Growing up, I didn't really know my native language that well. I'm Ewe, a proud one by the way. And when I say I didn't know it that well, I mean I wasn't fluent. Wasn't really my fault though, my dad and brothers spoke English, I attended an international school, and my parents were busy, so I had little exposure to Ewe growing up. It was so bad my brother used to call what I spoke "pidgin Ewe." Broken Ewe. Such a meanie.
Fast forward to form 1 going into form 2. Due to one or two reasons this French teacher finds out I'm Ewe and decides to speak with me. We end up going back and forth, communicating, vibing basically. Then one day he looks at me and says something I will never, ever forget:
"You didn't learn the Ewe. You acquired it."
Till today that sentence lives rent free in my head. I wished my brother was there to hear it. The man went on and on about how my Anlo Ewe was amazing, and my head was swelling, because for someone whose Ewe had been called pidgin for years… ommddd.
But that comment planted something in me. Years later I'm still chewing on it: what's the actual difference between acquiring a language and learning one?
First thing that comes to mind is babies.
My sister Adepa. Every morning, my grandma would say she was communicating with the birds whenever she babbled her gibberish first thing in the morning. And me, on the other hand, genuinely thought babies had their own secret language only they understood. Weird, I know. But it might be true.
Turns out that babbling wasn't as random as I thought.
Babies are actually born able to hear every sound in every language, anywhere on earth. But somewhere in that first year, their brain starts tuning in to just the sounds that matter around them, and lets the rest fade, kind of like how you stop noticing background noise in a place you've lived in long enough. It's called perceptual narrowing.
A good example is Japanese and English. In English, "rock" and "lock" are two totally different words. In Japanese, that difference barely exists, it's more like one blended sound. At six months old, a Japanese baby and an American baby can both hear "rock" and "lock" as different sounds, no problem. But by around ten to twelve months, the Japanese baby's brain has quietly decided that distinction doesn't really matter, while the American baby keeps sharpening it because in English, it counts.
So with this whole idea of perceptual narrowing, I guess that's how babies born into bilingual or trilingual homes end up thriving with multiple languages so easily, way easier than an adult trying to learn a new one later in life. Their brains are just quietly narrowing in on all the languages around them at once, the same way they'd narrow in on just one.
So I guess that's what my teacher meant by acquisition. The Ewe seeped into my subconscious without me ever realizing it was happening. Nobody sat me down and taught me rules. It was just there, through years of being around it, until one day it came out of me sounding like home.
