SPEAKING IN TONGUES My father always does the same thing ...

GUES My father always does the same thing when we get into a cab. He puts on his glasses and peers at the driver's license-then he guesses the driver's nationality. This happened again the other night.

"Driver, are you from Ghana?"

"I'm from Senegal," the driver replied, somewhat suspiciously. Whereupon my father, a Southerner, let out a whoop, leaned in and started speaking his native language, Wolof.

"You speak Wolof?" the driver yelled excitedly, whipping his head around to get a look at my father.

"Of course," my father said with mock nonchalance. "Everybody speaks Wolof."

The driver was laughing hysterically, as the car careened through traffic.

"Who this man?" the driver hollered. "He CIA! Tell me the truth. He CIA! Why he speak Wolof?"

My father laughed. I leaned in, said, "He's not CIA. Eyes on the road now."

The car stopped at a light and my father's date, bemused, said, "I can get out here. I'm just a block away."

"Darling," my father answered, "if aah were to let you get out here, my relatives would come up out of their graves and get me. Driver, pull over halfway down the block."

He pulled up, and the two of them got out.

"Tell me the truth," the driver said to me, still laughing and sort of flapping around.

"Truth is, he just speaks all these languages, like 26 or something."

The driver screamed.

"But he's not CIA. He just loves languages. He's been studying since he was a kid."

My father got back into the car and we headed uptown. "See, Wolof is a real, solid language," he said, holding his hands as if around an imaginary bowl. "It doesn't drift off into hopeless abstractions like so many other African languages."

"Like what?"

He frowned. "Like Twi, or Ga, or Bambara."

He continued: "Do you realize, Nigeria alone has 180 tribal languages? Colonialism got a bad rap but it enabled Africa to approach the modern age, because once the colonial languages were in place, they could talk to each other for the first time." He put his head through the partition. "Driver, do you think the colonial powers were good or bad?"

"Bad."

"But they gave you institutions, they gave you a language! You speak French don't you?"

"Oui. Je parle français."

My father leaned back.

I asked about the languages of South Africa. "Afrikaans is the most interesting language in the world. It's deteriorated Dutch. An insane language. Then there are the click languages of the Khosa peoples."

He put his index finger on his larynx. "They make a clicking sound, a real metallic click. It's like something happening outside the body. It's freaky. I've only met one or two Westerners who could do it."

The driver was laughing again, and wanted us to know he was no fool.

He shouted, "You CIA man. You CIA!"