“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate are “the dreadful words” inscribed at the gates of Hell, in Dante Alighieri’s ‘Inferno’ of his Divina Commedia.

Teacher trainer Leni Dam doesn’t use these exact words, when discussing learners’ prospects at the gates of language classrooms, but her message is as grim:

“You are now entering a foreign language classroom.

Forget that you are normal.”

Image: William Blake (1757-1827), Dante’s Inferno – Wikimedia Commons

To start off with, “foreign language” is a learner-unfriendly term, as I’ve noted before. In addition, Leni Dam believes, like I do, that the traditional tormenting techniques which are in widespread use in language classrooms are all but conducive to eliciting proficient language from learners.

This is because such techniques treat learners like hapless morons. Language syllabuses attempt to persuade thinking and speaking adults and older children that using, for example, the relative positions of pictorial representations of dogs and tables, or of actual classroom pens and pencil holders, is relevant for their everyday uses of the prepositions under and in, respectively. Or that recasting in the past tense sentences like She is my friend or I eat oranges satisfies the learners’ communicative and vocabulary needs out there in the wide, wild world where their new language is used.

Traditional fire-and-brimstone language teaching philosophies of this kind range all the way from the object, through the method, to the purposes of teaching. What is taught is not language, but linguistics; how languages are taught feeds you first what matters least; and why all of this should be taught draws on emulation of impossible and/or irrelevant standards of language proficiency. Such philosophies share a commitment to stifling learner autonomy, whose fostering is, in stark contrast, a core tenet of Leni Dam’s teaching philosophy. No wonder that such teaching results in the pathetic outcomes of “late” language learning, with which we’ve become familiar. You cannot do what you are not taught to do, which is to engage with your new language as a thinking and speaking individual. The learner is nowhere in sight, except to be chastised for the capital sin of having been born too long ago.

To my mind, there is only one way we can claim that learners’ ages are relevant to their language learning, under these teaching conditions: learners’ mental ages are certainly above the performance levels which are expected from syllabus contents, methods and purposes. I do understand why the too-old-to-learn-languages myth took shape and bulk. Since we cannot isolate age as a testable variable in any fair experiment that might (dis)prove its “effects” on language learning, age remains a conveniently murky scapegoat, one which is in addition easy to sell in its crudest form: we’re all getting older, not younger, so there’s not much you can do about ageing. It is also far easier to blame the learners’ age than to have traditional language teaching patriarchs, matriarchs and associated money-making corporate tribes listen to reason.

The age myth spawns sub-myths, as mature mythologies will: if you believe in language dunces, you’ll believe in language geniuses, too. These beliefs are textbook examples of bad science: you disregard all those “old” learners who do acquire proficiency in their new languages, to go on blaming mysterious degeneration for bad outcomes, and invoking mysterious giftedness for good outcomes. Stefka H. Marinova-Todd, D. Bradford Marshall and Catherine E. Snow, in an article titled ‘Three misconceptions about age and L2 learning’, address precisely this issue, in a review of the (lack of) evidence for claims which correlate language learning proficiency with learners’ ages, let alone attribute the former to the latter.

I can understand, as said, the genesis and propagation of the age myth, but I have no sympathy. In the language teaching marketplace, it seems that customers are never right. Instead of serving learners’ needs, whether learners wish to learn languages or the ways of teaching them, what we’re telling them is to abandon all hope of ever using or teaching their new languages like normal human beings. In the pithy words of one of my students, a qualified English language teacher: “Teachers and syllabus writers know what they want students to learn, but they never learn what the students want to learn from them.” (Thank you for your insight, Sopha!)

Other mythical beings and practices abound, where the use of more than one language is in question. The next couple of posts discuss these matters, starting with a guest contribution from a speech-language expert, whose wisdom I’ve had the privilege of featuring at this blog before.

Marinova-Todd, S., Marshall, D., & Snow, C. (2000). Three Misconceptions about Age and L2 Learning TESOL Quarterly, 34 (1) DOI: 10.2307/3588095

© MCF 2013

Next post: =Guest post= Language dominance: A one-way street with oncoming traffic, by Brian A. Goldstein. Saturday 26^th January 2013.

Friendly speakers and friendly listeners

The title of this post draws on Olle Kjellin’s take that speakers of a shared language would do well to nurture what he calls a “listener-friendly pronunciation”. Raising awareness that speaking is about thoughtfulness towards whom we are speaking to may come as a Why-didn’t-I-think-of-this-before epiphany, for those of us bred among the traditional one-size-fits-all kinds of accents that learners keep being fed in language classes.

Sensitivity to the linguistic comfort zone of other human beings certainly is, to my mind, a good thing to nurture. It’s also a matter of etiquette. It makes others feel good in our company, and it makes us feel good, too, because awareness of our surroundings allows us to feel in control. Not least, this kind of sensitivity is usually reciprocated, whether we’re being hosts or guests, including in our languages. It’s not that difficult, either: as newcomers to a party or a business meeting, say, we use the same mechanism to monitor the ongoing atmosphere, so that we may gain entitlement to merge with it. Or not, of course: if we find ourselves surrounded by deliberately hostile merrymakers and moneymakers, or by speaker-unfriendly listeners, it doesn’t matter how mood-friendly or how listener-friendly we strive to be. It’s a matter of will, and of awareness that all of us, habitués or rookies, have been “ongoing” too, for more or less extended periods of time, around more or less varied kinds of people, with the effect that our speaking and listening habits have become set, in what may feel more or less like stone.

