I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

Children will prefer to interact with people who speak their own language, who speak their own accented version of the language

that emerges quite early. But, you know, the other thing that they pick up on also is,

as was the case for me, because I was an immigrant kid. So I picked up quite early on the fact that

the language that was spoken within my family was not the language of the outside

world, and that the language of the outside world, being English, was the preferred language

for most people outside of my family. So that also gets transmitted to children. They pick up

very subtle facts about the power dynamics of languages,

the relationship between majority and minority languages as well.

That's Julie Seddaby. Her new book, Linguophile, A Life of Language Love,

is an eloquent ode to the power of language to shape us and to be shaped by us. It's informed by her

own experience with languages. She spoke five before learning English as an immigrant to Canada

when she was a child. Our conversation ranged over many things. How language can bring us

together and push us apart? Why some words are just more beautiful than others,

the usefulness of ums and odds. And to me, the unexpected and welcome idea that while

word finding can become trickier as we age, we don't actually lose language. In fact, we may

just have too much of it. I'm really interested in your work with regard to language. In fact, we may just have too much of it. I'm really interested in your work with regard

to language, because you focus a lot on socialization through language. We're socialized,

and we socialize others, right up the alley of this podcast. Yes, indeed. I find it fascinating that you talk about learning

language at the very beginning, the beginnings of learning language take place in the womb.

What does the mother's voice contribute to that? Yeah, exactly. We are embedded in human

relationships right from the very beginnings of our language learning.

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