Translators and multilinguals

“You speak so many languages! You should be a translator.” 

 

“What do you mean you can’t translate this memo into English? You speak both languages, don’t you?”

“I don’t speak your other language, I’m afraid. Can you translate what your child is saying, so I can assess her language development?”

Sounds familiar?

There seems to be this deeply ingrained conviction that the words multilingual and translator are synonymous. This is like assuming that those of us who intone ‘La donna è mobile’ while scrubbing our backs in the shower are professional singers, which is quite funny. Translators are indeed professionals, but being multilingual is not a job description.

The reasoning that multilinguals are translators because translators are multilinguals would be just laughable, too, but for the common practices which derive from it. Some of these may be rather harmless, like encouraging multilinguals to choose jobs because they are multilinguals, as in my first example above. Do monolinguals choose their careers because they use one language? The reasoning draws on two misconceptions, one about translators and one about multilinguals.

Translators aren’t people who can say the same things in different languages, and multilinguals aren’t multi-monolinguals who use their languages in order to be able to repeat themselves in them. Languages, whatever they may be, aren’t different containers into which the “same things” can be poured. If they were, we wouldn’t need borrowings, for example, and translators wouldn’t need dedicated training to do their job. Assuming that they don’t explains my second example. Chapters 1, 2 and 12 of my book The Language of Language have some more about why such misconceptions about multilingualism and translation came to be.

Multilinguals use different languages because those languages serve different purposes, but translations make one language serve the purposes of another. This is also why I don’t think that translation is a useful method of learning a new language.

Image © Tsunajima Kamekichi (Wikimedia Commons)

My objections relate to my persuasion that learning languages must mean learning to think in them (or we wouldn’t need to learn them), whereas translation teaches you to manage one language through another. I made this point in an online discussion on this topic, at the academic site ResearchGate. What I didn’t say there was that I’ve never forgotten the pleasure I felt when I first dared to buy monolingual dictionaries of the languages I was learning in school, and found that just reading those dictionaries as you might read a novel taught me more about how to use the languages than I had ever learned before.

Ability to translate demands a degree of awareness of each of the languages involved that multilinguals simply do not posses, as multilinguals. This applies to interpreters too, of course. The main differences between the two concern mode and timing: translators usually deal with printed texts and may be lucky enough to take time to enjoy a nice cuppa once in a while when inspiration lags, whereas interpreters, sometimes called simultaneous translators, usually translate speech or sign on the spot. I happen to have worked as both but, when off-duty, I’m quite like my fellow multilinguals in often having no idea even which language(s) I’m using at any one time.

My third example above illustrates an unfortunate practice in school and in clinic. Relatives (or friends, or neighbours) are co-opted to assist in assessment processes for which they obviously lack qualification, just because they know the language of the child under assessment. It’s like asking common mortals to take screwdrivers and soldering irons to the innards of their laptop, just because they use it every day. My example is actually mild, because children are also asked to translate for the sake of their elders. These two blog posts, authored by speech-language experts, say it all, concerning the effects of translation on assessment procedures and instruments: Brian A. Goldstein’s ‘Providing clinical services to bilingual children: Stop Doing That!’ and Elizabeth D. Peña’s aptly titled ‘Stupid translation’. It is true that little and big multilinguals do translate spontaneously, when they suspect that misunderstandings may arise among users of their languages. But this is much like 7-year-old big sister explaining to baby brother that mum came home in a rotten mood today and it is therefore advisable to tone down the usual level of mum-is-home mischief: we want people to understand what’s going on. Big sister is not a cognitive scientist for that.

Sisterly efforts to generate intelligibility by means of assorted translations must be a good thing: human beings have spent quite a lot of their time as human beings translating their languages for the benefit of fellow human beings. Sometimes, however, it’s not entirely clear whether the purported ability of multilinguals to translate makes them good guys or bad guys. If you can make sense of unfamiliar (linguistic) behaviour, then you must be privy to someone else’s secrets, which makes you not-really-one-of-us. Multilinguals who confess their inability (or unwillingness) to translate may, in addition, seem reluctant to share those secrets with “us”, as my second example illustrates. This may well be why multilinguals appear to have the status of permanent guests in all of their linguistic communities: I often get the uncanny impression that the Traduttore, tradittore quip, which is meant to apply to “disloyalty” to languages, keeps clinging to the multilingual users of those languages and applying to people.

