Welcome to our first issue of the Language Exepress!

Languages are what we are. I was brought up enveloped in the languages which tell the stories of my family and my town, of old borders which moved after long fought battles, of generations of men who used to leave in the autumn to cross over into what used to be Austro-Hungarian empire to find work, returning in the spring with much needed money and at times also with new wives who spoke other languages.

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My grandmother was the result of such a long-forgotten migration, and I wonder how she managed to cross the linguistic and cultural barriers between Budapest and her new Italian home, before Skype and Facebook and mobile phones, when long distance calls were rare and expensive and special. How did she manage to settle, learn a new language alone at home without a teacher or a textbook, and how did she manage to be different while remaining herself, carrying her mother tongue hidden inside?

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I was brought up learning and speaking Italian at school but at home using Venetian dialect mixed with Germanic words from just across the old border from before the 1914-18 war, and hearing Hungarian at my grandparents’ house. My grandparents used it as their secret language, when they did not want me to understand. I often think my grandmother must have missed the sounds of Hungarian so much, chatting and laughing in her native language.

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She never returned to her own country after she came to Italy in 1956. I was not taught it, since these were times when speaking another language, and passing a language across generations, was not perceived as something valuable that bound a family together across time and place, but something you only had to learn if life threw you far away from home: one aunt went to France, an uncle went to Switzerland and another to Romania, my own mother was on her way to Australia before she met my father, and I went to first Ireland and then England. How could all of us still be family without a language to bind us?

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Since I left my home town it has become a place of immigration as much as emigration; there are people living or staying there now whose mother tongues include Portuguese, Albanian, Romanian, Japanese, English, German, Chinese and various African languages.

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But here we are now in Exeter, with the internet at our finger-tips giving us access to media from around the world, with an amazing resource centre, with enthusiastic teachers, cheap air tickets, and the time and every reason to learn languages. Enjoy your journey and border crossing!