Many years ago, I went, as usual, to
fetch my children from Swedish Supply School, which met once a week after regular (English-medium) school in
Singapore, where our family lived. On that particular occasion, one
of the children was especially eager to start telling me all about
her day. She spoke Portuguese, this being the language that the
children and I have always shared, and she speckled it with so much
English and Swedish that I felt compelled to interrupt her.
“Querida!”, I giggled, “Que língua é que estás a falar?!”
(‘Sweetheart! Which language are you speaking?!’). She stared at
me briefly as if I were a clueless alien and then snapped, in squeaky clean Portuguese: “Uma qualquer, para
dizer o que eu quero!” (‘Whichever, to say what I want to say!’).
What was I doing, here? I was giving
evidence that being multilingual, as I am, hadn’t immunised me against the
persuasion that languages are objects of reverence:
they are there to be respected. Which meant that I was paying
attention to my girl’s languages, not to her.
What was she doing? She was giving
evidence that being multilingual, as she is, had made it clear to her
that languages are tools: they are there to serve our needs. She had
last used Portuguese in the early morning, a long time before the end
of her working day, which had
taken place first in English and then in Swedish. So why not use, in
“whichever” language, the bits and pieces of the other language(s)
in which those bits and pieces first became meaningful to her? All of
my children did this, as I discuss in Chapter 10 of my book Three is a Crowd?.
I found it particularly revealing that later, when they and I talked
about these episodes, it was their turn to giggle when reporting
their unawareness that they had been ‘mixing languages’, as this behaviour is
usually called. Besides, as my girl then added about this episode,
she knew that I knew all three languages in question, so “there was
no problem there, right?”
Again, she left me without arguments.
It may be true that only multilinguals in my children’s three
languages might understand what they were saying when they used their
languages in this way, but any multilingual in any languages would
understand what they were doing: they were being typical
multilinguals. The question then arises of why we came to talk about
a feature of typical multilingualism as ‘mixing’, a word with
rather negative undertones. Conversely, we might also ask what it
means to not mix, or switch, languages or codes. Multilingual mixes
usually raise judgemental or worried eyebrows as providing evidence of bad or impaired use of language,
respectively. But “bad/impaired use of language” in fact means
‘bad/impaired use of a language’, and there is a world of
difference between language and a language.
So why don’t monolingual mixes cause generalised unease, and where do we draw the line?
The issue is precisely one of lines.
Like country boundaries, language boundaries are figments of our
collective imagination. Not even linguists have any idea what or where they might be. So why do we go on
interpreting multilingual mixes as offending language boundaries?
Ofelia García, in an interview
conducted by François Grosjean on his blog Life as a Bilingual
and titled What is Translanguaging?,
answers this question pithily:
“Linguists often refer to the behavior of bilinguals when they go across these named language categories as code-switching. It is an external view of language. But translanguaging takes the internal perspective of speakers whose own mental grammar has been developed in social interaction with others. […] Translanguaging is more than going across languages; it is going beyond named languages and taking the internal view of the speaker’s language use.”
The book that Ofelia García edited
with Li Wei, Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, has more on how
translanguaging characterises everyday multilingual practices.
Languages are there to be used as the
tools that they are, not replicated as straitjacketed instruction manuals.
Different languages make sense to us precisely because they allow us
to engage with what matters to us in different ways, and to give the
right flavour to what we wish to say. To use one of my favourite analogies, how we
deal with our languages is no different from how we deal with our
food. There are (standard) recipes, that we haven’t been called
upon to put together because they were devised and tried by other
people; there are ingredients, and tips about method and seasonings.
But then we do it our way, because we are the ones
doing the cooking.
Favouring observation of each of the languages of multilinguals over
what the multilinguals themselves do with them is like
analysing recipes to find out how they taste. Multilinguals only
transgress those rules that never took multilinguals themselves into account.
The next post, a guest post, keeps to
the topic of creativity, this time about how and why we find ways of
preserving our languages in printed form.
© MCF 2016
Next post: =Guest post=
Being multiscriptal: why our alphabets matter,
by Tim Brookes. Saturday 9th
July 2016.
