You must be joking.

When we tell someone that they must be joking we don’t mean that they must be joking: we mean we don’t believe what they’re saying. They may not be lying, but what they’re saying strikes us as making sense only in the realm of make-believe. We say this in a tone of voice that rules out acknowledgement of shared merriment. And we don’t laugh at the presumed “joke”. So why the word joking, then? Quirks of linguistic formulaic devices, surely, but that’s what languages are: formulaic devices. We need to learn when and how telling people that they must be joking is appropriate, because we don’t say this to people whom we know are joking. So how do we know they’re not?

At the turn of last century, in a monograph titled Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du Comique which has withstood the test of time, Henri Bergson argued that what makes us laugh, “le comique, [c’est] du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant”. Stumbles and/or falls, for example, trigger our mirth because (more or less) supple living bodies fall prey to mechanical stiffness – and I suspect there must be something mechanical at work, too, in what makes us laugh over and over again at whatever makes us laugh. Perhaps the converse of Bergson’s take, plating life onto machines, is one reason why machines aren’t that good at laughing at what makes us laugh? Or rather, why we aren’t that good at creating laughter-inducing software. Richard Powers puts it this way, in Galatea 2.2: Helen, the mechanical protagonist, “was strange. [...] She sped laugh-free through Green Eggs and Ham”. Helen isn’t the only one having issues with laughter in this novel, by the way: if you’re curious, have a look in Fran McDonald’s chapter Wrong laughter: Laughing away the human in Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2.

Bergson also explained why laughter confirms a successfully shared joke: “Notre rire est toujours le rire d’un groupe.” 

Image: isCute.com

As we learn our languages, whether we’re young or old, we learn what’s shared through them among fellow-users. Human beings are natural merrymakers, regardless of culture, so it’s no wonder that one of the main purposes of language use is entertaining, along with informing and persuading. Since jokes make sense to insiders, learning to make and get jokes isn’t as frivolous as it may appear on first thought. Happily, given the not-for-laughs nature of most language teaching materials, humour is being increasingly understood as a very effective language learning tool. Research by Nancy Bell shows, for example, that fostering joking in a new language enhances linguistic proficiency, by promoting creative ways of using those new linguistic resources. Catherine Davies provides an additional reason for getting to grips with humour in the language classroom: her study How English-learners joke with native speakers concludes that “Such fine-tuning of understanding is the core of why the ability to participate in such joking is important in the development of rapport.” Not only do we learn better what makes us laugh, learning what makes others laugh hails us as sanctioned linguistic insiders. My take is that people who joke together wire together.

Although I have yet to decide which of the two is more vexing, someone telling you that you must be joking when you are joking, or someone laughing at your joke when you’re not, I’m sure of one thing: prosody is often to blame for mishaps of this kind, as research included in this special issue of Pragmatics & Cognition, dedicated to Prosody and Humour, makes clear. We draw on language/culture-specific analogies and metaphors, bodily ones included, to create idiomatic sarcasm and irony, but language/culture-specific prosody is what allows their interpretation as humorous. Maybe the reason why Richard Powers’ Helen and our other human-like machines don’t know how to laugh is that programmers inherited the traditional view of languages as exhausting themselves in robot-friendly words + grammar. Just a thought.

Lastly, a healthy note: we know about an apple a day, but a laugh a day may have equally beneficial effects on our physiology and psychology. Here are two, for the child within each and every one of us: Howard L. Chace’s monolingual fairy tale, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut and Luis d’Antin van Rooten’s multilingual rhymes Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames. I’ll indulge in some more language play next time.

Davies, C. (2003). How English-learners joke with native speakers: an interactional sociolinguistic perspective on humor as collaborative discourse across cultures Journal of Pragmatics, 35 (9), 1361-1385 DOI: 10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00181-9

Goldstein, J. (1982). A Laugh A Day The Sciences, 22 (6), 21-25 DOI: 10.1002/j.2326-1951.1982.tb02088.x

McDonald, F. (2012). Wrong laughter: Laughing away the human in Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2. In Matos Alves, A. (ed.), Unveiling the Posthuman, Interdisciplinary Press.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Multilingual crosswords. Saturday 14^th December 2013.

