[ELTWeekly Volume 10, Issue 9 | April 16, 2018 | ISSN 0975-3036]
Caroline Wyatt has been reporting on global affairs and war for more than two decades, working as a foreign correspondent based in Germany, France and Russia for 15 years, and reporting from places including Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Egypt and Israel. In 2014, Caroline moved from reporting defence to covering global religious affairs and ethics. She moved in 2016 to making BBC radio documentaries after being diagnosed definitively with MS. Caroline grew up travelling the world thanks to her British diplomat father, and spent her teenage years in West Berlin during the Cold War. She is an occasional presenter for Radio 4’s Saturday PM programme, as well as The World This Week on World Service Radio.
We understand that in addition to English you can speak German and French, as well as bit of Swiss-German. What was your reason for learning each?
I grew up speaking Swiss-German, as my adoptive mother Annemarie was from Switzerland. So at home, we spoke both English and Swiss-German. In some senses, that was my mother tongue, as we used it at home until my mother died when I was 11. I still love hearing the language, as it always reminds me of my childhood, though I think the Swiss-German has now been superseded in my brain by German. I can understand Swiss-German, but when I try to speak it these days, it comes out as German.
BBC’s Caroline Wyatt on how language learning has been vital to her career