How “disloyal” to whom, then, are those of us who insist that being multilingual means precisely that, being multilingual? The next post, by a guest with whom I’ve had the privilege of working before, argues that a lucid understanding of multilingualism has yet to impact decisions about language education policies.

© MCF 2014

Next post: =Guest post= Mother tongue education or flexible multilingual education?, by Jean-Jacques Weber. Saturday 28^th June 2014.

Children speak child-speak

               
            Me: Children speak child-speak, you know?

            Possibly you: Duh!?

            Possibly you: Of course they do!

            Possibly you: Hellooo (singsong), they’re *children*... (ditto)

            etc.

If your reaction to the title of this post matches one of these (possible) responses to it, I’m with you all the way. But do read on, by all means. I’m not going to tell you that children speak child-speak, I’m going to tell you about those of us who appear to believe that children don’t. And I won’t be telling you only about your average, averagely misinformed layperson, either.

The first time I realised that something must be very wrong with academic treatments of child multilingualism was back in the 1980s, when the literature about “translation equivalents” was making headlines. Briefly, proponents of multilingual equivalence had it that children being raised multilingually should either provide evidence that they had acquired words for the same things in all of their languages, or forfeit their right to be (called) multilingual. Being multilingual was then viewed as being what I call multi-monolingual: multilingual children are just like monolingual children, only several times over. Implicitly, the claim was that multilingual adults must also be multi-monolingual, on the understanding that children don’t typically remain children all their lives.

If you’re shaking your head in benevolent disbelief at how this kind of nonsense could ever have made headlines, then don’t. Not just because nonsense about multilingualism keeps making headlines, but principally because this claim appears to have resurfaced lately: one announcement of a meeting on multilingualism, dating from only a few weeks ago, states that “early bilingualism often result[s] in perfect parallel proficiency”. Note: perfect, parallel, proficiency. I doubt it that the convenors’ choice of words was a simple tribute to alliteration. But I do wonder what these words mean, in isolation and in collocation, and I would love to know about the evidence supporting this statement.

My first publication explaining that perfect parallel translation equivalence proficiency can’t make multilingual sense also explained why. The data came from my own children, then only two of them, and then users of only Portuguese and Swedish. At the one-word stage, the children started using the “wrong” language with us, parents. Or rather, they started using the same language with both parents, in words like, for example, Swedish där (‘there’) or Portuguese dá (‘gimme’), and I wanted to know why.

On preliminary inspection, the observation was that “translation equivalents” of these words in their other language were way beyond babies’ articulatory abilities, e.g. Portuguese ali or Swedish får jag. I concluded that the children’s “vocal tracts were, at the time, not mature enough to pronounce the respective translations in each language, which are phonologically more elaborate.” Child speech doesn’t reflect adult articulatory sophistication.

On closer inspection, the children turned out to use different intonations with each of the words that they so “mixed”. In fact, they used different prosodies altogether with each parent, and they did so in their babbling. I understood their use of prosody as a means of differentiating between the otherwise very similar syllables/words that they were able to pronounce, like Swedish där or Portuguese dá. The children were signalling, through intonation, rhythm, and stress, that they were speaking different languages, and that they were doing so with the “right” parent. So I wondered: should we also look for “equivalents” of intonation across languages, as evidence of “perfect parallel proficiency”? Where can we find such equivalents? And if we can’t find them (we can’t), does this mean that multilingual children who do this (my children are not the only ones) are not multilingual after all, and are instead “confused”, because they’re using the “wrong/right” words with the “right/wrong” parent?

We may want to rethink what we mean when we talk about using “words”, and we may want to rethink what being multilingual means. It’s not the children’s fault that adult expectations shape the way we see and hear our little ones. My children were using both of their languages, and they were differentiating their use of both. Not by replicating adult uses of these languages, not in ways that adults believe languages “should” be used, and not in baby ways of doing adult things: they were doing baby things the baby way. If you’re keen to read a detailed account of (all three) children’s strategies to sort out their (three) languages, have a look in my book Three is a Crowd?