Multilingual liars

Cynics have it that human beings developed language in order to be able to lie. I’m not sure I like the innuendo in this suggestion, but I’m quite sure that language does allow us to lie and that we human beings make liberal use of this linguistic facility.

Human language features what linguists call displacement, enabling us to talk about absent and/or fictitious referents – you can read more about this in Chapters 1 and 12 of my book The Language of Language. Robert Wright, in The Moral Animal, discusses the morals of lying, a fascinating topic in itself – and I quite like another cynic’s take on morality in general, August Strindberg’s in Röda Rummet: “... moralen som de bestå, det är deras elakhet som anlagt en lämplig, presentabel form”. But Wright also argues that our ability to empathise with fellow human beings’ feelings and thoughts explains our deception skills. He writes that “the presentation of self, and the perception of others, has great Darwinian consequence: reciprocal altruism and social hierarchy”, which, by an apparent paradox, “may together be responsible for most of the dishonesty in our species” (emphasis mine). And he adds: “We are far from the only dishonest species, but we are surely the most dishonest, if only because we do the most talking” (emphasis his, p. 265).

Like empathy, displacement was once hailed as a distinctive characteristic of human languages, but we’re not so sure any longer. The issue revolves not only around what we mean by language(s) (the perennial issue of terminology...), but principally around what we’ve come to learn about non-human communication. Birds can fake injury, in order to attract a predator’s attention away from their nests. Natural camouflage experts likewise deceive their predators, and carnivorous plants their prey. We’ve also long known that bluffing about resourcefulness is a survival strategy among those of us who populate lower rungs of the food chain. For example, Eldridge S. Adams and Michael Mesterton-Gibbons, in The cost of threat displays and the stability of deceptive communication, reported on one crustacean species whose weaker members resort to threatening behaviour as much as their strong ones, with the same goal of putting off stronger opponents.

Social chains are our civilised equivalent of food chains, and we often lie for similar purposes of survival. Why else do we praise the quality of substandard meals, useless meetings or soporific lectures to which we’ve been invited, for example? We may not be intentionally attempting to deceive by doing so, not least because feedback of this kind is largely formulaic, but we are certainly attempting to benefit from using language in less than honest ways. We even have dedicated names to represent our gradient views about the moral acceptability of untruthfulness, from white lies and fibs through hoaxes to frauds and swindles. Strindberg did indeed hit the nail on the head.

Lying, like any other social behaviour, obeys culturally sanctioned norms. It engages not only our linguistic resources but (mostly?) body language, hand movements, eye gestures, facial expressions, whose interplay we must learn to adjust congruently in order to become competent liars. When we lie, we don’t want it to show.

Image © Enrico Mazzanti (Wikimedia Commons)

Over 20 years ago, in Fishy-looking liars: Deception judgment from expectancy violation, Charles F. Bond and colleagues investigated the effects of discrepant verbal vs. nonverbal clues in our perception of deception. More recently, Joanne Arciuli’s co-authored study “Um, I can tell you’re lying”: Linguistic markers of deception versus truth-telling in speech found that hesitation markers, sometimes misunderstood as signs of disfluency, play a core role in our perception of fluent truth-telling vs. lying.

So what about those of us who need to lie in tongues? The issue of whether we can identify liars across languages and cultures appears to be far from settled, judging by research led by Charles F. Bond which shows both that cross-linguistic and cross-cultural lying behaviour can’t be detected (e.g. in Lie detection across cultures) and that it can (e.g. in International deception).

These findings may explain why the behaviour of multilinguals at times rings false, as it were. This is particularly true of trainee multilinguals such as young children and beginner language learners: it takes time to gain awareness of conventional behaviours in different languages, in different places, to different people, and it takes effort to master their appropriateness. In addition, it’s not enough to just remember the lies that we concoct, so we can stick to them, we also need to remember in which language we lied. Professional liars (spies come to mind, though I’m sure they’re in good company), know all about this: they must develop skills which not only uphold the credibility of their false persona and false claims but, chiefly, suppress the clues which would betray their true persona’s lying habits.

Next time, I’ll deal with something that relates, indirectly, to perceptions of lying. Meanwhile, let me leave you with nothing but the truth, my favourite example of the Liar’s Paradox: Don’t believe a word I say. I’m a liar.

