Kris Welcome to the actual fluency podcast. Each week you'll find inspirational motivational interviews with some of the world's best language learners, industry experts, all trying to help you to learn foreign languages better, faster and more efficiently. And here we go.
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Hello everyone and welcome back to the actual fluency podcast. Before we get into today's episode, which is a really exciting one about the the quest for your heritage. In today's episode, Jonty Yamisha comes on the show and talks about his experiences learning the language of his ancestors, the Circasian language, which I hadn't heard about before this recording. And I think it's quite exciting to hear about other different kind of languages and people around the world.
And I don't know how many of you guys listening out there are actually learning a language for heritage reasons because I know that that is a big reason. Let's say your grandmother's from Germany or your parents migrated from Italy or wherever your heritage comes from, there's a language there that could be useful to either discovering more about your past or talking to relatives as well in their original language or partners even. You know, you can you can learn the heritage language of your partner as well. So that's an interesting story for today.
Just before I let you loose on on the story of of the day in this episode, I just want to give a quick shout-out to the Polyglot Cruise. If you're listening to this episode on August 9th, when the episode first went live, then you can still register for the first cruise, but you have to be quick. The registration ends August 15th. So if you want to join me and 30 other people on the first ever cruise, April 2020, then you have to go quick to Polyglot Cruise and register. There's still a few days left.
If you're listening to this in the future, then do check out polyglotcruise.com for future cruises, because it's definitely something that I want to do again and with different itineraries. So we're already debating where Polyglot Cruise number two is going to take place, but I'm thinking somewhere in North America. What do you guys think? Let me know and enjoy this episode and be sure to sign up to the cruise if you haven't already.
Jonty Yamisha I have most often introduced myself as a third-generation refugee. And what I mean by that is, or the the flip side of that is, I am the first person in at least three generations to be born, grow up, be a citizen of, and speak the language fluently of his country of birth. Right?
So what does that mean? I was born in the United States, clearly I speak English fluently, I'm a US citizen because I was born here, for all intents and purposes, I feel comfortable here. There's nobody who could come and forcibly remove me, and it's highly unlikely that there would be some violent unrest in the United States that might displace me anytime soon.
You go backwards in time, my mom and my dad were both born in the Golan Heights of Syria, right? In fact, my my mom was born in what is now technically part of Israel. So, a whole slew of Circasians settled in the Golan Heights of, you know, the the Middle East. Today, I have some relatives who are on the Israeli side, I have some relatives who are on the Syrian side. So my mom and dad were born in a region that was not their their ethnic homeland, speaking Circasian, not Arabic, having learned Arabic, speaking Arabic as effectively as foreigners, even though they are living in that land. And then came to the United States in in the late 1960s, early 1970s to build a new home. So they they came here as refugees because of war.
You go one generation before them, I'll just stick with my dad's side of the family because it's just a little bit easier. My grandfather was also born in that region, except that when he was born there, it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
Jonty Yamisha And so, what he spoke, you know, inasmuch as Arabic was the government language of my father, Turkish was the government language of my grandfather. Right?
Jonty Yamisha Um, and the the reality is that whole region is is very, very ethnically diverse. So my dad growing up, he spoke a little bit of Turkish, a little bit of Hebrew, a lot of Arabic, some Circasian, that's about it. My grandfather spoke those same languages, but Turkish was probably a little bit stronger than my dad's. Because of religion, Arabic was still pretty strong, but they spoke a different dialect of Arabic than than the the local Arabs did.
Then I go to my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather was born in a region that was not part of the Russian Empire when he was born there, but had become a part of the Russian Empire during the course of his life. And so it was probab he was I don't I can't imagine any monolinguals in my family for for a long time other than me. Right. Or Oh, I'll get to me in a minute. I can't I can't imagine any monolinguals in my family for a very long period of time because even if I go back to my great-grandfather, who was born in what is now part of the Russian Federation, at the time of his birth, he would have spoken Circasian, but because there are so many other different ethnic groups within the Caucasus, I mean the Caucasus is probably if I had to guess, you know, the size of a large US state, it might be a third the size of Texas. You know, so a large state, but not a huge state. But it has more languages spoken there than the entire European Union. You know, Dagestan alone probably has about a dozen or 15 languages spoken within it. Right?
