AWARDS FOCUS
F
rank Gardner talks about languages
the way an explorer might talk about
his most exciting voyages. To him,
they are the start of an adventure: "the
wardrobe that leads to Narnia… the door
to someone else's world". It's not just that
the renowned Arabist found his passion
for Arabic during a chance meeting with
the Arabian explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger,
cementing the idea of languages and
adventure in his 16-year-old mind. He had
gained an innate sense of language's
ability to open up new worlds as a child,
thanks to his diplomat parents.
The family moved to Holland when
Gardner was seven. "That was my first
real encounter with foreign languages.
The thrill of trying to imitate the accent
and the language was exciting," the
BBC Security Correspondent tells me. His
mother, a languages graduate, and father,
who spoke excellent German, learnt
Dutch in order to mingle
with the diplomatic
community.
"My parents would sprinkle a lot of their
conversation with French, Dutch, German
and Italian. I was quite inspired by that,
and if I'm honest, I probably wanted to be
like them – to invent some of my own
phrases," he confides.
Realising that languages were a
gateway to interesting people and places,
he studied French and German at school,
spending two weeks in Germany with an
elderly couple who took him on "rather
staid" tours of the town. "But the
husband had fought on the Eastern Front
in WWII so it was fascinating to hear his
stories," says Gardner. Fast forward a
couple of years and he had a very
different exchange experience aged 17,
staying with a French family in Gascony.
"We were going to nightclubs on the
back of motorbikes," he explains. "I came
back speaking quite good conversational
French, but the worst French slang. My
mum was appalled."
Then came his first trip to an Arabic-
speaking country: Morocco. "As an
18-year-old, it was incredibly exciting.
Arabic was the portal through which I
was experiencing a completely different
culture. Everything about it was fascinating:
the way it was pronounced, the way it was
written, the way people's facial expressions
change when they speak Arabic."
This set him on course for a prestigious
career at the BBC which has seen him
reporting from across the Middle East,
embedding on military operations in
Frank Gardner tell Miranda Moore how his passion for
Arabic drives his work as BBC security correspondent
Being Frank
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