Adams, E., & Mesterton-Gibbons, M. (1995). The cost of threat displays and the stability of deceptive communication. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 175 (4), 405-421 DOI: 10.1006/jtbi.1995.0151

ARCIULI, J., MALLARD, D., & VILLAR, G. (2010). “Um, I can tell you're lying”: Linguistic markers of deception versus truth-telling in speech. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31 (03), 397-411 DOI: 10.1017/S0142716410000044

Bond, C., Omar, A., Mahmoud, A., & Bonser, R. (1990). Lie detection across cultures. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 14 (3), 189-204 DOI: 10.1007/BF00996226

Bond, C., Omar, A., Pitre, U., Lashley, B., Skaggs, L., & Kirk, C. (1992). Fishy-looking liars: Deception judgment from expectancy violation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63 (6), 969-977 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.63.6.969

Bond, C., & Atoum, A. (2000). International Deception. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26 (3), 385-395 DOI: 10.1177/0146167200265010


© MCF 2013

Next post: You must be joking. Saturday 30^th November 2013.

Multilingual rudeness

Swearing fluently and insulting people where it really hurts isn’t easy. The thing is that you manage to be rude only if someone acknowledges your rudeness. That is, only if someone understands that you’re being rude. You may have intended a compliment instead, or you may have had no intention of being either polite or rude. This is probably what explains the common perception that profanity is the hardest thing to master in a new language.

I agree. I’ve had students quite eager to show off to me their not-so-bad-after-all proficiency in the languages they want me to help them fine-tune, by inserting random expletives all over their speech, during my assessment interviews. It sounds horrible, and it *is* horrible. I’ve also witnessed attempts at verbal abuse by means of word-by-word translations of horrid expressions from one language into another, resulting in either unintelligible gibberish – or flattery. It sounds depressing, when it doesn’t sound hilarious.

“Verbal” is probably the key word here. Keith Allan and Kate Burridge’s book gives an account of Forbidden Words. Taboo and the Censoring of Language, but words are not the whole story. Words aren’t even main characters in the rudeness plot, in fact: we can either insult or compliment someone by calling them a genius or a filthy pig. Whether words will never hurt me, as the saying goes, depends entirely on our other languages, which are necessarily there when we speak: body-eye-hand language, and our prosody. They give the clues to what we mean, because rudeness is a cultural covenant, not a lexical one.

Studies such as José Mateo and Francisco Yus’, Towards a cross-cultural pragmatic taxonomy of insults, and those collected by Jonathan Culpeper and Dániel Z. Kádár in Historical (Im)politeness highlight the social nature of rudeness. Its verbal and gestural dialects evolve and vary across time and space, much through our uses of metaphor – more on which in my next post. The label idiot once described a clinically diagnosed condition, for example, and the label idiot-savant still does. In Europe, Nordic rudeness draws on mythical beings and places related to religious beliefs, whereas Mediterranean profanity is at its most flamboyant when invoking bodily functions – as well as close relatives resulting from some of those functions. And is it (more) rude to point with your index finger, your pinkie, or your thumb? Or is it rude to bite your thumb, as in this sample of Shakespearean insults?

Being multilingual and (not) wanting to be rude means being aware of these choices. I’m often asked the standard question asked of multilinguals, the one beginning In which language do you ...?, about my swearing, too. As if things like stubbing my toe or boiling inside a car in peak hour traffic jams only happened in the settings where I use one of my languages. As if the reasons for swearing and hurling insults, including at myself, came pre-packaged in a single language. I swear multilingually quite often – like just now when my server broke down for the third time today, and I found myself muttering Raio de internet connection!. I also curse monolingually, often because the curses I can express in that language are the most satisfying for whatever made me curse – even if the trigger took place in a different language. And sometimes I don’t really care whether anyone understands my insults: it just feels good to let off steam in a way that I know to be very rude.