Linguistic friendliness matters, both ways, because there is a sophisticated interplay between speaking and listening, rooted in a law which is very, very familiar and very, very dear to all of us: The Law of Least Effort. As speakers, we’re quite reluctant to disturb the comfy humdrum routines that we’ve patiently trained our vocal tracts to observe. As listeners, we simply stop listening to whatever threatens to engage skills beyond what we deem to be our territorial listening rights. Call it laziness, if you so wish. I prefer to say that our human speech and hearing hardwares are optimised to account for effort-effect tradeoffs: less effort from speakers means added inconvenience to listeners, and vice versa. Never has “Do Unto Others” had such a practical, everyday application.

One sure way to create linguistic friendliness is to literally tune into the rhythmical patterns which characterise our fellow speakers. By this I mean their body language, facial expressions, visible and audible articulatory movements, anything that can help us decode the cadences underlying the ways in which our interlocutors use their language(s). Speakers and listeners are individuals, like you and me: the Upanishads put it precisely the way I believe matters of “languages” should be put, with the remark that “It is not the language but the speaker that we want to understand.” It’s all about people, like you and me.

All cultures, as far as we know, have developed characteristic ways of harnessing human vocalisations and body movements as a means of nurturing commonality. This is what we came to call “song” and “dance”, respectively. Steven Mithen, in his book The Singing Neanderthals, draws on archaeological, neurological and other evidence to propose a unified account of The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, as in the subtitle of the book. More recently, Gustavo Arriaga, Eric P. Zhou and Erich D. Jarvis, in an article titled Of mice, birds, and men: The mouse ultrasonic song system has some features similar to humans and song-learning birds, report that fellow mammals share with us what we already knew we shared with songbirds, the ability to communicate through the use of learned vocalisations, which we fine-tune to match what we hear around us.

Falling in with other people cannot then be rocket science: even when simply strolling around with somebody else, we end up moving with a shared rhythm which makes everybody happy, because our heads bob in synchrony so that we can talk to one another easily. Cadences form a core part of our survival: breathing, chewing, sleeping, digesting, pumping blood through our bodies take place in cycles of natural tempos, amplitudes, frequencies, durations. Small wonder that our languages follow suit: facts are that we can’t open our mouths, in any language, without assigning tempos, amplitudes, frequencies, durations to the sounds we produce. In short, without prosody.

This is why linguistic prosodies are not just niceties, a waste of our precious executive learning time, cherries on cakes, and so on, even if we’ve never been told about these things in our language lessons. Even if we believe that this is irrelevant at preliminary Me-Tarzan-You-Jane stages of acquisition, and even if we believe that language learners must go through Me-Tarzan-You-Jane acquisitional stages, which is far from a universal truth.

“Me dance you?”

Image © 1966, NBC Television (Wikimedia Commons)

Even at this supposed learning stage, are you telling Jane your name and hers? Or are you asking, or repeating what Jane said, or are you expressing stupefaction at a sudden realisation that people can have such names, or names at all?

Prosody is so central to our languages that we felt the need to create, for them, meaningless carriers of meaningful prosodies, precisely because prosody is enough. Nearly thirty years ago, Melvin J. Luthy conducted a pioneering study on Nonnative speakers’ perception of English “nonlexical” intonation signals, which found that core American English-bound melodic signals were either missed or misinterpreted by newcomers to the language.

If you also happen to be a newcomer to American English, have a look at how Judy B. Gilbert implements listener-friendliness in the classroom, in her book (aptly!) titled Clear Speech. One of her teaching mottoes is that “Small chunks of language should be learned like little songs.” You can also watch a video of one of her presentations of her teaching method.

Next time, I’ll take back everything I’ve said in this post.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Secret languages. Wednesday 31^st October 2012.

Teaching *about* languages

What does it mean to say that you “know” a language? The English verb know can refer to different kinds of knowledge, two of which are especially relevant to matters of language and language learning.

One kind of knowledge, sometimes called procedural knowledge, involves know-how: you know how to tie your shoelaces, for example, because you’ve practised doing it over and over again, without necessarily being able to explain what is involved in shoelace-tying. The other, declarative knowledge, involves know-that: you may talk about what people do when they tie their shoelaces, without necessarily being able to do it yourself.

All of us have know-how knowledge of the languages that we need to use regularly, simply by using them regularly. In contrast, know-that knowledge about our languages, that is, awareness of the machinery which makes them work and of the technical terminology that describes it, comes through deliberate study. Knowing the latter kinds of things about languages is the job of linguists – or grammarians, which often amounts to pretty much the same. Linguists and grammarians may know, declaratively, that Portuguese has personal infinitives and double negatives, say, without knowing, procedurally, how to use them.

The issue is then what do learners mean, when they enrol in language courses because they want to “know” a new language. Some of them will be happy to acquire both kinds of knowledge of that language, which is fine: it’s a matter of choice and of learning preferences. But most, I suspect, will just want to be able to use the language. To me, choice and learning preferences are precisely the issue: I think it odd that imparting declarative knowledge of languages to learners has virtually become synonymous with language teaching across the board. You can read an account of the resilient confusion between linguistic know-how and linguistic know-that, among specialists and laypeople alike, in my paper ‘First language acquisition and teaching’, included in a collection titled Applied Folk Linguistics.

Assuming that language learners must learn the components and workings of their new languages is like assuming that in order to be able to use a mobile phone device you must learn what microprocessors, amplifiers and bandpass filters are, and what they do to make your phone work.

Teaching the grammar of a phone in order to teach how to use a phone?

Image © Techie111 (Wikimedia Commons)

Maybe this assumption explains why so many of us have come to see language learning as boring, difficult, useless, technical and “not for me”?