In contrast to many adults, small children do and say things that make sense. What they do and say teaches us about how we all learn, including how we learn to be multilingual, and teaches us how to give evidence of what we’ve learned: by using the means that are available to us. If, that is, we choose to *see* what’s going on, instead of attempting to fence in facts within the theory of the day.

OK, so untrained vocal tracts explain child mixes, and productions which don’t match uses of language in the children’s surroundings. Could this also be the case for adult language learners? My next post has something to say about this.

Cruz-Ferreira, M. (1990). Karin and Sofia in Bilingual-Land In J. Leather & A. James (Eds.), New Sounds 90. Proceedings of the 1990 Amsterdam Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech (pp. 248-254). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Shibboleths & Co. Saturday 6^th April 2013.

Speech-language clinics: cultural meeting places?

When our children are referred to speech-language services, the least of our concerns is probably to muse on whether the clinic is a suitable venue for cultural happenings. We go there to seek expert assistance, that’s all. Expertise, however, isn’t absolute, because experts aren’t abstract beings. Like the rest of us, they’re shaped by cultural backgrounds and professional training which are bound to specific places and specific times.

Clinical observations leading to diagnoses start at the clinic’s door: Does the child greet new people, and show appropriate curiosity about new surroundings? Does the child say please or thank you, which speakers of languages with words for please and thank you take as a sure sign of basic politeness? Is there telltale body language? How about body contact? If the child shuns an open, extended, unfamiliar hand, or recoils at that hand patting cheeks or ruffling hair, is this culturally odd? What if the same hand insists on heaping dolls, teddy bears and other lifeless representations of living beings near a child who’s scared witless of these things because they’re associated with taboo meanings?

We may all know, in theory, that the same behaviour can be interpreted in widely different ways, but we may not realise that “invisible” cultural considerations, those that we take for granted because they shape our routines, impact clinical observation and assessment: is avoidance of eye contact, for example, a sign of social impairment or of deference? What about silence? The verdict rests with the clinician. The excellent news about this is the growing awareness, among speech-language clinicians, of cultural considerations concerning their little multilingual clients.

Many speech-language clinicians are trained to use a single language of intervention, and receive no training in matters of multilingualism and multiculturalism. There may be no shared language between clinician and client, for example, or no shared ways of using it. One common practice is to ask the parents to interpret, or hire an ad hoc interpreter. A previous post explains why the former solution cannot work, and other research explains what is involved in proper training of clinical interpreters, who aren’t simple, “neutral” vehicles of messages in different languages. See, for example, Claudia V. Angelelli’s book Medical Interpreting and Cross-cultural Communication.

There may also be a shared language, though no normed assessment instruments for other languages used by child clients. Translation comes to mind, here, too: speech-language clinicians do report that they themselves translate and/or adapt instruments which were normed for other languages. But doing so in fact invalidates the standardisation of these tests, making them unusable. Rhea Paul and Courtenay Norbury’s book, Language Disorders from Infancy through Adolescence provides a thorough review of these issues. Elizabeth D. Peña, in an article titled ‘Lost in translation: methodological considerations in cross-cultural research’, raises an additional issue. Neither the instruments were devised to be translated, nor what is in question is the accuracy of a translation: translated tests yield “different patterns of response” in different languages, which “may be due to differences in cultural interpretation” (p. 1257).

We can’t translate languages without translating cultural practices, in other words, because languages are there to serve them. Margaret Friend and Melanie Keplinger, in a study on ‘Reliability and validity of the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT)’, discuss their adaptation of a vocabulary test from (American) English to (Mexican) Spanish, which they used to assess Mexican infants. The task required the children to grasp an object, when prompted with the word for that object. All children failed this task, arousing suspicion of language delay, compared to their American peers. The cause of the failure, as it turned out, was not language, but culture. When questioned about possible reasons for their children’s results, the Mexican parents clarified that they forbid their children to touch things that do not belong to them.