Having said all this, I am (mostly) a nice, polite person [insert groan here], so when my children were growing up, with me as their only provider of Portuguese, I made a mistake. I thought I was being a good mother by not familiarising my nice, polite little ones with Portuguese profanity. Until, that is, a good friend expressed her bafflement at this striking gap in my children’s Portugueseness: How can they be Portuguese without knowing how to use Portuguese rude words??, she chided me. She was right, of course. I followed her advice (obrigada, Maria João!), and the kids soon became fluently rude – like me. I had forgotten that you can’t be polite if you don’t know how not to be rude. I can give one example:

Photo © parenting.failblog.org

If the gesture featured in this picture makes you cringe, you’re not alone. I, for one, am still working on taking it as a gesture, rather than the (very) rude insult I grew up associating with it.

School-language learners who intend to use their new languages, verbal and gestural, might be grateful for some insight about how other users use them, too, rather than about what those languages “are”. We may unintentionally offend (or fail to offend) by using tones of voice and/or gestures that associate with different meanings in our other languages. Prosodic false friends, as I call them, are no less than a time bomb, if we’re left in the dark about them. My study Non-native interpretive strategies for intonational meaning shows what can (and certainly will) go wrong when we attempt to speak a new language with no clue about its prosody.

Prosodic false friends tell us that words do not hold the exclusive on metaphorical meanings. I’ll have some more to say about this next time.

Cruz-Ferreira, M. (1987). Non-native interpretive strategies for intonational meaning: An experimental study In A. James & J. Leather (Eds.), Sound patterns in second language acquisition (pp. 103-120). Berlin: de Gruyter.

Mateo, J., & Yus, F. (2013). Towards a cross-cultural pragmatic taxonomy of insults Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 1 (1), 87-114 DOI: 10.1075/jlac.1.1.05mat

© MCF 2013

Next post: Metaphors and multilinguals. Saturday 10^th August 2013.

Multilingual moods

Have you ever woken up in a language-bound mood? Or felt a sudden compulsion, at any time of your day, to speak, think, read, sing, cook, dress, in one of your languages, and only one of them? This happens to me all the time. Not that I go about summoning up language-related everyday behaviours at will: rather, these urges appear to strike whenever my intentional uses of my languages are off-duty, as it were.

I indulge these unscripted moods as a leisurely way of keeping my languages and the behaviours that go with them well oiled. They’re a welcome addition to my daily uses of them, which ebb and flow according to need – whether I’m working or relaxing with friends and family, for example. Whatever skills, fluency, ownership, flexibility, we acquire in our languages are neither inborn nor immutable: they arise through use and they rust without it. Such moods are also a natural consequence of being multilingual, not evidence of the legendary monolingual said to be lurking inside every multilingual. When I’m being Portuguese, for example, I’m being it with a flavour, not because there is a vanilla way of being Portuguese, from which I “deviate” as a multilingual, but because nobody has vanilla ways of being whatever they are – except perhaps in their own eyes.

If we happen to believe in pure languages and pure moods, we may be tempted to call these mood switches and colourings “mixes”. On condition, of course, that we then use the same word to describe, say, what conventional tourists do, including staunch monolinguals, when they bring home souvenirs from the places they visit. Why else do we keep and cherish bits and pieces, songs and food, behaviours and words from other cultures, if not because we want them to be part of new moods we wish to enjoy? Different languages likewise associate with different souvenirs, as reminders that you have experienced things in different ways. Our mobility in time and space, to use the word in Alastair Pennycook’s book title, Language and Mobility. Unexpected Places, imprints our selves, and so our languages. My point is that there are different “mes” to every single “I”, from any anylingual individual.

This is why questions requiring mono-minded answers like “Do you feel X?”, where X stands for the name of official nationalities (of all things!) don’t make sense. When I feel miserable, or happy, do I need to feel so and express what I feel in a nationality? Or in a language? Questions about moods, feelings, emotions, and “their” language(s) raise similar issues to the ones about thought and “its” language(s). Not surprisingly, perhaps, since António Damásio showed, in his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, that the “neural underpinnings of reason” (p. xi) turn out to have quite a lot in common with those of emotion. So what exactly is it that we’re trying to find out by asking such questions, and why does it matter to know? And, of course, why aren’t questions addressing monolingual moods, feelings and emotions by name apparently as interesting to ask. Different languages, much like different clothes, are but one of the choices that some of us have available for expression, depending on who we’re talking to (ourselves included), and what we’re talking about, among other things.

