiar about it that I just couldn’t put my finger on. When I inevitably lost that round and had to seek, I counted in Spanish, knowing that only my siblings and I would understand.

I was raised in a house surrounded by fields and a stand of trees that seemed to stretch to infinity behind it. Grass was my native tongue; since birth I had run and rolled and played in the expanse of green with my family. It was predictable and safe, there were never surprises when you could see far across the field. But the woods were always there on the periphery.  My mother had led me to the edge of the forest often when I was a young child to give me a taste of what was in them, mysterious as they were. She was a Spanish teacher, and always had bilingual books and learning toys around us. She never tried to teach us how to speak, but when I started Spanish class in seventh grade it didn’t seem totally foreign to me. Initially, I was voracious in learning Spanish. I wanted to get as far as I could into the forest as fast as possible. I didn’t perceive strange new creatures as threats but as learning opportunities, but as school progressed and pressure increased, the once friendly animals seemed frightening. I didn’t want to enjoy the forest anymore, I just wanted to get to the other side. As I stumbled deeper, I came to a crossroads: leave the forest, run for the field, and abandon language learning all together, or choose the road less traveled and pursue Irish, the great unknown. I had a real choice for the first time in my academic career, and I chose Irish. I haven’t made it far down the road, but it has allowed me to gain a better perspective and understanding of both English and Spanish.

On one hand, Spanish classes gave me the tools to learn Irish. I learned the basic structures of language and the best ways to memorize vocabulary – all the skills I needed for reading and writing. But when it came to speaking, Irish gave me the tools to speak Spanish. Throwing yourself into an environment without a conjugation sheet or vocabulary list and just speaking what you know and letting conversation flow is terrifying, but that’s how I started learning Irish. In Irish class I am constantly encouraged to speak, regardless of how I trip and fumble over my words, because the more I try, the more I’ll be able to regain my footing. I don’t have grades to maintain or people to please. I’m only speaking for myself and for the beauty of the language. Irish is by nature a spoken language, to the point where to say that someone is fluent in Irish is to say they have the gift of the blas, or the tongue. Language isn’t a multiple choice test, it’s rolling words around on your tongue until they become songs and poems and lamentations that resonate somewhere deep within another person.

My Irish is a motley of dialects and borrowed words, a child’s art project made with ripped pages from textbooks and foreign postage stamps held together by over-chewed gum. It’s delicate and far from elegant, but I love it. I love the hints of a Bostún accent; I love the stories behind each piece of vocabulary; I love that it can keep growing into a more polished work of art. I keep it by my bedside, admiring it and building on it on my own time. My Spanish is kept far away, in the bottom drawer of my desk, sandwiched between aging biology notes. It’s neatly stacked and stapled, its colorful pages faded and worn. You can still see doodles and notes from my friends written in the margins, though time has left them smudged. Someday when I can finally bring myself to cut those doodles out and start from scratch I’ll be proud of my Spanish again and it will sit with Irish on my bedside table. I have so much hope for their future; I hope that I continue to help them grow with me into full, functioning languages, and that someday they won’t be confined to a page or a child’s art project. They’ll be an inseparable part of me.

Emma Fallon is a student at Northampton High School who takes classes at Smith and Elms College for fun. She is passionate about literature, her study of the Irish language, robotics, and the environment and hopes to continue her studies with Smith in the future.

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