Other recent research reports on growing awareness of cultural issues arising in speech-language clinics. From Australia, in ‘Speech-language pathologists’ assessment and intervention practices with multilingual children’, Cori Williams and Sharynne McLeod found that clinicians actively sought information about their clients’ languages and cultural backgrounds, faced with a lack of culturally appropriate tools which would do justice to them. Lack of culturally appropriate resources for assessment and intervention is also the case in the US, as Mark Guiberson and Jenny Atkins discuss in ‘Speech-language pathologists’ preparation, practices, and perspectives on serving culturally and linguistically diverse children’. Finally, in a review of clinical practices in multilingual settings worldwide, ‘Towards evidence-based practice in language intervention for bilingual children’, Elin Thordardottir observes that “Existing clinical methods have largely been developed within Western middle-class cultures” (p. 532). In multilingual settings, clinicians are not only being required to interpret what they’re unfamiliar with but, perhaps as crucially, they’re realising that they must stop mistaking what they’re familiar with for “norms”.

Several of my own contributions to this issue focus on monocultural and monolingual features of clinical approaches to speech and language. One book chapter titled ‘Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children’ discusses clinical practices which take culturally-bound ‘mono’ tenets as default behaviour. Another chapter, ‘Assessing multilingual children in multilingual clinics’, in my book Multilingual Norms, reports on the consequences of monolingual training on the practices of multilingual clinicians.

The next post will have some more to say about small children and their well-being, namely, what does it mean to “teach” children?

Friend, M., & Keplinger, M. (2008). Reliability and validity of the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT): data from American English and Mexican Spanish infants. Journal of Child Language, 35 (01). DOI: 10.1017/S0305000907008264

Guiberson, M., & Atkins, J. (2010). Speech-Language Pathologists’ Preparation, Practices, and Perspectives on Serving Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 33 (3), 169-180. DOI: 10.1177/1525740110384132

Peña, E. (2007). Lost in Translation: Methodological Considerations in Cross-Cultural Research. Child Development, 78 (4), 1255-1264. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01064.x

Thordardottir, E. (2010). Towards evidence-based practice in language intervention for bilingual children. Journal of Communication Disorders, 43 (6), 523-537. DOI: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2010.06.001

Williams, C., & McLeod, S. (2012). Speech-language pathologists’ assessment and intervention practices with multilingual children. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14 (3), 292-305. DOI: 10.3109/17549507.2011.636071


© MCF 2013

Next post: “Teaching” children. Saturday 23^rd February 2013.

Language therapy or language tuition?

The titles Speech-language Therapist and Language Tutor name different job descriptions, different qualifications and, therefore, different professional competencies: speech-language therapists (or speech-language pathologists, in alternative terminology) do therapy, language tutors do tuition.

In practice, however, the distinct services that these professionals provide are sometimes not so distinct. One reason might be the resilient confusion between two meanings of the word language, in English and other languages. Both job descriptions include this word, although language therapists (let’s call them so) deal with overall language ability, whereas language tutors deal with specific languages. Another reason stems from both specialists being called upon to intervene in a child’s life because there is a problem, or a suspected problem: language therapy addresses problems which affect all of the child’s languages (e.g. language delay), whereas language tuition solves problems with specific languages (e.g. everyday or specialised exposure) which bear no relation to the child’s other languages.

Interestingly, the merger of professional competencies works one-way only: you probably wouldn’t dream of entrusting your child’s possible language disability to a qualified language tutor, whereas you do expect qualified language therapists to address deficiencies in particular languages. I’ve had reports of therapy-for-tuition services of this kind from a number of countries in Africa and Asia, although I doubt that they are restricted to these parts of the world. I would be very interested to know whether the same situation holds elsewhere.

Let me try to work out why this situation arises at all. Children naturally acquire the language uses around them, from elders and/or peers. These uses may not match what parents or schoolteachers deem to be desirable ones, where “desirable” means ‘standard’. In matters of language, the word “standard”, in turn, means ‘good’, whereby non-standard uses of language are ‘bad’, that is, in need of remediation. By the same reasoning which recommends clinical assistance for bad health, cure for bad language should also be sought from a qualified clinician.

I mean the word cure quite literally. An increasing number of typical child language features have also come to merge with features of disordered development, drawing on current standards of normality which are as usable, in practice, as current standards of physical beauty. Almost 70 years ago, in her Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy depicting life in the English countryside in the 1880’s, Flora Thompson saw it coming :

“The general health of the hamlet was excellent. The healthy, open-air life and the abundance of coarse but wholesome food must have been largely responsible for that; but lack of imagination may also have played a part. Such people at that time did not look for or expect illness, and there were not as many patent medicine advertisements then as now to teach them to search for symptoms of minor ailments in themselves.”