Multilinguals naturally express their moods differently in different languages because different languages naturally reflect different things: languages belong to cultural heritages, not genetic ones. See, for example, Javier E. Díaz-Vera and Rosario Caballero’s article ‘Exploring the feeling-emotions continuum across cultures: Jealousy in English and Spanish’. The whole issue of the journal where this article appears, Intercultural Pragmatics, is of interest for the additional reason that it is a thematic issue on the topic of Metaphor and Culture. Metaphor does seem to permeate quite a lot of what we say, whether we’re being “emotional” or “rational”, and metaphorical devices as well as meanings certainly vary among different cultures, and so among different languages. The meaning of things like “big boys don’t cry”, for example, fits a particular culture and makes sense to those who have been initiated into that culture. And not all of us express loving moods by invoking a “little cabbage” or by hugging and kissing the object of those moods.

Photo: MCF

Metaphors also abound, understandably, in our expression of profanity. Next time, I’ll try to explain why this is interesting for multilinguals.


Díaz-Vera, J., & Caballero, R. (2013). Exploring the feeling-emotions continuum across cultures: Jealousy in English and Spanish Intercultural Pragmatics, 10 (2) DOI: 10.1515/ip-2013-0012

© MCF 2013

Next post: Multilingual rudeness. Saturday 13^th July 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.

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.

Fluent mumbles and precise vagueness

In cases of suspected or actual disruption to communication, we tend to repeat exactly what caused the glitch, only louder, and slower. A bit like turning the ignition key on a dead engine more and more fiercely, and more and more deliberately, in the hope that sustained, precise action will induce cooperation. We believe, in other words, that intelligibility is best procured through disfluent delivery. On the other hand, utterances like “And then, er... it just went on, y’know, just like that”, which are sometimes said to be disfluent, are perfectly intelligible in their contexts.

It is true that vague wording and mumbled articulation are not usually associated with desirable linguistic practice. They go under cover labels like “verbal crutches”, and they are attributed to all sorts of speech-language shortcomings, from poor vocabulary, through syntactic indecisiveness, to (clinical) disfluency itself. We’ve formed such opinions from what our elders and betters keep telling us about the great language users. On close inspection, however, the greatness of these uses turns out to have been preserved for us mostly through print.

The big revolution that sound and video recording technology brought to language studies was the insight it gave us into how we actually use our languages, and so into what constitutes evidence of language ability in spoken or signed modes. What we actually say or sign doesn’t look good in print, because print is not its mode, and vice versa.

We are learning that apparent imprecision and hesitation in fact mark proficient language use. When we say and what not or thingamajig, we’re signposting what we said before, or relevant material in the surroundings where our exchange is taking place, for example. Umming, ahhing, and falling silent fluently also assist spoken interaction. We thereby highlight content (saving us the trouble to say ‘now listen carefully, what I’ll say next is really, really important’), keep conversational turns (‘wait, wait now, I’m not done talking yet’), and buy time when we’re looking for the right turn of phrase or attempting to repair a botched start to an utterance. Michael Erard’s book, suggestively titled Um..., tells us about this. Celeste Kidd, Katherine White and Richard Aslin, in their article Toddlers use speech disfluencies to predict speakers’ referential intentions, in turn explain how we learn to make use of these devices, as we learn our languages.

It seems, then, that there is more to language building than the w o r d-based constructions that we have assumed of child learning, and so immortalised as recipe for school learning too. (Or was this the other way around now??)

Languages are not this:

Photo: Ralf Roletschek (Wikimedia Commons)

but this:

Photo: Wamito (Wikimedia Commons)

Richard Cauldwell first proposed this analogy, in a 1992 paper titled ‘Of Streams and Bricks: new ways of presenting the spoken language to learners’, published in Speak Out!, the Newsletter of the IATEFL Pronunciation Special Interest Group.

Fuzzy devices flow naturally along the characteristic prosody of each language, and give us clues about their speakers’ favoured vowels and consonants: have you noticed that we erm... and ahh... and nnn... differently in different languages, when we’re thinking about producing language? They also match culture-bound body language, gesture, gaze, that give precise meaning to face-to-face linguistic interaction. In her multilingually-titled article And stuff und so, Maryann Overstreet analyses vagueness in two related languages. This Linguist question and summary of replies lists a wider sample of vague words in several languages.

