Another Tongue by Evgenia Nayberg

“Different countries have different mother tongues. When you come to a new country, you may not understand its language at first.” Nayberg’s (I Hate Borsch!, rev. 7/22) playful picture book presents readers with the idea that when you’re struggling to make sense of another language, words break down into sounds that don’t always have meaning. Quirky collage illustrations incorporate letters (both Latinate and non-Latinate) falling from the sky like snowflakes, filling the air, escaping like steam from a pot, or assaulting the ears, visualizing the way language sounds to the non-native speaker as fragmented, disjointed, and sometimes overwhelming. Nayberg expands the “mother tongue” metaphor to include how speaking a new language makes your mouth work in new ways and how trying to speak it “may taste funny on your tongue.” Sometimes you get it right, correctly differentiating between the words chicken and kitchen, and sometimes not, as when misunderstanding a sentence such as “Welcome to the Vampire State Building!” In the end, there is the reassurance that if you keep at it, you will eventually become bilingual, or “someone with two tongues,” which, amusingly, is represented literally. This lighthearted look at the experience of foreignness deftly represents the sometimes-scary, sometimes-humorous process of becoming bilingual and the transformative effect of immersing yourself in a new language.