Any label which remotely hints at clinical disruption, tagged on to a child, will drive zealous caregivers to appeal to those whose job descriptions likewise include clinical labels.

Zealous teachers stand for the lion’s share of such moves, despite cautionary reports exemplified by Jeff MacSwan and Kellie Rolstad’s ‘How language proficiency tests mislead us about ability: implications for English language learner placement in special education’. The article reviews evidence that the bulk of referrals of young language learners to special education, in the US, has nothing to do with the learners, and all to do with assessment policies and poorly designed language tests. This is the case elsewhere around the world, as also reported in my book Multilingual Norms.

Misguided referrals of this kind count as false positives, where typical multilingual behaviour is mistaken for language disorder. In time, cumulative practices “identifying” multilinguals as disordered become standard practices, in yet another interesting meaning of the word “standard”: as Brian Goldstein quotes in a previous post: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” Accepted habits boost reluctance to revise mindsets and practices, with two consequences: overworked language therapists, squandering time and resources tuned to atypicality on typically developing children; and blindness to false negatives, which mistake disorder for typical multilingual behaviour and thus fail to identify disordered multilingualism.

A third consequence, perhaps the direst of all, is the stigma which sticks to the children who get singled out by means of special labels. Not just because “special” is Correct-Speak for ‘not-quite-up-to-par’, but principally because labels go on deciding our opportunities for us.

Next time, I’ll deal with the bit that I missed, in this post, in the label speech-language therapist.


© MCF 2012

Next post: Speech and language. Wednesday 12^th December 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.

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.

Multiculturalism, and other big words

Words which come prefixed with “multi-” give the impression that “multi-” refers to ‘many, different, varied’, and therefore that the same words can be used with some contrasting prefix referring to ‘one, same, uniform’. In some cases, multi-words appear to make some sense, examples being multimedia or multinational. In other cases, I wonder: what does a word like multitasking contrast with, and what might contrasting concepts refer to?

Multi-monotasking?

Photo: MCF

Another such word which provides me with much food for thought is “multicultural”. Your culture can be defined as anything that you are and do which is not determined by your genetic patrimony. That is, what you are and what you do because you’ve been nurtured to be so and do so. Cultural behaviours are localised in time and space, which is why we find phrases like Victorian culture or Asian culture. But big words like Victorian and Asian refer to analytical concepts, whose vagueness ends up turning them into stereotypes. As we know, analyses, including cultural analyses, are made by the big shots of their time – often for other big shots of all time. Real-life culture is small in both time and space, because the groups which socialise us into it are also small. We eventually develop into culturally local individuals.

Our languages are naturally part of our cultural patrimony, because they are there to serve socialisation into the practices, physical as well as intellectual, which characterise the people in our environments. The locality of cultural behaviours is what explains that languages associate with neither countries nor cultures, one to one, and that attempting to attribute cultural portraits to nationalities says more about the portrayer than about the culture or the nationality. More than one language is used in virtually all countries, and the same language is used to express widely different cultures. The same locality also explains language variation, whether geographical (what linguists call dialects) or social (sociolects). There are northern, and southern, and regional, and urban, and so on varieties of the same language; and we don’t speak in the same way to our childhood’s best friend and to the head-hunter who just found out about our ideal profile for the latest starvation-wages job.

This means that we all use our languages, one or more, in many, different, varied ways, in order to satisfy many, different, varied cultural needs, and this is why I find it quite baffling that only part of humankind somehow got to be labelled as “culturally and linguistically diverse”, or as users of “heritage languages”. Aren’t we all? The belief that mystifying labels such as these refer to relevant facts, and the related effort to make sense of what doesn’t make sense takes time, and human, administrative and financial resources. Not to mention, of course, the expectations about linguistic and cultural proficiency which we go on pasting on those people whom we’ve got used to label in this way. I develop this argument in a book chapter, Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children, included in a collection dedicated to assessment of speech disorders in multilingual children.