We are further learning that language users in fact expect vagueness and mumbles in meaningful interaction. These are both linguistic tools, in that they have their own grammar, and communicative tools, in that their use reflects shared knowledge of what the interaction is about. Your interlocutors expect you to let them be part of what you’re saying by letting them fill in what you’re not saying.

So now you know: if you want to sound really fluent in your new languages, stop trying to engage with le mot juste or the model syntactic rule that you remember from page 672 of your textbook, and engage instead with your interlocutors, here and now, by tossing in a vague word or two, and mumbling a bit from time to time. This is why Joan Cutting, in her book Vague Language Explored, recommends inclusion of these devices in school language syllabuses.

Learning to use languages from what we experience around us, in school or at home, probably reflects the major single difference between the two kinds of learning, as I’ve said before. In both cases, however, what we do indeed learn can be taken as evidence not of good learning but of faulty learning abilities. Know whadda mean? Aahm... oh well, next time I’ll talk about that kind of stuff anyway.

© MCF 2011

Next post: People see, people do. Saturday 18^th June 2011. 

The fight for a fair deal

We spend a lot of our time and energy assessing, ourselves and others. We look and re-look in the mirror for the perfect fit to the image we wish to project. We slot objects, people and attitudes into the mental rating boxes that guide our opinions, and we sometimes do this at first sight. Less benign emotions than love can take root in this way too.

Assessment experts, among them teachers, medical doctors and other clinicians, rely on professional rating boxes. Whether lay or specialist, our expectations appear to carry a surprisingly significant weight in how we gather information. Surprisingly, because they’re often based on nothing more substantial than hearsay; and significant, because they mean that we already know the answers to the questions that we nevertheless keep asking: we need not look any further.

I can give one example. I was once taking my regular walk in a nature reserve, in Singapore, where I live, and I heard a group of tourists heatedly debating whether they would be lucky enough to see a crocodile. One of them had read it somewhere that crocodiles are a common sight in Southeast Asian cities. A glimpse of an unmistakably reptile tail, which suddenly scrambled away from us, made his day: “There it is! I just saw one!!” What this visitor actually saw was a (large) monitor lizard. I took a picture of his (her?) friend, or perhaps of her-/himself, on another occasion. 

A (rare) specimen of Crocodillus Singaporeanus.
Photo: MCF

But he (the visitor, not the lizard) will swear he never, ever, laid eyes on a monitor lizard, because he “knew” that crocodiles might be around, not lizards. He will tell all his friends that he saw a crocodile in Singapore, who will tell all their friends, who will then all “know” that there are crocodiles in Singapore. Their source is the indisputable affidavit of an eyewitness.

On a rather more serious level, the way in which expectations affect observations was studied in a school, in the late 1960’s. The findings became known as the Rosenthal Effect. Like the children in this school, multilinguals get labelled before observation, and are therefore expected to be the special case, as mentioned earlier. One common expectation, for example, is that being multilingual is a self-explanatory “diagnosis”. Expectations, incidentally, are also what lies behind national and other stereotypes. If you “know” that an X will provide evidence of W properties, you’ll both see W and disregard all evidence of non-W. The same effect can explain, for example, successful therapies with placebos. And superstition.

Multilinguals, their caregivers, school teachers and speech-language therapists are all in the same boat. Awareness of multilingual behaviour is not required for teaching or clinical certification, even of multilinguals, and language assessment tools are standardised for monolingual users. All too often, teachers and clinicians thus have no reliable tools to guide their assessments. Adapting or translating tests works only partially and often badly, for the reasons we saw before: each language is unique. If dismissing adaptation and translation as a handy solution sounds far-fetched, have a look at what is involved in the mammoth task of making speech-language assessment usable, in this ASHA Directory (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association).

To top it all, there are speech-language assessment instruments for only a tiny fraction of the world’s languages, which of course raises problems for the assessment of monolingual children too. For multilinguals, yet another issue arises, paradoxically, where assessment instruments do exist for one of their languages. This is usually the mainstream language, which may not coincide with the “main” language of a multilingual. On the (monolingual-based) assumption that testing one language is enough to assess the overall linguistic ability of a multilingual, two things can happen. First, that underachievement in that one language may lead to suspicion of language delay. Children may be referred to further therapy, when what they would need is a language tutor. Second, that monolingual assessment naturally misses features of typical mixing, whose regular patterns in fact aid in the diagnosis of language disorder among multilingual children.