The belief that what language learners really want is to become linguists could have its roots in the perception that know-that knowledge is (more) easily testable: the learner ticks boxes for questions like “Is this an example of active or passive voice?” or “How many short rounded close front vowels do you hear in Example 26?”, or underlines the object complements in a couple of example sentences, to match the set answers in a marking key. Or it could be that knowledge of grammar has long enjoyed the reputation of enhancing intellectual abilities and thus promoting civilised (linguistic) behaviour. Deborah Cameron, in a piece titled ‘Fantasy Grammar’, adds to this the “collective cultural fantasy” which has conceptualised the teaching of grammar “as a way of inculcating the values grammar stands for – discipline, order and respect for the rules.” (Thank you for pointing me to this article, Sunita!)

Someone, in the classroom, must of course know about the language you’re being taught – and, if you’re lucky, also about your other languages. That will be your language teacher, who is trained to use this knowledge in order to help you make sense of your new language for your purposes. I nevertheless find it also odd that the specialist knowledge about language “properties” which is routinely taught to language teachers and, through them, to language learners, turns out to be a rather selective kind of knowledge. We do have to learn about plural umlauts, the passé composé and noun phrase concord affixes, but seldom, if at all, about what makes a spoken language a spoken language: its prosody, which remains a source of breakdowns in spoken communication, by all (specialist) accounts known to me ever since I first set out, many years ago, to investigate how and why this is so.

The next post will have something to say about how and why prosody is crucial for hassle-free language use.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Friendly speakers and friendly listeners. Saturday 20^th October 2012.

Unconnected speech?

Unconnected, yes. I wonder: what do we mean when we talk about *connected* speech? We must mean that there is at least one other kind of speech, which is not connected, so that it makes good sense to talk about its connectedness at all. But I would very much like to know who uses it, unless we’re perhaps talking about the so-called one-word stage in child language development, when spoken utterances appear to consist of single words, or expecting speech to and from interlocutors who look like this:

“Klaatu... barada... nikto...”

Image © The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951, via Wikipedia

Qualifying speech with the modifier connected also means that we somehow take “connected speech” as a special case of speech – or it wouldn’t need qualification by means of a dedicated adjective. This is the same kind of reasoning which identifies some people through the qualifier multilingual, thereby leaving it understood that there’s no need to identify in any special way whoever is not multilingual, because there’s nothing special about their lingualism. In the same way that monolingualism came to represent default lingualism, unconnected speech represents default speechiness. One language at a time is desirable linguistic behaviour, and so is one word at a time (whatever the word word might mean, incidentally, since nobody has ever come up with a satisfactory definition of what a “word” might be).

I wonder why. It could be that the only way we might hope to identify the words of a language is by looking at them (assuming, in turn, that we do know what “a language” might be, which is another big linguistic mystery). If you listen to a language you never heard before, chances are you’ll have serious trouble attempting to single out its words (assuming, in turn, that all spoken languages have words, which is yet another moot question). If you see a spoken language, you may have better luck. Printed representations of speech, for those languages which have them, may show spaces separating what in some of them we’ve come to call words. Others won’t, because speech and whatever we choose to call its components cannot be adequately represented in print. It’s like attempting to represent a landscape in speech. It’s like putting a girdle on things. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but pictures of words tell you very little about the thousand different ways they are pronounced, even for those languages which may share printed representations that you recognise.

Take my language students, who mostly come to me after years of traditional vocabulary + grammar language learning, where “vocabulary” means lists of words (for what “grammar” means here, see my next post). They keep insisting that speech forms like wanna and doesn’t, or j’sais pas and t’as vu, or fàchavor and tá bem, are “bad” language. They keep reminding me that even native speakers of their new languages tell them that they use their language “better”, because they learned it the “proper” all-words-in way, whereas natives tend to become “lazy” when speaking – more on which in a future post, too. And I might as well confess that some students thought better of having me as a teacher, given my tendency to attempt to wrestle pens and paper and books off their hands and concentrate on training speaking and listening. This for students who come to me because they, or their own language students, are unhappy about matters of intelligibility from and to users of their new languages.

I don’t blame them. In the textbooks that they were taught by, and taught to abide by, wannas and tá bens are either glossed over or treated in special chapters, whose titles include the phrase “connected speech” and which come after all the chapters dealing with speech forms which apparently need no special treatment and so must be the “real” speech forms. But how do you learn to understand and use a language by first spending chapters and years memorising and spelling out citation forms of visually unconnected words? To me, the disconnect between language teaching and language use is the problem: not that you say things like gonna and you’d and perhaps write them too, but that so many learners are not told that people say and write these things because this is how people speak their languages.

Next time, as promised, I’ll deal (sorry, I mean I will deal) with the “grammar” part of the traditional vocabulary + grammar language teaching methods.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Teaching *about* languages. Wednesday 10^th October 2012.

Vocal versatility and vocal fossilisation

Vocal versatility, described as the ability to make your vocal tract do whatever you want it to do, is usually discussed in connection with professional voice users. In contrast, vocal fossilisation, described as the inability to make your vocal tract move beyond what you’ve grown used to move it for, is usually discussed in connection with language learners. This makes it sound like vocal tract users neatly divide into distinct subspecies, skilled and unskilled, respectively. The point I wish to make here is that vocal versatility and vocal fossilisation are related, because as far as vocal uses are concerned, we’re all pros.

The first observation is that we all come equipped with the same vocal tract model. Since all languages are equally difficult to pronounce – or equally easy, if your outlook on life tends towards optimism – because each language has a signature sound to it, the second observation is that the way we sound relates to the uses to which we put our vocal equipment, rather than to the equipment itself. In the literature on language learning, the (mortifying) label fossilisation stands for ‘routine vocal behaviours’. From learners, as said. For some reason, the word doesn’t apply to petrified accent models that the corporate textbook industry continues churning out, as I’ve argued before.