There’s more to any individual than the singularity of the pronoun “I”. Being “multicultural” doesn’t mean being a patchwork of cultural bits and pieces which “belong” to other people, and which besides stand in conflict with one another. It means behaving according to the cultural conventions which make sense around us. The next post explains how the conflicts which presumedly afflict multilinguals and multiculturals arise from the implications of the prefix “multi-”.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Split identities, and other ugly words. Saturday 28^th January 2012.

Providing clinical services to bilingual children: Stop Doing That!=Guest post=

by Brian A. Goldstein

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” (Thomas Paine)

In most countries, bilingualism is well-established. That is not the case in the United States. However, because of demographic changes, bilingualism in the United States is slowly but surely becoming the default condition… the underlying representation… the new normal (Goldstein, 2012). In the U.S., it is estimated that 10.9 million (21%) 5- to 17-year-olds speak a language other than English at home, and 2.7 million (5%) speak English with difficulty (Language Use, U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2007). At the same time, the amount of research related to bilingual children has increased significantly. Much of that research is translational in that it aids practitioners in providing reliable and valid clinical services to bilingual children.

Despite the rapid increase in research related to bilinguals, clinical practice has not always changed as a necessary and important by-product of that research (Kritikos, 2003). I witnessed this disconnect recently while attending the annual convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), in November this year. At the convention, I witnessed clinicians questioning clinical advice that has been current for 20 years. It was clear to me that these individuals did not seem to have received these messages. Here are some messages that I believe need to be delivered.

• Stop telling bilingual parents to speak only one language to their children. There is no evidence that speaking only one language or practicing the one parent-one language dichotomy improves language skills or staves off a speech and language disorder. Even parents who report that they use the one parent-one language rule do not do so in practice (Lanza 2004).

• Stop believing that being bilingual causes and/or exacerbates a speech or language disorder. As Kohnert says, “A disorder in bilinguals is not caused by bilingualism or cured by monolingualism” (Kohnert, 2007, p. 105). It is now reasonable to conclude that in the acquisition of two languages, bilingual children do not appear to be “remarkably delayed nor remarkably advanced” relative to monolingual children (Nicoladis and Genesee, 1997, p. 264).

• Stop using family members as interpreters/translators (Langdon and Cheng, 2002). Family members are not trained in this area and are clearly biased when it comes to their own family members. It also places them in a precarious position in which they are not likely to be comfortable.

• Stop trying to calculate an omnibus measure of language dominance. The notion of dominance has been criticized on both theoretical and methodological grounds (e.g., MacSwan and Rolstad, 2006). Moreover, its utility relative to speech and language skills is equivocal. Ball, Müller, and Munro (2001) found that Welsh-dominant children (aged 2;6-5;0) acquired the Welsh trill earlier than their peers who were English-dominant. However, Law and So (2006) found that both Cantonese-dominant and Putonghua-dominant children (2;6-4;11) acquired Cantonese phonology first. This is not to say that variables such as language history, language use, and language proficiency are not important variables to consider. They are. What should be dismissed, however, is determining language dominance based on a standardized test and then triaging clinical services based on its results.

• Stop assessing speech and language skills in only one language. The bilingual’s languages are not mirror images of each other. Skills are often distributed across the two languages. The same language skills can be easy in one language but difficult in the other (Peña, Bedore, and Rappazzo, 2003). The distributed nature of language skills in bilinguals necessitates examining speech and language skills in each of the child’s languages.

• Stop waiting 2-3 years before assessing a bilingual child for a possible speech and language disorder. The belief by many practitioners is that a child needs to have years of experience in the second language before even thinking about assessing their speech and language skills bilingually. That viewpoint runs counter to the mounting evidence that such children acquire their language skills fairly quickly. For example, Paradis (2007) found that after 21 months of exposure to English, sequential bilinguals exhibited skills within the normal range of monolinguals in the areas of morphology (40%), receptive vocabulary (65%), and story grammar (90%). In a seminar titled English Phonological Skills of English Language Learners, presented at the ASHA convention in New Orleans in November 2009, Gilhool, Goldstein, Burrows, and Paradis found that after an average of 8 months of exposure to English, sequential bilinguals (ages 4;6-6;9) averaged consonant accuracy of 90%.

