Vernacular Spectacular

Our earliest memories of learning language can reveal a lot about how we relate to words and meaning. At three, for example, Julie Sedivy was in “the sweet, stinking darkness” of a barn with her new friend, Maura, who was introducing her to farm animals. The linguist-to‑be didn’t understand her companion yet, as she and her family had just arrived in the Dolomites, but she was enthralled by the “bewitching confusion” of what she heard. “I belonged to it,” she writes of her swift attachment to Italian, “and it to me, in a familial way that had nothing to do with reason or with wanting or with deciding.”

Within two years, Sedivy had been exposed to five languages, to varying degrees: Czech, the tongue “of my parents and country of my birth”; German, “spoken by the orderly and temperate Viennese”; Italian, “in which I roamed with the wild Maura”; French, “learned in the back alleys of East Montreal”; and English, which represented “authority and aspiration” and would...