Routine behaviours are automated and taken for granted to such a degree that you come to believe that they cannot be characterised as specific behaviours at all, and so that there is nothing that can be changed about them because they’ve never changed, as far as you can remember. But fossilised behaviours, vocal or otherwise, are in fact acquired behaviours. For language learning, the issue is then to identify the steps through which we all learned to condition our natural vocal versatility in order to sound proficiently fossilised in at least one language. We could also call this the ways in which we learned to speak with intelligible accents.

Let me try to explain what I mean with an analogy: dancing.

Image © Tannon Weber (Wikimedia Commons)

Getting our steps right involves training muscles and coordinating their movements to match specific rhythms. There is a very similar choreography going on in our vocal tract whenever we speak and, like actors and opera singers, we learners need a choreographer, whom we could also call our language teacher, to help us get our vocal movements right. Teaching you how to get things right doesn’t mean teaching you the technical jargon used to describe vocal tract actions, which is familiar to language teachers. You don’t need to know a third conditional by name either, in order to use it appropriately – an issue that I’ll address some other time. Teaching you means making you aware of what you do and what you can do, when you speak those languages you’re comfortable speaking, so that you become aware of what you need to do, in order to sound the way you want to sound in your new languages: you’ll need “a guided tour of your vocal tract”, and you can treat yourself to a preview of what this feels like in Chapter 5 of my book The Language of Language.

As with dancing lessons, the age at which you start your vocal training programme is irrelevant, and so is the alleged brain shutdown which is allegedly restricted to language learning. Learning means instructing your brain to work in ways that it hasn’t worked before. With competent guidance, and lots, and lots, and lots of practice, your brain will follow suit because that’s what brains do. One day you’ll wake up in the morning to find out that your vocal tract remembers things that you don’t remember teaching it to do, and that you had no idea it could do. But it could do them.

The training of your vocal skills through awareness of your vocal skills is routinely available to professional voice users. But unlike these professionals, who only need to give the impression that they can speak the languages that they’re speaking onstage, we amateurs learn languages because we need to speak them in real life. This is also why we need real-life guides to assist us in our learning: if we learn to samba and to speak from printed images, we’ll samba and speak like printed images.

The next post deals with a strange conception which, to my mind, could only have become a standard conception in matters of language teaching and learning if one assumes that language teaching and language learning proceed, by default, through printed materials.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Unconnected speech? Saturday 29^th September 2012.

Vocal intelligibility

Making yourself intelligible involves awareness that you may not be intelligible, just like making yourself presentable involves awareness that you may not be presentable. This kind of awareness arises from exposure to different people and different situations, that is, from exposure to different intelligibilities.

As children, we develop our linguistic skills largely unaware that we are making ourselves intelligible, in the sense that we would not be able to explain what we are doing in so many words (there is a very significant difference between what you do and awareness of what you do, whether you’re using a mobile phone or speaking a language, more on which in a coming post). Nevertheless, monitoring and constructing intelligibility is exactly what typical language acquisition involves: we progressively learn to attune our inbuilt speech production and speech reception equipment (our vocal tracts and our ears) to uses which satisfy the speech reception and speech production counterparts, respectively, of those around us.

The key factor here, to me, is “those around us”. When children eventually end up sounding like those around them, that is, when they end up making everyday linguistic sense to and from those around them, their acquisition process is deemed complete (or “perfect”, as some analysts might prefer). It seems to me that the same applies to language learners across the board, because you learn a language in order to use it, and using a language means making it work for and with those around you. Barring disorder, we are all intelligible to someone and someone is intelligible to us, which means that intelligibility is not a feature of the speaker, or of the listener, but of what both end up negotiating in order to make sense. Just like there are no “ideal” speakers, there are no “ideal” listeners either – something to which I’ll come back soon too.

Intelligibility is also a feature of the here and now, because speaking and listening are bound by real-life settings, in place and time. One of my multilingual friends, who uses English for work-related purposes, has developed fluent understanding of Texan English from his Texan business partners. But only in one-to-one situations. When two (or more) Texans meet in his presence, all hell breaks loose, as he describes it – and not just because they eventually start talking about football (N.B.: not “soccer”) teams and other Texan entities unknown to him. Besides their vocabulary, they also change their accent and their overall ways of expressing themselves in English. They do this not because they want to exclude my friend (though some of us may sometimes deliberately want to adopt similar strategies for this purpose), but because it’s only natural to switch among the different ways of making ourselves intelligible that we’ve learnt to navigate along our lives. We all do this, we all can do this – if we so wish. Perhaps monolingual speakers, of English and other languages, will have similar stories to share?

My friend could also learn to understand and produce Texan in-house vocal ways – if he so wished. Users’ wishes are the reason why I believe that sticking to the one-standard-fits-all policies which go on guiding production of traditional language teaching materials makes little sense. I’m not saying that we should strive to prepare as many teaching materials as there are varieties of languages: this is as unrealistic a goal as attempting to make sense of multilingualism through cumulative descriptions of the number and the combinations of particular languages involved in each multilingual setting, as I noted before. I’m saying that textbook standards are best used as guidelines for what learners actually need. In some cases, the book-prescribed accent may match the learners’ needs. In other cases, learners may end up becoming unintelligible, for their purposes, precisely because they were trained to reproduce intelligibility in varieties of their new languages which fail to serve the reasons why they decided to learn a new language in the first place. And maybe this is one of the reasons why so many of us routinely get bad press about our “non-native” uses: maybe we’re just being differently native?

Since there are no ideal language users, there can be no ideal language uses either, unless by “ideal” we mean ‘flexible’: accommodation to accent variability is the key to intelligible speech production and perception, as I’ve argued in a paper titled ‘Multilingual accents’. So why not start in the classroom, because we have to start somewhere and because classrooms are where this whole business of language learning starts for so many of us? The next post has some more to say about this.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Vocal versatility and vocal fossilisation. Wednesday 19^th September 2012.