• Stop comparing the speech and language skills of bilinguals to those of monolinguals. Bilinguals are not two monolinguals in one (Grosjean, 1989). Thus, although their skills will be similar to monolinguals, they will not be identical. Further, in a seminar titled Lifelong Bilingualism: Linguistic Costs, Cognitive Benefits, and Long-Term Consequences, presented at the ASHA convention in Philadelphia in November 2010, Bialystok indicated that both languages of bilinguals are active when using one of them, even in strongly monolingual contexts. What this means is that bilinguals do not sublimate the other language, even if the speaking community is exclusively or largely monolingual. Both languages are always active to one degree or another. Thus, from a clinical perspective, this view argues for comparing monolinguals to monolinguals and bilinguals to bilinguals.

• Stop treating those with speech or language disorders in only one language. To again quote Kohnert (2007, pp. 143-144), “Being ‘monolingual’ in a bilingual family or community exacerbates a weakness, turning a disability into a handicap.” If, as practitioners, our focus is to develop a bilingual speaker, then services for those with speech and language disorders necessarily have to be conducted in both languages. Intervention in only one language is not an option.

Finally, “Stop thinking in terms of limitations and start thinking in terms of possibilities.” (Terry Josephson)

Brian A. Goldstein is Dean of the School of Nursing and Health Sciences and Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

© Brian A. Goldstein 2011

Next post: Language geniuses and language dunces. Wednesday 14^th December 2011.

Balancing (f)acts

Immigration scenarios, such as the ones described in a previous post, are probably among the first that come to mind when we think about “unbalanced” uses of languages. But the term “unbalanced” crops up to characterise the languages of multilinguals who stay put where they happen to be born too. The appropriateness of this term to (assumedly) describe multilingualism bears some thinking. This is why I thought of dedicating a post to it, following up on other grudges of mine against obscure terms which persist in appearing collocated with the term “multilingualism”, like here, or here, or here.

The first observation is that the term unbalanced does not aim at description at all. It draws on comparisons, because one thing can only be said to be unbalanced in comparison to another. This is interesting, in that it reflects the odd fate of past and current approaches to multilingualism, which have had a really, really hard time breaking loose from the vicious circles of comparative methodologies. Multilingual competence (or incompetence, often) has mostly been ascertained through comparison of each of the languages of a multilingual with monolingual uses of the same languages. An additional layer of comparison comes through comparing the languages of a multilingual among themselves, in order to decide whether they are “balanced” or not – which, if those languages are developing as they should and are being used for what they are meant to be used, they cannot be.

Let’s see why. Comparing the different languages of an individual to find that they are used in unbalanced ways is about as interesting as comparing the same individual’s two or three mobile phones, or four or five pairs of shoes, to find that they are also used in unbalanced ways. The reason must be obvious: if you didn’t need to use different phones and shoes and languages in different ways, you wouldn’t need different phones or pairs of shoes in the first place. Or languages. The languages of a multilingual are “unbalanced” by definition, not because of linguistic (or multilingual) incompetence, but because of pragmatic competence: the real-life situations for which multilinguals need their languages are unbalanced.

We use our different languages in different ways, for different purposes, with different people, at different times, and in different places because that’s what we have different languages for. As I’ve argued before,“If multilinguals could (or should) use all their languages in exactly the same way, they would not need several languages: one all-purpose language would be enough. ‘One all-purpose language’ defines a monolingual, not a multilingual”. The interesting questions to ask about multilingual uses of languages must surely be whether and how those uses fit their purposes – which are also the interesting questions to ask about different mobile phones and different pairs of shoes. The reason such questions are important is that their answers are the ones which can shed light on whether and how multilingual uses are typical or disordered.

A second observation concerns the meaning of the term “balanced” itself, which isn’t ‘of equal weight’. If it were, I would be a balanced multilingual in Japanese and Swahili, because I can say Thank you in both languages and that’s about all I can say in them. When applied to languages, “balanced” means ‘full weight’, across the board. Which is in its turn quite interesting, for three reasons. First, that we should expect to find users of several full-weighted languages as often as we find fire-spitting dragons racing down from the skies. Not even professional multilinguals, such as translators and interpreters, can claim to have “balanced” command of their languages: each of their languages also serves specific purposes in specific situations. Second, what should we make of the apparently desirable multilingual goal of having several full-weighted languages, against the paradoxical but equally desirable multilingual goal that one of the languages must be dominant? And third, what exactly do words like “full”, or “complete”, or their synonyms mean, applied to languages? I’ll deal with this last bit next time – which means I’ll go on ranting some more about the funny terminology that goes on sticking to multilingualism.

