In playgrounds, as our children were
growing up, comments ranged from severe “We speak X, here” to
commiserating “Oh, can’t the children speak X?”, where X stands
for the name of the local mainstream language; in school, teachers
recommended X monolingualism at home, not only as the usual (and
misguided)
safeguard against assorted developmental shortcomings, but also to
protect the children from bullying which might arise from their
unwitting public shows of Alien-Speak. Understandably, well-meaning
officials added. You can read a detailed report on these issues in
Chapter 9, titled ‘A new language: intruder or guest?’, of my
book Three is a Crowd?
The scenario repeated itself, from
extended family gatherings to more or less formal dinners where our family, for example as
hosts, caused the smoothly ongoing conversation to suddenly come to a
halt. Guests would glance at fellow guests, to make sure that what
they had all heard was discourteous gobbledygook indeed, and someone
was finally bound to ask: “Sorry, what was that you just said?”,
with tones and facial expressions which made it very clear that the
question was not about “what”, but about “why”.
We parents, let alone the children,
weren’t even aware that we were using Private-Speak, so naturally
it came to us. Which meant that the generalised malaise struck us all
the more painfully: we felt guilty of speaking our language(s), as
charged. We felt as rude as if we had publicly whispered secrets in a
shared language.
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| Photo: MCF |
It doesn’t help that people who feel
excluded in this way also seem to believe that we use our secret
languages to talk about them, probably because so many of us
tend to assume that our pet conversation topic, ourselves,
unquestionably extends to others. This is not surprising, really,
given that Oxford English Corpus
frequency counts for written English, for example, report that one of
the most common words is “I”. It might be hard to persuade those
people that our secret conversations concerned banalities like Stop
picking your nose, Do you want to go potty?, Let go of
your brother’s leg, or Can I have your cake, daddy, if
you’re not finishing it? and I want to go play with their
goldfish. I often wondered whether I shouldn’t have asked these
people two things, a) what do they talk about with their children,
and b) in which language.
Things did get better, in time, as
everyone got used to everyone else’s linguistic quirkinesses in the
different places where we’ve lived. Not least, we parents came to
feel free to switch language to our children,
when they became aware of what linguistic politeness is all about,
and thereby realised that it tops any feelings of personal offence,
on their part, to their own language policy habits.
The children themselves came to put
their secret languages to good use: when receiving their friends at
our home, it happened that they deliberately switched to one language
that they knew their friends didn’t understand, in order to ask us
parents, for example, whether their friends could stay on for dinner
and sleepover combos. This was the only strategy they could think of,
as they explained to me, to protect their friends from assuming that
they were not welcome, in case the answer had to be “no”, for
some logistic reason.
Languages can indeed be used as
strategic tools in more than one way. One well-known example relates
to the “uncrackable” codes used by Code Talkers in World War II –
their own languages. The site of the Navajo Code Talkers explains how the coding took
place, and how its success seamlessly drew on native cultural tenets.
My next post looks at other linguistic
codes, which also appear to be successfully uncrackable for the same
reason.
© MCF 2012
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