Teaching to the standard

Language courses are routinely identified by the name of the languages that they claim to teach you. Things like Advanced Course in Turkish or Learn Swahili in Three Weeks are common sights on textbook covers and internet sites.

We learners might then be excused for thinking that we are learning a language, when what we are in fact presented with is one particular variety of that language. What we call “languages” are about as invariant as what we call “human beings”, so course creators and sellers might in turn be excused for omitting mention of which variety their creations and products reflect. But we language learners might think it courteous, to say the least, to be informed about what exactly is contained in what we’re consuming, just like we also prefer to know what exactly is contained in that appealing chocolate bar at the convenience shop.

Chocolate bar standards, however, arise from bottom-up preferences dictated by consumer markets, whereas language standards differ in two respects: they are dictated top-down and they serve offer rather than demand. Language course contents do not stem from a belief that everyone will be equally well-served by the standard language varieties on standard offer either: rather, it simply is unprofitable, for writers and publishers, to provide language materials which are tailor-made to learners’ needs or, for schools, to change textbook adoption policies, which routinely involve the use of (read ‘being stuck with’) the same materials for several years, precisely because shorter-term adoption contracts are too expensive.

The limited offer geared to user needs in language teaching matches the limited offer in speech-language diagnostic and assessment tools, for monolinguals and multilinguals alike. Like speech-language therapists, language teachers may find themselves required (read ‘forced’) to work with language varieties which they themselves do not use outside of professional duties, and to assess them against standards which in addition may not serve their clients either.

I can give one example. Many years ago, I attended a French summer course in Pau, in the French Pyrénées-Atlantiques. There I met a few other Portuguese students, who spoke a different Portuguese dialect from mine. In particular, we pronounced our so-called “rolled-r” differently, as in the ‘rr’ spelling of my surname. Mine is a uvular articulation, at the back of the soft palate, theirs was an alveolar one, at the upper gum ridge, and we used our respective r’s in our French too, as we had done ever since we first learned to speak French. We soon found out, however, that by doing so I was being a good student, whereas they weren’t “putting in the required effort”. I wondered what kind of “effort” I was giving evidence of, since all of us were doing exactly the same thing, speaking French as we always had. The issue was that my French ‘r’ happened to match the standard Parisian one which was required as proof of “good” command of the language. The irony of it all was that their ‘r’ matched the mainstream Béarnais French accent, which was the one we heard around us.

Being required to learn a standard variety of a language is not an issue in itself: whatever the variety or varieties of our language(s) that we use outside of official circles, we all need to learn to navigate (some) standard of those languages. But it wouldn’t hurt to also learn that languages come in many standards, and that what people sometimes call “the” standard is just one of them.

I can’t remember whether our teachers at the French course spoke in their own accents or in the “good” one with one another and with us students, outside of the classroom – probably because everyone understood everyone else, when we were using the language to talk rather than to demonstrate classroom-bound linguistic skills, an issue I’ll come back to some other day. But I was constantly reminded of this episode in my later language teaching career, when, as a beginner teacher, I took it as my duty to comply with unwieldy textbooks and assessment materials on offer, and equally unwieldy students who, because they’d been brainwashed about “good” uses of language being “the” language, were persuaded that, say, Standard Lisbonese (or whatever you choose to call it) and Parisian French were in use, or should be, in places like Luanda and Liège, respectively, to where they were relocating after completing their language courses with me. 

The issue has nothing to do with murky concepts like “nativeness”. Béarnais accents are as native as Parisian ones, which makes one wonder what (certain) people might have in mind when they say that “competent” language learning means emulation of “native” proficiency. The issue has nothing to do with linguistic competence or intelligibility either – unless we wish to argue that native Béarnais French speakers should also put in some “effort” in order to sound “good”. The issue is, to me, a non-issue, because it stems, yet again, from an ingrained confusion about what terms like good, standard, competent, native, intelligible, and so on, might mean. The next couple of posts deal with these matters.

© MCF 2012

Next post: “Good”, “standard”, and other intriguing language qualifiers. Wednesday 29^th August 2012.

Being multilingual in a single language?

Multilingualism in a single language – why not? I, for one, see no difference between saying Olá! vs. Hi! in what are said to be different languages, and saying Olá! vs. Ôi! in what is said to be the same language.

Let me explain. When Brazilian telenovelas first reached Portugal, we Portuguese found ourselves wishing they had come with subtitles. It wasn’t just the words, the rhythms and the intonations of the different varieties of Brazilian Portuguese portrayed in the episodes that were alien to us, it was the body language too, through which we tried to make sense of unintelligible lines. Things got better, in time, but only in time. With our eyes glued to the screen, we practised our daily listening to make intelligibility happen.

Several years later, I moved to Britain, where I came to have my first regular contact with Brazilians. One evening, I was watching a thriller on TV with one of my Brazilian friends. The good guy was leisurely making his way home, where we knew, but he didn’t, that horrid bad guys were waiting to do horrid things to him. I had to express out loud my jitters about the hero’s predicament, and the following drama took place in our room:

Act I

Me, the native speaker of Portuguese: Este tipo vai-se meter num sarilho...

My friend, the native speaker of Portuguese: Quê!?

[Interlude, while these two lines were repeated in measured and louder tones, with zero effect on intelligibility, until I decided to translate what I had said into (non-native) English.]

Act II

My friend: Ah! Esse cara vai entrar numa fria!

Me: Quê!?

Both my first line and my friend’s last one mean, roughly, ‘This guy is done for’ (in some varieties of English, perhaps?) – and I probably don’t need to explain what Quê and Ah mean. The bottom line is that we were both glad that we could resort to (English) subtitles, as it were, to make sense of our respective foreign Portugueses.

