Parental adventures in Multilingual-Land

In my family, both parents come from monolingual households and from (officially) monolingual countries, Sweden and Portugal. Both of us knew about other languages and other cultures long before we met, including from daily contact through schooling and more or less extended stays in other countries. Foreign sound and video bites were also routine on radio and TV. Adapting to a “foreigner” through marriage might then have looked like a straightforward addition to a seasoned roll of experiences.

Well, not really. Whatever experiences we’d had, of other countries and speakers of other languages, didn’t count as home. Home-bound Swedishness and Portugueseness turned out to be all-new to us – including to the natives of each culture. Puzzlements expressed by Why are you doing that, that way? ended up a distant second to Why am I doing this, this way? We confronted, daily, the simple truth that you can’t see yourself for what you are unless you become “foreign” to yourself.

The exotic feeling of otherness was first compounded by our use of English with each other. A few months into our marriage we realised that that wasn’t working at all: English was neither “ours” nor allowing us to be us. It was a language of work for both of us, and so a stilted, rather unwelcome guest to our home – more on which in a coming post. Neither did our lingua franca come complete with some cultura franca, to which either of us cold relate.

So we built our home around Swedish and Portuguese. This had an interesting side effect, by the way: as soon as we began understanding each other’s languages, we came to realise that we had in fact married quite different people than we had imagined. There is, as the saying goes, no place like home.

With our languages came our licences to use them as we were used to, in the ways that identified us and “our” people. Suddenly, there were no foreigners any longer in our respective family gatherings, because everyone could speak the same language. Granted, there were a few glitches along the way. When mingling with Portuguese relatives and friends, for example, Dad never ceased to be baffled at why he continuously got asked questions which were as continuously answered by the same or other relatives and friends, who all then reported to him that he was a marvellous conversationalist. He never got the time or the chance to even attempt to open his mouth. Mum, in turn, became unsettled at the long silences which come up in cosy Swedish family gatherings, suspecting that the lack of uninterrupted chattering at the dinner table was due to her presence. And what to say of where to place the male Swedish guest of honour to a dinner party in Portugal, or vice versa, who sits to the right of the hostess in a Portuguese home, but to her left in a Swedish one?

Small stuff, perhaps. But nevertheless the stuff of everyday habits which suddenly turn into daily surprises. You tend to want to blame someone, something, yourself, the others, your languages, their languages, for what fails to match your habits, forgetting that habits are just more or less tribal rituals which appear to be set in stone only through continued practice – more on which in a later post too. There is cultural novelty (or cultural clash, if we choose to honour the war metaphors which are favoured to discuss these things) whenever our necessarily local habits meet with other local habits.

So, question: did we become multicultural? It might be tempting to say that we did, also honouring the current fashionable aura surrounding multi-words. But that would be as meaningless as claiming that we had once been monocultural. I’d rather say that we adapted, as much as we did when we moved from kindergarten to high school, or from single to married life, or from Europe to Asia. We knew we were different (who isn’t, really?), and we didn’t mind either being so or being seen as such.

So, question: what happened when our children came along? The choice to use each of our languages with our little ones was not so much a deliberate choice as what we felt would come to feel natural to us. Baby talk, nursery rhymes, child-rearing practices, had first come to each of us in a single language, and so we did as we had had done to us. But we also played it by ear. We soon realised that it’s probably wise to avoid setting yourself the kind of New Year resolutions that you know you won’t keep and you know will give you a guilty conscience for that, when you embark on new adventures like becoming a parent. The next post explains what kind of surprises were waiting for us there too.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Making a home for new languages. Saturday 25^th February 2012.