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Issue link: https://thelinguist.uberflip.com/i/1172840
@Linguist_CIOL OCTOBER/NOVEMBER The Linguist 29 OPINION & COMMENT I found issue TL58,3 very interesting, in particular the comments regarding linguistic intolerance and the episode in the Edinburgh supermarket described by Bernadette O'Rourke in 'The Authority to Speak'. Plus ça change! My mother and I had a similar situation rather a long time ago, showing that certain problems will always reappear, even if they are brushed under the carpet. My mother married my father in Italy in 1937 and immediately had to surrender her Italian passport as he was from 'perfidious Albion'. She went with him to the UK and only returned once to Italy to see her family before the war started in September 1939. Italy's Declaration of War against the UK on 10 June 1940 was seen as a stab in the back by a country which had been an ally in the Great War, with US President Roosevelt proclaiming: "On this tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor." As a result, the UK government and population labelled all Italians as 'traitors', an opinion that was reinforced by the Italian Armistice on 8 September 1943, which many saw as another act of treason. My family had to suffer all the problems associated with war, but in addition my mother had to face the trauma of finding herself on the opposite side to her Italian Email linguist.editor@ciol.org.uk with your views Linguistic bigotry: plus ça change family. My Italian grandmother wrote to her through a Swiss friend, but the letters that made it to the UK were heavily censored by both the Italians and the British. My father was away almost all the time, working with a group of scientists to improve the performance of military aircraft, so my mother was alone with two very small children in London. Throughout the war, she spoke only Italian with my sister and me. We were never taken to an air raid shelter because the only time my mother went to one she was ill-treated because the other people understood she was Italian. Instead, we would sit under a table, wearing our Mickey Mouse gas masks. One day in a shop, I saw a man spit in her face; after the war my mother explained that he had congratulated her for speaking Spanish with her children and she replied that she was speaking Italian. Luckily my sister and I were for most of the war too small to be able to understand what it meant to be 'on both sides' and my mother brought us up to love Italy without ever taking sides. Our problems began when we started going to school at the age of four. Immediately, the other children started making fun of me, calling me 'Itie' because I spoke English with an Italian accent. For them, I represented the enemy, and I was oppressed and bullied. In the UK at the time, I had to smile at the concluding sentence of Vicky Davis's feature 'Research in Relay' (TL58,4). When visiting the museum in Puerto Princesa in the Philippines, I was asked successively: "Are you travelling alone?" (shock or admiration?); "How old are you?" (astonishment that I was not safe at home, as a local lady of 60 would have been); and "Are they your own teeth?" My assent prompted the question: "Are you very rich?" I had not thought I was but, looking at the state of teeth in the local population and considering the cost of my own dental treatment, I have decided that I must be. Joanna Le Métais FCIL The importance of good teeth there was a marked xenophobia, and Italy and Germany were hated. On her return to Italy with us in 1946, my mother discovered that her three brothers had survived. After the Italian Armistice, the eldest became a translator for the British Army, the second became a translator for the Americans in Sardinia and the youngest decided to fight the Germans. As a child I could not have imagined that many years later I would become a member of the oldest regiment in the UK and that, in Italy, I would become a friend of the Alpine troops, the Alpini. Michael Drewitt FCIL IMAGES © SHUTTERSTOCK