Even if you don’t understand Portuguese, cursory visual inspection of the two lines in question shows that we were speaking two different languages. This is why my Brazilian friends and me had huge amounts of fun making fun of our funny cross-Atlantic accents, turns of phrase and gestural habits, and accusing one another of “speaking like my grandmother” (this is a mild insult, by the way, in both versions of our language), which shows that historically-marked uses of language feature in both geographic and generational varieties. Daily practice ended up improving mutual intelligibility here too, but we remained, as George Bernard Shaw said of England and America, divided by a common language. I had more in common with the British, with whom I shared cultural traits, than with the Brazilians, with whom I shared a language. My friends felt the same about themselves and the Americans, as opposed to me. Maybe the labels Old World and New World are there for a reason.

The question is, then, why did we all call what we were speaking “Portuguese”? The reason we go on saying that we share a “common language” must be a matter of habit, drilled into us by whoever was drilled, in turn, to say so. A matter of political convenience (and probably correctness too), in other words. Politics in fact holds the clue to what defines a language: the sociolinguist Max Weinreich is credited with popularising the criterion which hits the nail on the head, when he quipped that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. What we call “a language” can no more be defined linguistically than what we call “a nation” can be defined geographically. Which also explains the urge of creators of new nations to decide which “national language(s)” to institutionalise.

Mutual intelligibility is sometimes used as the touchstone of language distinctiveness, in the sense that if I understand you, then we’re using the same language, and if I don’t, then we’re not. Questions arise here too, besides the ones illustrated in Acts I and II above. I may understand you, but you may not understand me, so where do we draw intelligible boundaries, and for whom? One of the reasons I found myself learning Spanish from my Spanish-speaking friends (in Britain too) was that they didn’t understand my Portuguese, whereas their American Spanishes were crystal-clear to me – although I can’t say the same of several European Spanishes.

Many of us become multi-dialectal in our language(s) the way I did – if that’s the right word to call it by. I learned when to talk about caras and frias instead of tipos and sarilhos, in Portuguese; I learned, in Britain, to say crisps for what my school textbooks said were chips, because chips are what you eat there with newspaper-wrapped fish, not what comes on its own in plastic bags; I learned, in Singapore, that you on and off the aircon; and, whenever I’m back in Portugal relaxing in lingua-franca-English among local and foreign friends, I do my best to avoid Britishisms and Singaporeanisms in my English vocabularies, grammars and accents.

Many of us grow up multi-dialectal too, perhaps in less fun-filled ways: monolingual children don’t always have it easy sorting themselves out in what adults call their language, in the singular. I turn to this matter next.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Little multi-dialectals. Wednesday 30^th May 2012.

Language “integrity”

Deciding what a language is has never been easy, although we go on talking about languages as if we knew what they are. This is partly because we’ve become habituated to having language names used all around us, but mostly because we’ve become inured to the fact that names serve as convenient labels to help us talk about imaginary and abstract concepts, among other things. We can also talk about unicorns and hypotenuses, for example.

Labels like Arabic or Kimbundu do not designate ‘objects’: they are a handy notation to refer to ways of using language which are each found to be intelligible to other language users. The criterion of cross-(un)intelligibility is regularly invoked as an equally handy way of attempting to define one particular language as opposed to another – more on which in a coming post. Let me just add two things here: in some cases, the name we use for a language in fact refers to its printed form, for example when we talk about “the Chinese language”; and in many other cases, language names have become indistinguishable from nationality names, which further complicates the matter of defining what “a language” is.

If we can’t pinpoint language boundaries in any precise way, it then makes little sense to say that languages can suffer injury to their integrity. We nevertheless go on talking about languages as if they owned territorial rights to what can be done with them. Difficulties in delimiting languages relate to both historical and geographical factors. Whether in monolingual or multilingual communities, grandparents and grandchildren, say, or African and Asian users of the “same” language don’t use it in the same way. There are virtually as many ways of using each of these abstract entities called “languages” as there are individuals – sociolinguists even devised a label for this observation, idiolect. This is one of the reasons why no one has ever produced a “full” grammar of any language, and this is the reason for the scare quotes in the title of this post.

Whatever we use, we necessarily change, because using things means making them ours, so they can serve our needs. “Things” like languages are no exception. For sequential multilinguals, for example, those of us who learn our languages at different times in life, one common observation in the literature is that our earlier language(s) affect the way in which we use our later one(s). This has been called “first language interference”, and means that we use our younger languages in ways that remind of our use of our older ones (for reasons why this may be so, regardless of learning order, see a previous post).

But research shows that the converse is also true. The Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen provided us with the first comprehensive report of how a later language (English) interfered with an earlier one (Norwegian), in his 1953 book The Norwegian Language in America. A Study in Bilingual Behavior. More recently, and particularly concerning accent, two other studies reported similar findings. In an article titled Gestural drift in a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and English, Michele L. Sancier and Carol A. Fowler observed interference from English in the production of consonants of a native Portuguese-speaking adult learner. My own report on my children’s learning of English, a language which they acquired in school, Prosodic mixes: strategies in multilingual language acquisition, showed use of English prosody in their home languages.

Given these observations, it may make better sense to conclude that using our languages cannot threaten their “integrity”. Speaking in metaphors about abstract entities (like saying that “languages affect languages”) is just that, speaking in metaphors about abstract entities. In an earlier publication, The analysis of linguistic borrowing (1950), Haugen also reacted to the unhelpful use of such imagery. Discussing shortcomings in the metaphorical use of the word mixes to describe what multilinguals do with their languages, he had this to say:

“A further inaccuracy is introduced if the resulting language is called ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’. It implies that there are other languages which are ‘pure’, but these are scarcely any more observable than a ‘pure race’ in ethnology.”