Kris Right. Just to get people along, Circasian is an ethnic group. And did they have a a region, a territory that was then kind of taken on by all these like wars and power struggles and empires building and changing or was it kind of a spread out?
Jonty Yamisha So, so I'm an ethnic Circasian. Circasians are organized around roughly 12 tribes, 12 principalities. Each tribe has its own dialect. Some of those dialects are as close as like, you know, two dialects of Arabic or two dialects of Spanish. Some of them are as far as Portuguese to Romanian. Right? So that that's kind of how far And it comes it really depends on where geographically your tribe was from. If you're geographically close, your dialects were close. If you're geographically far, your dialects were far.
So the Circasians are the largest ethnic group historically and today, the largest ethnic group in the Caucasus. The Caucasus is this wondrous, amazing part of the world where Europe and Asia kind of all intersect. There's a North Caucasus and there's a South Caucasus. The North Caucasus are north of the Caucasus mountain range, and they are all part of the Russian Federation. The South Caucasus have historically never really They've been in the sphere of influence of the Russian Empire, but not necessarily part of Russia. And so South Caucasian states would include countries like Georgia, it would include countries like Armenia, and depending on whether you believe it's a country or not, I believe it's a country since I am a citizen of it, but Abkhazia. So that would be the South Caucasus.
The North Caucasus would include the semi-autonomous republics of the Russian Federation, which would include republics such as Dagestan, Ossetia, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, and then the three titular Circasian republics, which are Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, and then Adygea. So, that's kind of where we're from, where where I'm from, ethnically.
As is the case with human history, as stronger and larger and more powerful peoples expand, they create empires. Russia was not the only empire. It's not going to be the last empire either. Human beings, you know, want to go out and conquer. But as the Russian Empire expanded, it incorporated parts of what we called Free Circasia into the Russian Empire. And so, you know, that's kind of the the little bit of back history there.
And then in terms of geography, if you're if you're looking on a map or you're trying to reference where this is, the Caspian Sea is the eastern frontier of the Caucasus. The Black Sea is the western frontier of the Caucasus. And then the specific region where I am from, where most of my family is from is Kabardino-Balkaria or Kabardino-Balkaria, I guess in English. The capital of that is Nalchik. Kabardino-Balkaria is just north of the state of Georgia, and probably about an eight-hour drive east of Sochi, which is where the Winter Olympics were held a few years ago. Sochi was the capital of our country before it was incorporated into the Russian Empire.
My grandmother was Abaza, and I have many cousins who are Abaza. And as a result of that, a few years ago, I traveled to Abkhazia to visit them. And I secured my my citizenship there as well. So now when I travel, I can travel to Abkhazia, I can own property, open a bank account, and I can travel to Russia without a a visa because I hold that passport.
Kris Wow, very nice. And, and you know, going back to yourself, I I don't know if you want to continue the story. I I just wanted to know about when did you when did you get interested and then find out about this? Was that something that came early on in your life? Or did you kind of rediscover that as an adult and and had to go back and ask your parents about, well, what what was that about? What was that about?
Jonty Yamisha So, you know, it's it's I've as I'm 40, I turn 42 this year. I've got four children in total, two from my first marriage, two from my second. And I've always been very open and supportive of, you know, exploring our identity, our ethnicity, our religion, our culture, our history with them.
I was almost shocked as a kid that my father was so terse about, and my mother were so terse about our identity. And I I don't I'm not denigrating them. I I think it's just part of the generation and the culture that they grew out of. And when I would ask them about what their parents would say, they were even more terse. And I I don't know whether this is something to do with the austerity of our culture, or whether it's something to do with this feeling of loss of being expelled, you know, having so many people die in war, then being forcibly removed from your from your region.
But as a kid growing up, I just I I can't say I was confused, but I can't say that I was clear on who I was. You know, I was a Circasian originally living in Southern California where I was born, then moving to New Jersey where the bulk of my family in the United States lives. I I was this, you know, Circasian kid whose parents came from Syria, who was living in Southern California, who was a practicing Muslim. And all that kind of made sense to me.
You know, it it's funny. I think I have two small kids I have two toddlers and two teenagers. To the teenagers, I