© MCF 2011

Next post: Half-linguals and semilinguals. Wednesday 23^rd November 2011.

Multilingual beginnings

One of the striking impressions I get from my dealings with language learning, language use and multilingualism is our tendency to look at what is not there. I don’t mean the commendable mindset that urges us to keep doing more and better because we know that we haven’t done our most and best yet, I mean the way we tend to disregard what is there.

I plead guilty too. When I took my firstborn to one of her routine check-ups, another 11-month-old, also a girl, was in the waiting room with her mum. This other girl was crawling all over the place at breathtaking speed, and grabbing at anything and anyone in sight to lift herself up and try to walk, whereas my girl, who had rehearsed a few half-hearted attempts at rolling and dragging herself on her tummy a few months earlier and soon given up, was doing what she did best at the time, which was sitting there on the floor and enjoying the show. My eyes glued to the little acrobat and I became instantly unsettled. What was wrong with my baby? Why wasn’t she moving at this late age?

I then noticed that the other mum was, in turn, staring at my girl, which added to my discomfort. She must be wondering about my motionless child too, so I decided to praise her child before she could condole with me about mine. “Sorry I’m staring”, I said, “but I couldn’t help noticing how active your girl is, compared to mine”. “Oh”, she replied, “thanks for telling me that! I was staring myself, at the impressive amount of teeth your girl has. Mine has none”. We had to laugh, both of us.

Informal observations like these are one thing. Quite another concerns official verdicts about our children’s development falling short of standard milestones, and this is no laughing matter. Take vocabulary, for example, the traditional tell-tale indicator of early linguistic health. If we assume that words reflect the first signs of linguistic development, then lack of words, or of a specific amount or type of words, means lack of expressive abilities. So much so that children who have yet to acquire words are said to be at the “pre-linguistic stage”. That is, these children don’t have language.

We’ve nevertheless known for quite a while that, prior to the appearance of words, babbling and babbling patterns provide reliable indicators of typical development. But descriptions of babbling often concern what analysts can recognise as syllables, vowels and consonants, that is, “word-like” baby utterances. Should we then look for words and word-like productions as evidence of the earliest linguistic resources that children have available? We might be looking in the wrong places, actually. Perhaps what wordless babies are said to lack, according to popular benchmarks, is instead what popular benchmarks themselves lack.

Take prosody, for example. For ages 5 and upwards, Sue Peppé and colleagues are currently developing an instrument for assessment of child prosody, PEPS-C (Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems – Children), but our understanding of how very young children use the prosody of their languages has been most lacking. Yet we’ve also known for many years that children begin making sense of their languages by making sense of prosody, and I was thrilled to be able to confirm this in a study of my own children’s language development.

Before they had any recognisable words in any of their two home languages, Portuguese and Swedish, the children started using any sounds that they were able to produce as fillers, that is, as handy carriers of salient prosodic patterns of each of their languages. They also babbled things like blh-blh-blh (to be read in Portuguese, [bʎˈbʎbʎ], where ˈ indicates a stressed syllable) and hadda-hadda-hadda (ditto in Swedish, [hadahada ̏ hada], where  ̏  represents the so-called ‘double-accent’ of the language).

The children switched between these uses of their resources when addressing people whom they associated with each language, or when looking at pictures of them – as well as when talking to toys which they got from Portuguese or Swedish speakers and which, therefore, also “spoke” each of these languages. The baby-dialogues that they fashioned in this way sounded Portuguese or Swedish, because the prosody was Portuguese or Swedish. When the first words appeared, the children accommodated them to the linguistic melodies that they had by then mastered, and went on using their old prosodic strategies as replacement for words which they hadn’t yet learnt in one of their languages, or which for some reason failed them at some time or other. Just like all of us use fillers like thingamabob or what’s-its-name, for the same reasons.

These earliest linguistic resources were not “words” of either language, but the children were nevertheless using their two languages. I’ll have some more to say about multilingual child strategies for learning language in the next couple of posts. 

© MCF 2011

Next post: Children, toys, and languages. Saturday 15^th October 2011.