Using our languages is what we are supposed to do with them. We decide. In the introductory chapter to my book Multilingual Norms, I argue that multilingualism is not about what we do to the languages, it’s about what we do with them. If you want to read more about this, you can download the full chapter, titled Multilingualism, language norms and multilingual contexts. 

But doing things with languages is surely true of monolingualism too. Next time, I’ll have a look at why we associate threats to the “integrity” of particular languages more with multilingual than with monolingual users of them.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Being multilingual in a single language? Saturday 19^th May 2012.

The languages of multilinguals

When Western monolingual researchers came to realise that some of us went about not being monolingual, they surmised that having two languages to deal with was more than enough. That two languages would cause enough damage, that is. The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, for example, had the following to say in his 1922 book Language. Its Nature, Development and Origin:

“It is, of course, an advantage for a child to be familiar with two languages but without doubt the advantage may be, and generally is, purchased too dear. First of all the child in question hardly learns either of the two languages as perfectly as he would have done if he had limited himself to one. [...] Secondly, the brain effort required to master the two languages instead of one certainly diminishes the child’s power of learning other things which might and ought to be learnt.”

One of the interesting lessons to take home from this observation is that Jespersen was multilingual himself. He lived in Britain and he wrote extensively about English, among other languages that he was familiar with. But he left no hint that his dismal views about multilingualism held for what his own multilingualism did to him: becoming a multilingual may well have persuaded him that doing so in later years was either not damaging, or less damaging than doing so in early childhood, contrary to current mainstream persuasions. So much for mainstream persuasions, in other words.

Both of Jespersen’s points above find relevance still today. I have discussed the second one, about our brain being there to limit us, in a previous post, so I’ll deal here and in my next post with his first point, about our languages being there to limit us too.

The thought that having two languages may be just about enough endures in current terminology. The prefix bi- in the word bilingualism and its cognates often means, literally, ‘two’ – although these words are as often used to mean ‘more than one’, sometimes with no indication of which meaning is intended. Learning a new language is likewise said to be a matter of second language acquisition, with dedicated acronym, SLA, and all. The idea seems to be that the number of languages in one’s repertoire matters, judging by recent queries that have reached me, from private people and media corporations, about whether findings about bilingualism (where bi- means ‘two’) can, should, or must be extended to tri-, quadri-, penta- or, generalising, n-lingualism.

The idea seems also to be that the order in which you learn your languages matters too. You may well be a (relevantly) different multilingual if you learn Amharic before Icelandic, rather than vice versa, or if you learn both these languages simultaneously, in addition to another language you had before. And so on. This is probably why multilingualism is often described as a “complex phenomenon”. No wonder: we just have to imagine the (roughly) 7,000 languages we believe we have identified in all possible bi-, tri-, and so on combinations, plus whether they’re first language(s), second or third, and so on, plus whether they’re learned simultaneously or sequentially, and so on, to see what the word “complex” is meant to mean. We can also predict that this way of approaching multilingualism is likely to spawn brisk research for n number of years. But I wonder: why don’t we say that monolingualism, in the same (roughly) 7,000 languages, is also “complex”? Why is a monolingual a monolingual, regardless of the particular languages they are monolingual in, whereas multilinguals are all different multilinguals because of the particular languages they are multilingual in? Surely a Portuguese monolingual is a different monolingual from a Swedish monolingual, by the same token. I wonder why different monolingualisms are less worthy of curiosity than different multilingualisms.

The idea, in short, is that the languages of multilinguals are what matters. Jespersen thought so too. His twin concerns mirror today’s concerns: one, what multilingualism does to the languages; and two, what multilingualism does to you. What the language user does is nowhere in sight. I’ll try to work out next time why we came to think of multilingualism in this way.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Language “integrity”. Wednesday 9^th May 2012.

Languages lost and languages regained

Healthy individuals may lose hold of their languages, a process that is sometimes called language loss, or language attrition – which is not the same, by the way, as so-called language death.

We may lose our languages for a number of reasons, including perceived lack of prestige of a particular language, or lack of (willing) users of it around us, all of them having the lack bit in common: lack of use. I mean “use” in the sense of meaningful use. Talking about a single vs. several brown cows in order to introduce the grammatical concepts of singular vs. plural, for example, or about the same ruminants jumping over the moon in order to introduce prepositions is not meaningful, so the languages that we learn in school as “language subjects” don’t count for what I want to say here. Languages learned in this way cannot be lost, because they were never acquired: they are lost from the beginning.

I’ve talked before about how children may lose their languages because of less than ideal input conditions. Let me add here a couple of additional factors. One of them is that multilingual families may live in places where none of the parents’ languages are used, like my family did as the children were growing up. In our case, mum and dad were the only input providers. In our sporadic visits to our respective home countries, our children used to gape in incredulity at their realisation that Swedish and Portuguese could after all be spoken by “everybody” around them, as they put it.

One other factor is that parents use, well, parental-kind of language, and therefore dated language – which is true of any cross-generational uses of language, whether each generation uses one language or more than one. In my family, we parents had as little contact with child users of Portuguese and Swedish as our children did, so none of us had any idea about what the trendy youth-speak of the day was. Our children, whose peer-nurturing in their home languages was proceeding exclusively through home-made cross-pollination, learned about it the hard way, through scoffs and guffaws from visiting and visited peers at the “aaancient!!!” metaphors, idioms and turns of phrase that they had inherited from us. Chapter 9, ‘A new language: intruder or guest?’ in my book Three is a Crowd? reports in detail about this. If you read Swedish, have a look also at Lena Normén-Younger’s post on a related topic, Vad gör Du när någon skrattar åt dina barns svenska? (‘What do you do when someone laughs at your children’s Swedish?’).

