July 1 - Father Tongue

The plane went down somewhere between Seychelles and Mumbai, and the only survivors were Pierre (a Frenchman), Anatoly (a Russian), Henry (an Englishman), Murat (a Turk), and a 9-month-old baby boy that each of the men believed was his own.
None of them knew for sure, though. That was the purpose of their trip--a flight to India to take a paternity test that the boy's mother Marjorie had arranged.
The baby could have been fathered by any of them. They had all been with Marjorie around the same time while working together at a posh diving resort in Seychelles. Thus, the paternity test.
Marjorie was waiting for them in Mumbai, having gone there the day before to finalize the test arrangements. The men had all agreed to go along with Marjorie's mother and the baby the next day.
And then their plane had gone down.
Following the plane crash, the men were able to swim with the baby to a nearby island. Although it was uninhabited, the island had plenty of fruit, fish, and fresh water, and the weather always stayed clear and balmy. In better circumstances, it would have made an ideal vacation spot, but it also made for a nice temporary home. They built a shelter, made sure their surroundings were safe, and waited for a rescue plane to spot them.
That was roughly three years ago.
Since then, the men had worked, sometimes together and sometimes against each other, to raise the boy. His was an unconventional childhood to say the least.
The main reason--other than the fact that his only human interaction since he was old enough to remember was with four father figures on an otherwise deserted island--was that all four of the men spoke a different language, and none of them spoke anything beyond basic greetings in any of the others' languages.
Perhaps inevitably, each man tried to raise the boy to speak his language only.
And to an extent, each man succeeded, but only to an extent. The boy heard only Turkish from only Murat, only French from only Pierre, only English from only Henry, and only Russian from only Anatoly. The language that he ended up learning was like a cut and paste mashup, a slapdash collage, a recklessly slapped together language patchwork quilt. He didn't have one native tongue. He had four intersecting, overlapping, contradicting quarters of four different father tongues. Any sentence he produced would have a French subject, Turkish verbs, and Russian adjectives all held together with English grammar. Or the same elements in different combinations. It was like a linguistic wagon wheel where the boy was the hub and the other four men were spokes. He was able to communicate with barely passable clarity with each man one on one, but things got pretty chaotic when all five of them were having a discussion together.
The fathers found it maddeningly difficult to communicate this way, but to the boy it was normal. Since he had no other experience to compare it to, and since life on the island was his only frame of reference, as far as he was concerned, his circumstances were normal. His existence consisted solely of the trees, vegetation, fruit, fish, and surrounding waters of the island, and the four men who took care of him. He had no concept of anything beyond that. It wouldn't even have been accurate to say that he thought of his situation as normal. Notions like normality didn't exist to him. His life was simply what it was.
But to his fathers, it was aggravating. To only be able to count on understanding (maybe) 25% of what their son was saying soon became too much to bear, so they began making more of a concerted effort to learn to communicate with each other better, and in time they all came to be fairly proficient speakers, not of the others' languages, but of their shared ramshackle cobbled together Frankenstein's monster of a language--Ruenfranturk, as they came to call it.
Years passed.
The boy grew older and so did his fathers.
In time, the men separately came to the same conclusion that they were all fathers of equal standing to the boy. The cooperative aspects of their child rearing increasingly outweighed the competitive aspects and eventually crowded them out entirely.
By the time he was 13, all five of them were completely fluent in Ruenfranturk, and they used the language to talk about topics of increasing complexity.
Although life on the island wasn't cushy, it also wasn't difficult. Food and water were plentiful and easily acquired. During the day, they had plenty of time to swim, dive, and explore. At night they entertained each other with storytelling contests, all in their shared Ruenfranturk. Life was good.
And then they were rescued.
A fishing boat that had gone way off course when its captain passed out drunk for more than 12 hours spotted the men and took them to the mainland.
By then, Ruenfranturk had completely supplanted each man's native language, and in their medical examinations doctors from England, France, Turkey, and Russia had to work together to decipher what the men were saying. Even then, it was guesswork at best.
Meanwhile, news of their rescue quickly spread: The missing baby and his four "fathers" were alive!
Marjorie learned of their survival and flew to the resort town where they were being examined. She and her new husband wanted custody of the boy.
There was a media circus.
Politicians from England, Russia, France, and Turkey all tried to claim the boy as a citizen.
There were requests for studies from linguists and behavioral psychologists from around the world. Movie offers. Book deals. Reality show development offers. Agents. Cameras. Lights. Chaos.
The boy didn't understand any of it. He may as well have been on a different planet. Ruengfranturk was already fossilized in his brain as his native tongue, a language that was understood by only four other people in the world.
Seeing the effects that all of it was having on the boy made the men's decision easy. And the fact that nobody could understand what they were saying also made it easy to make their escape plans right in front of their handlers without having to worry about being found out.
Late one night, they absconded with scuba gear from the diving resort where they were being put up, and swam to the boat of the fisherman who had initially rescued them. Together, they were able to communicate their request to be taken home, back to their island.
Upon arriving there and getting the fisherman to promise not to show anyone else where they lived, they waved goodbye to him and resumed life on the island.
The first order of business was to come up with a name for their island. The name they decided on was Babapatchvestland, a Ruengfranturk word that translated roughly to "Fatherland."