Making a language of friendship

Do you believe in friendship at first sight?

In the following case such friendship can not be denied. It was really about sight (or touch, or smell – I don’t know) because it certainly was not was not about words!

Two girls age 4 and 5 met for the first time. They were from two distant countries, and one might say that they did not share any common language – but they must have had since it took them just a few minutes to become attached to each other. Full of happiness the four-year old was jumping and singing: “I’ve got a friend! I’ve got a friend!” She was looking forward to every minute she would spend together with her new friend.

Smiles and gestures, shells and pebbles, running and swimming were enough for the friendship to flourish in the beginning. Words were really not necessary, but they emerged with the girls’ wishes to share more. The youngest started to imitate the other girl’s language - not exactly the words, but the sounds and the melody of the Norwegian language. When her mother asked her: “What are you saying?”, she replied: “I don’t know, but you see that it works!”. After a while the other girl also started to adjust her words to what she experienced sounded like Serbian. Both seemed to try getting closer to the other one’s language – and it worked: the girls were talking in their strange language, nodding and smiling, and were completely overwhelmed when a familiar word occasionally was pronounced.

During the five days they spent together, I observed only one occasion where the “language of friendship” appeared to have some limitations: Some problems came about when one of them tried to explain rules of a game they wanted to play together. But it didn’t matter because they still had their language of body, action of play (like taking pictures of each other), and shared interests in objects – like shells and cameras!

Today they are thousands of kilometres apart from each other. I wonder how a telephone conversation between them would sound like(?) A video conversation would probably be much better – but even if visual it would still be inferior to a personal meeting; Interactions between children really are multisensory and dependent on their three-dimensional bodies in space, and all kinds of actions they can do together with or without physical objects like flowers, water, sand…