We enter a bar, a shop, or an office and say ciao.
“Di dove siete?”
One word is often enough. We haven’t ordered, explained our problem, or asked where the bathroom is. Nonetheless, the international portion of the conversation has begun.
This is not a big deal in the scheme of things. The question is usually friendly, and often it leads somewhere interesting. We have met people, exchanged travel stories, and explained many times how two Americans ended up living in Bergamo. Still, after ten years, there are mornings when we would prefer simply to order a macchiato.
This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that we write about our odyssey with the Italian language. We have dozens of posts (TravelMarx: Italian Language) on the subject. We love Italian, we love living in Italy, and our lives here would be impossible without the language. But affection does not eliminate frustration.
After ten years, we speak enough Italian to live in Italy, but perhaps not enough to disappear into it.
One Word is Enough
“Where are you from?” after a single ciao demonstrates how quickly we can be identified and sorted. The question may be nothing more than curiosity or an easy way to make conversation. Repeated hundreds of times, however, curiosity can begin to feel a little like border control conducted at a coffee counter.
What tires us is not being foreign. We are foreign. It is the speed with which foreignness can become the subject, pushing aside whatever we were trying to say or do. How we pronounce the word becomes more interesting than the word itself.
Italy has a highly tuned linguistic ear. Italians identify one another by pronunciation, vocabulary, rhythm, and regional cadence. A few sentences may reveal that someone is Bergamasco, Roman, Neapolitan, Sardinian, educated, provincial, working class, or trying rather hard not to sound like any of those things. Italians are not only locating foreigners through language. They have long been locating one another.
The difference is that a regional accent usually places an Italian somewhere within Italy. Our accent places us outside it.
We touched on this feeling in Transplants: Notes on Aging and Living Abroad, where we described our accent as a kind of passport carried in our voices. That post considered the larger experience of living between cultures. Here, we want to stay with one small but persistent part of it: how a single ciao can locate us before the conversation has really begun.
The R Bar
The Italian r has become our recurring symbol of linguistic struggles. Someone rolls an extravagant r for us. We try to reproduce it. What comes out is recognizably an r, but not the correct kind. Everyone laughs, including us. Then we try again, with greater concentration and usually worse results.
Repeat for ten years.
The joke is affectionate. We understand that. Often the person correcting us is genuinely trying to help, and we would not want people to stop correcting us altogether. The tiring part is how easily the correction can take over the conversation. We may be explaining something complicated, making a joke, or telling a story, but one poorly executed r suddenly becomes the most interesting thing at the table. The message briefly disappears behind the delivery.
In that moment, the Italian r seems to outweigh years of vocabulary, grammar, residence permits, utility bills, medical appointments, friendships, misunderstandings, and daily life. We may have explained the problem perfectly, but we have not rolled the r with sufficient authority.
Perhaps this does not mean we failed to work hard enough. Adults vary greatly in their ability to hear and reproduce unfamiliar sounds, and many people who learn a language later in life retain an accent even when they speak fluently. At some point, the mouth seems to settle on its preferred collection of sounds. Ours settled before it encountered the Italian r.
Adult learners vary greatly in their ability to perceive and reproduce unfamiliar sounds, and late learners (like us) commonly retain a non-native accent even at high levels of proficiency. According to the research A hypothesis on improving foreign accents by optimizing variability in vocal learning brain circuits adults learn foreign pronunciation poorly because they stop experimenting too soon and the result is a foreign accent. (This is research to follow up on.)
The Woman Who Disappeared
We went to a party recently where many of the guests had international backgrounds. One English woman had lived in Italy for more than twenty years. She had married an Italian, raised children here, studied languages, and could move easily between English and Italian.
A few days later, a friend who had attended the same party remarked on how perfectly she spoke. He had to listen closely to tell that she was not Italian.
His admiration was generous, and deserved. Still, I felt a brief flash of envy. Apparently, there was a finish line after all, and we haven't passed it (yet).
The English woman had achieved a kind of native invisibility. Her Italian no longer announced her before she had a chance to say anything else. She could enter a conversation without immediately becoming the foreign person in it.
Do we want the same thing?
Yes and no.
We do not necessarily want to disappear. The way we speak is part of who we are and how we think. Our accents record where we came from, when we learned Italian, and the fact that another language still lives close beneath the surface.
But we would like the option to disappear now and then.
Sometimes we want to say ciao, order a coffee, and not explain how two Americans ended up in Bergamo. Sometimes we want the conversation to continue without turning toward our pronunciation, our origins, or the inevitable question: “Why Bergamo?”
Thinking about the woman at the party also forced us to take inventory of what our own Italian can do.
It has built a life.
It gets us through bureaucracy, friendships, driving exams, medical conversations, meals, repairs, jokes, and misunderstandings. It allows us to participate, not perfectly and not invisibly, but fully enough to belong to the life we are living.
