Wolfstar Family Snippets

A Multilingual Household

June 1983

Most wizards, especially pureblood wizards, raised their kids with a second language, commonly Latin, as it was very useful for understanding spell work. Sometimes they taught their kids multiple languages. Sirius for example had been speaking French for just as long as he'd been speaking English. He was eventually taught Latin by a tutor, who also taught him basic literacy and arithmetic, and later on basic spell theory before he went to Hogwarts.

James had grown up speaking Tamil, with as much familiarity as Sirius had towards the French language. Of course all the marauders took an interest in the language, Sirius picking it up the fastest, of course, because everything came easy to him. It was something Remus struggled with. Even before his lycanthropy came into play, his parents were never well off, he had never had a fancy tutor. His mother taught him to read and write, but she didn't have any convenient wizard ancestry and a predisposition to picking up a second language with the snap of a finger, much less teaching Remus one. And his father, well his father preferred to drown his guilt with a bottle of rum with firewiskey as a chaser, not sure how he was meant to teach Remus anything.

Peter knew a little Latin from a tutor of his own, who was nowhere near as skilled as Sirius'; he and Remus picked up Tamil around the same time. Looking back though, maybe Peter had nullified his own progress so Remus didn't feel left out or far behind the rest of the marauders. Ever observant and always empathetic, it's hard to believe that was the same boy who had turned James and Lily into Voldemort, but fear was a powerful thing. Speaking of…

Sirius had this irrational fear of ending up like his parents. So when Remus broached the subject of hiring a tutor for the kids, namely Cathleen and Marcus, who were 6 & 5, Ariella and Harry were still a bit young, well anyway, Sirius was immediately off-put.

"I suppose you'll want them to learn a second language while we're at it-" Sirius says, rolling his eyes as if it was the most unfathomable suggestion he'd ever heard.

"Would that really be so bad? It certainly couldn't hurt anything, in fact, as someone who didn't have the privilege of being able to learn a second language, it could really benefit them, being on par with their peers."

"I don't know, Moony. It just seems so," Sirius shivers, "pureblood"

Remus laughs starkly, "You can't be serious," then he raises his hand promptly, "Don't answer that with a pun."

Sirius shakes his head, smiling, a joke lingering on his tongue but he holds it in, "No I just mean, it reminds me of my parents, even just this discussion, I just don't want to wake up and find myself becoming like them."

"Oh love," Remus reaches out, intertwining their hands, "You are nothing like your parents, you never have been, and never will be. This is completely different. We'll go through a process with only the best tutors, but we'll pick the one the kids are the most comfortable with. We'll give them options, if they aren't interested in learning another language, they won't have to. If they want to, but then change their minds, that's their right.  Or even if they have a day they don't feel like learning anything at all, we'll send the tutor on their way for the day and take them to the park instead. The kids know by now, just as I know, and I know you do as well, that nobody in this house is going to be FORCED to do anything, especially something as trivial as that. We're not your parents."

Sirius had begun to play with Remus' wedding band while he listened and as Remus finished talking he took a heavy breath and just said, "Okay you've convinced me. I mean it's actually been weighing on my mind because I know it wouldn't be fair to ask you to teach them and I'm honestly way too scared to even think over the idea of sending them to a muggle primary school."