Indledning
In the short story "The Only Speaker of His Tongue", David Malouf imagines the encounter between a Nordic lexicographer and the last speaker of a certain Australian language.
As the lexicographer reflects about the threat that the loss of a language poses to cultural diversity, he also exposes his views on the possibilities of language.
We all use our mother language every day, and some of us uses our second language more than our mother language.
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Uddrag
The narrator is inquisitive about language, the way that language is a big mystery, which holds history and secrets from the past. “All this is mystery.
It is a mystery of the deep past, but also of now. We recapture on our tongue, when we first grasp the sound and make it, the same word in the mouths of our long-dead fathers, whose blood we move in and whose blood still moves in us.
Language is that blood.” (p2, l 24-29) In the example, we can see that the narrator is fascinated by language.
He articulates his wonder for language and the way it contains secrets of “the deep past” (p). He fully believes that the blood from your ancestors lives in us and that it is our élan vital.
He sees our language as the only heritage we have from our ancestors, that the language is in our bloodline and therefore the closest we come to understanding and learning about the history of our people.
History is the greatest mystery, because of the different things that happen from generation to generation. But you can say that if the language was not there, there would be no stories to tell and to pass through generations.
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