Sunday 25 November 2007

Learning my Native Tongue

Well I don't know if anyone will read this since I haven't posted for so long, but I decided to write it anyway. I have spent this last six weeks starting to learn Serbo-Croatian, the native language of my parents and my relatives. I decided to do this because my great neice asked me how to say a few words in our language( notice how it is called our I am sure other people refer to their native tongue as their language as well). So I realized that since my sister died the heritage of our family had died as well, so I thought I sould do something about that. So therefore the stimulus to learn the lanuage (as my son calls it "the old tongue"). I found several websites for Serbo-Croatian ,but many more for the different enthic groups since Yugoslavia broke up in the 1980's and the 1990's. The most sites that I found were for Croatian( where my Dad came from). So I am learning that particular form of the language. Yet there are many words that I have not heard of since my mother and father spoke an uneducated form of the vocabulary(they never went to school there and only went to public school here). My dad learned on his own to read and write Yugoslavian. It was a broken form of the langauge with some English words mixed in. So now I find myself at the ripe old age of 58 trying to learn all over again(I could understand Yugoslavian but never spoke it). I am also listening to radio stations from Croatia to get a better grasp of the verbal word. It is stimulating to my mind and it something that I now find that I can do in all the time I have now in my life.