This is not failure. It is functioning bilingualism, accent and all.
What Our Italian Can Do
It is easy to measure our Italian by what it cannot do.
It cannot disguise us. It cannot reliably roll an r. It cannot always keep pace with a crowded dinner table when three people are speaking at once and a fourth is beginning a story from the middle.
But that is a strange way to measure a language.
Our Italian has built a life.
It has carried us through residency paperwork, medical appointments, condominium meetings, repairs, friendships, arguments, meals, and the Italian driving exam. It has helped us explain symptoms, negotiate with tradespeople, understand train announcements, complain about bills, and occasionally make someone laugh on purpose.
It has also allowed us to notice things we would otherwise miss. We hear differences between formal and informal speech. We recognize regional expressions. We stop at signs and wonder why Italian phrases an instruction one way while English would phrase it another. We may not speak like native Italians, but we no longer experience Italian as noise passing around us.
There are, of course, limits. In a fast conversation, we may arrive at the perfect response several seconds too late. A joke may need to be explained, which is rarely an improvement. Some days our Italian feels fluent; on others, we struggle to assemble a sentence we are certain we used successfully the day before.
Still, “medium-level Italian” may be an unfair description. Medium compared with what? A native speaker? The English woman at the party? An imaginary version of ourselves who studied the congiuntivo every evening instead of doing something else?
Perhaps the more useful measure is not whether we can pass as Italian, but whether our Italian language level allows us to participate in the life around us. And by that measure, it works.
Our Italian is imperfect, accented, and occasionally held together with gestures. It is also durable. It gets us through the day and into conversations, relationships, and situations that would otherwise remain closed to us.
That may not be mastery. It is not invisibility. But it is much more than nothing.
My Grandfather was American
The United States is hardly innocent when it comes to judging people by the way they speak. Accents can affect how people are treated at work, in public, and in everyday conversation. Race and class are often tangled up in those judgments. Someone can be born in the United States and still be asked where they are “really” from.
Still, that was not how I understood American identity growing up.
My grandfather was born in the United States to Italian parents. He spoke and wrote English imperfectly and was, for practical purposes, probably illiterate. In an earlier post, A Happy Sound in the Grotto, I wrote about the sounds he made while sitting at the kitchen table, working slowly through the newspaper. His limited literacy was part of his history. It was never evidence that he was somehow less American. He did not have to pass linguistically.
Perhaps that is because the United States tells itself that it is a country made from arrivals. The story is often contradicted by the country’s behavior, but the story still matters. An accent may identify someone as Italian American, Chinese American, Southern, Midwestern, working class, or recently arrived. It can place a person within a complicated American landscape without necessarily removing them from it.
Italy tells itself a different story, one built more around place, family, town, region, and inherited culture. This is curious because Italy contains enormous linguistic variety. Italians have always used pronunciation and vocabulary to locate one another. Yet a regional accent usually places an Italian somewhere within Italy. Our accent more often seems to raise the prior question of whether we belong inside the category at all.
That may be too simple a comparison. Perhaps I remember the United States generously because it was where I grew up and experience Italy more critically because I am still learning how to inhabit it. Perhaps this is rosy retrospection with an American accent.
But the difference continues to feel real.
My grandfather’s imperfect English did not make his nationality conditional. Our imperfect Italian can sometimes make our connection to Italy feel provisional, even after ten years of living here.
Maybe that is the question beneath all the questions that follow ciao: not simply where we came from, but how a person who came from somewhere else can ever become fully from here.
Foreign at Ciao
After ten years, we speak enough Italian to live in Italy, but perhaps not enough to disappear into it.
Fine.
We may never be mistaken for Italians, at least not once we open our mouths. But being mistaken for Italian may be the wrong measure.
The woman at the party could pass. We cannot. Yet passing is only one form of belonging, and perhaps not the most important one. A perfect accent can conceal a history. An imperfect one can reveal it in interesting ways.
Our accents record lives lived in two languages. They tell people that we arrived from somewhere else and learned Italian later. They do not tell them how long we've been here, what we understand, what we contribute, or how thoroughly we have made Italy home.
Perhaps this is what people are trying to discover when they ask where we are from. The question may be less a judgment than an opening, an attempt to place us within the story they already understand.
Still, there is a difference between being welcomed and being unremarkable.
We have been welcomed. That is for sure. We have built friendships, routines, and a life in Italian. We participate fully, even if we do so audibly as foreigners. What we may never achieve is the ordinary privilege of passing unnoticed.
There are worse things.
Remaining recognizable as ourselves while living in another language may be a more modest achievement than mastery, but it is also a more interesting one. We do not need our Italian to erase where we came from. We need it to carry us further into where we are.
And it does.
Even if, immediately after ciao, we are sometimes asked to explain the whole journey before we have managed to order the macchiato.
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