Other typical characteristics of multilinguals may go undetected, or pass as atypical. We don’t just mix languages, but also gestures, posture, attitude. A speech-language assessment, despite its name, crucially involves observation of body language, including body and eye contact. The absence (or presence) of standard signals of this kind may be culture-bound. For example, falling silent with a lowered gaze may be interpreted in some cultures as the absence of a response, whereas in others it is the presence of a mark of respect.

The problem is not so much that children (and the rest of us) are not usually socialised in speech-language clinics. The problem is that clinics and clinical tools belong to specific cultures too. What, many of us may wonder, can be a more striking image of childhood well-being than cuddling a teddy-bear? Many of us may indeed wonder, but not all. Perhaps not even most of us. Some of us may wonder instead why someone would want a child to engage in close bodily contact with a miniature representation of a beast of prey. 

Cuddly toys are part of the extensive array of clinical aids routinely used to elicit linguistic and other behaviour from children. One common test involves having several toys made available to a child, and then ask the child to grab, in turn, the ones named by the clinician. Children may fail this apparently straightforward test of vocabulary and object recognition, not because of a language problem, but because their culture forbids them to touch objects that do not belong to them. The child wouldn’t have either the sophisticated social and linguistic awareness that is needed to explain, preferably politely, this “non-compliant” behaviour to an adult. Perhaps the child’s culture doesn’t allow children to address adults, or question their demands. Or perhaps the culture does allow this, but not in the language that the child happens to share with the clinician. If you’re interested in research, reviews and reports on these issues, have a look in my recent collection, Multilingual Norms.

School teachers and school kids don’t have it much easier, whether in monolingual or multilingual settings. The language tests that they have to set and sit may also misrepresent their own uses. Here’s one example, taken from a real-life paper in a real-life English school subject:

And here’s one suggestion for you: a) First, answer according to your own use of English, without thinking much – the more one thinks about language uses, especially when they come robed in correctness, the worse it gets, I find; b) Then ask friends, relatives, schoolchildren, teachers of English, to answer too, in the same way; c) Then compare your results; d) Then come back to us on this blog with what you found out.

I won’t tell you (yet) what the test creator took as the right answer. I’ll do it in a comment to this post a few days after publishing it. Your little survey will provide you with a database of actual uses of English, for this particular example, that we can also discuss here. On a suitably large scale and with suitable statistical treatment, this is how norms of usage are established.

To round up my thoughts for today: the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, in his 1986 book The man who mistook his wife for a hat, that “Our tests, our approaches [...] our ‘evaluations’, are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers.” Granted, he was talking about severely disordered patients, but my point is that we all come out as more or less severely disordered if there are no means of assessing our “normality”. Sacks’ plea concerned a woman with severe mental decomposition, who nevertheless found ways to integrate her world with nature and music, for example. Engaging with nature and music was not part of standard neurological assessment tools.

This is why I mean the word fight in the title of this post quite literally. We may lack the tools that do justice to whoever we’re assessing, but we must at least realise that we do lack them. If we insist on fitting everyone’s feet into Cinderella slippers (another cultural stereotype, I know), which were fashioned for Cinderella’s feet, there is no way we can provide ourselves with the means to offer a fair deal in assessment: we’ll keep finding Ugly Sisters. Or crocodiles.

I have one last thing to say, a confession to make. You may have noticed that I had some difficulty trimming all that I wanted to say about assessment, particularly child assessment, into a post of reasonable dimensions. I had tremendous difficulty. This is an issue that lies very, very close to my heart, but I also know that no one has time to read blogs that just go on scrolling down and down forever. I will come back to these matters. Standardisation, not of tests but of the languages that are used in tests, is in line next but, until then, I hope you will let me know of your own concerns about assessment of multilinguals, here or privately. We need to learn from one another. I also meant quite literally what I said in my welcome message: this blog is for you.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Code makers and code breakers. Saturday 6^th November 2010.