“How did I manage to change from a regular girl into an immigrant with an accent?” writes Yevgenia Nayberg in the author’s note of her playful new picture book, Another Tongue. “Life is full of surprises!” she adds, noting how incomprehensible English was when she first came to the United States at age 19. Born and raised in Kyiv, Ukraine, the New York City resident has since become an award-winning painter, stage designer and author-illustrator of numerous books, including Mona Lisa in New York and Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters: A Graphic Memoir.
Another Tongue is a delightful look at language learning. With its fairly limited text and bold, graphic illustrations, it’s simple enough to hold a roomful of preschoolers at rapt attention, yet sophisticated enough that adults will revel in its quiet wisdom and wordplay. Readers of all ages wrestling with a new language—including young native English speakers—will love its mixture of empathy and humor.
Nayberg brings the seemingly invisible process of language-learning into focus. Pairing images with lots of white space, she begins by pointing out the literal meaning of “your tongue” and “your mother’s tongue,” and then explaining the phrase “your mother tongue.” She shows how babies and toddlers learn speech, then addresses learning a foreign language (“Your ears may get tired of listening to the new language.”). Children and adults are surrounded by cleverly arranged barrages of individual letters and words, including the Latin alphabet and, later, Cyrillic characters. The color red serves as an attention-grabbing unifier throughout, whether it’s displayed as a hat, the stripes on a shirt or a kitchen pot. Numerous tongues are portrayed, helping young readers digest—shall we say— the book’s concept, and there’s plenty of humor as well, including a Halloween-themed page featuring a New York language learner who says, “Welcome to the Vampire State Building.” A particularly lovely subway spread shows how riders can easily be surrounded by a multitude of languages.
Another Tongue will likely spark great conversations among young readers, no matter what language they may speak.