Language and the self

I’m a bit of an anglophile, much to the bewilderment of my parents, who brought me up to be keenly aware of my Finnish heritage. My interest in all things English, however, stems from a deeply-rooted conviction that culturally, I am a product of England as much as I am of Australia or Finland.

I ardently believe that language, far from being a simple tool for communication, is one of the strongest forces in shaping our consciousness. Even though Finnish was my first language, my whole education has been conducted in English. I first encountered the alphabet, that magical cluster of characters with the capacity to create worlds, in English. My obsession with the English language began then.

The folk tales I heard as a child came to me via England (did those adult storytellers ever really understand the power of Red Riding Hood’s cape or Cinderella’s shoe?). My dragons are dragons of flight and fire, they are not the Scandinavian crawling wyrms. The legends I read in primary school were English (are there any stories as wonderful as the Arthurian legends?). The fantasy I grew up on was written by Oxfordians. My sense of humour, even, is quite English (think Gaiman, Pratchett, Adams). In high school, I studied Shakespeare in three separate disciplines. The turns of phrase employed by the English, with their delightfully extensive vocabularies, have always made me proud to speak their language.

How can I begin to unravel this bundle of influences? How can I explain how King Arthur’s court shaped my impressions of the world more strongly than anything I ever saw on TV? How can I account for the fact that my imagination soared in response to black letters marching across the pages?

I’m not sure I can unravel it, and I don’t really want to. If you took away the influence of English, what was left wouldn’t be me anymore. I couldn’t tell you why it’s so important to me, it just seemed apparent from the start that the English language is one of the parameters of my universe. I am defined by this language and this literary heritage, by my responses to it and my passion for it, and I like it that way.