Children, however, may have the good excuse that they are still learning their languages and that, in time, they’ll get over whatever linguistic glitches they’re stumbling over. What to say, then, of fully grown-up individuals who give similar signs of dwindling language skills? It happened to me, for one. Given the away-from-home-country kind of globe-trotting which characterises my family, both of us parents were naturally unaware of trendy adult-speak in our respective languages too. What we heard and read, back in Sweden and Portugal, on radio, TV, newspapers and all around us, at times struck us more like foreign-speak than native-speak. My case was compounded by being a stay-at-home mum while the children were being born, which meant that my Portuguese ended up fluent in baby-speak only, for a significant number of years. I literally lost the ability to construct complex things like full sentences, for example, or to avoid using jingly language peppered with diminutives and/or augmentatives.

I was, in short, using my supposedly “native language” like an imbecile, and I didn’t know I was. I do know one thing now: I wouldn’t have wanted to have my Portuguese language skills clinically assessed at that time, as little as I would have thought it fair to have my children’s linguistic proficiency assessed through a single language, either Swedish or Portuguese, as they were growing up. All four of us were using our languages inappropriately for our ages.

We got over it, all of us, to regain our languages whenever we got the chance to use them beyond the restricted contexts to which they had been limited. To me, observations such as these are evidence of two things. First, that the process of learning to use your languages goes on throughout life. Languages remain alive if the uses that they serve remain so too. And second, that your languages will be more or less well-oiled at different times in your life. Languages come and go as and when we need them to do so.

Nevertheless, like my children, I was also judged (and laughed at...) by my peers on account of my linguistic inadequacy. The way we express ourselves through our languages seems indeed to count as a reliable gauge of what we are. I’ll leave this matter for my next post.

© MCF 2012

Next post: You speak so, therefore you are so. Saturday 17^th March 2012.

Speaking like mummy, and speaking like daddy

Being a good child can sometimes have its drawbacks. My children were good children (still are), who readily followed suit on our home-made OPOLicy, whereby Portuguese and Swedish are mum’s and dad’s default languages, respectively, to be used if there is no reason to use another language.

During the children’s first few years, these were the other ingredients to the language-use recipe that I would like to discuss in this post:

1. I was a stay-at-home parent. Mum and dad therefore chose to speak Swedish to each other when the children were around, to compensate for the children’s greater daily exposure to Portuguese;
2. In those years, Portuguese was the children’s sibling language;
3. The children had only very sporadic contact with other speakers of their (then) two languages, because we kept moving from and to countries where these languages were not used;
4. The children are, in order of appearance, two girls and one boy.

Because the children were good and because there was nothing amiss with their linguistic development, they naturally spoke Portuguese and Swedish like mum and dad, respectively. That they would do so was predictable, of course, in hindsight. But hindsight is hindsight because you miss the sight when the sight is in plain sight: we parents didn’t predict anything of the kind. Whatever linguistic habits we noticed in our children’s speech were good habits, because the children were speaking our languages and that was all that mattered.

Those users of our languages with whom the children had on-and-off contact, however, did notice a number of things. Namely, the children’s replication, in their speech, of the parents’ respective male and female identities, evident through the parents’ linguistic behaviour. Dad spoke boy-Swedish and mum spoke girl-Portuguese, so we had all three children using female Portuguese and male Swedish, each version of the languages complete with vocabulary, grammatical devices, expletives and prosody. A previous post mentions a forerunner to these language uses by the children, also out of sight at the time.

Here’s one example of what was going on. Both Swedish and Portuguese are gendered languages, where noun words fall into distinct categories which are characterised by grammatical features both of the nouns themselves, and of the words which pattern with them, e.g. adjectives. With Swedish adjectives, we use the same gender for males and females, whereas in Portuguese we use one of the two genders of the language for males, and the other one for females. If a Swedish-speaking child says Jag är snabbt for Jag är snabb (‘I’m fast’), the child is making a grammatical mistake, by using the wrong gender on the adjective. If a Portuguese-speaking boy says of himself that he is rápida for rápido (‘fast’), by using the female-bound gender for the male-bound one on the adjective, he’s projecting a mismatched identity. The thought that he’s (also) making a similar grammatical mistake comes second.

My children had other baffling encounters with gender. We were once cosily watching our brand new animated video of The Little Mermaid, dubbed in Portuguese, and all went hunky-dory until Ursula the octopus made his/her/its appearance. The Portuguese word for ‘octopus’, polvo, well known to the children, belongs to the masculine gender, so its association with a clearly female character resulted in hasty pausing of the viewing delight, to initiate a lively Q+A session about things like (un)sexed beings, (un)gendered languages and, not least, the sex of octopuses and of people named Ursula.

More Q than A, actually. It’s not easy to explain these things, or to attempt to correct child uses of them, in child-digestible language. What do you say? “You are a boy, so you should say that you are rápido, not rápida” or “You are a girl, so stop using dad’s tones of voice”? Talking about language doesn’t make sense to children – and doesn’t make anyone learn how to use a language. To me, my children’s uses became plain evidence that you crack a language through real-life input from real-life people. Our boy had no male-Portuguese models available to him at the time, surrounded as he was by all-female users of the language, and conversely for our girls’ Swedish. In case you’re wondering about what I say in point 1 above, the answer is yes: I also spoke Swedish like dad, at the time.

My children’s budding uses of their languages also made clear, to me, the importance of taking into account a child’s language-learning conditions, where school or clinical assessment becomes relevant. We all tend to judge people by their uses of language, taking those uses as a faithful reflection of what people are, or are developing into, an issue that I will come back to some other day. Inadequate uses of language, however, may well reflect inadequate input, instead of developmental or learning deficiencies.

Speaking of which, if you think that children hold the copyright to glitches, false starts and dead-ends on the road to multilingualism, the next post may have some news for you.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Parental adventures in Multilingual-Land. Wednesday 15^th February 2012.