Secret languages

One of the most disheartening feelings I’ve experienced, as a multilingually-engaged parent, relates to the realisation that being multilingual may be, and often is, interpreted as a deliberate sign of unfriendliness towards those who share one of our family languages. The reasoning seems to be something like “If you can speak X, which you know I understand, why else should you be speaking Y, which you know I don’t?”

In playgrounds, as our children were growing up, comments ranged from severe “We speak X, here” to commiserating “Oh, can’t the children speak X?”, where X stands for the name of the local mainstream language; in school, teachers recommended X monolingualism at home, not only as the usual (and misguided) safeguard against assorted developmental shortcomings, but also to protect the children from bullying which might arise from their unwitting public shows of Alien-Speak. Understandably, well-meaning officials added. You can read a detailed report on these issues in Chapter 9, titled ‘A new language: intruder or guest?’, of my book Three is a Crowd?

The scenario repeated itself, from extended family gatherings to more or less formal dinners where our family, for example as hosts, caused the smoothly ongoing conversation to suddenly come to a halt. Guests would glance at fellow guests, to make sure that what they had all heard was discourteous gobbledygook indeed, and someone was finally bound to ask: “Sorry, what was that you just said?”, with tones and facial expressions which made it very clear that the question was not about “what”, but about “why”.

We parents, let alone the children, weren’t even aware that we were using Private-Speak, so naturally it came to us. Which meant that the generalised malaise struck us all the more painfully: we felt guilty of speaking our language(s), as charged. We felt as rude as if we had publicly whispered secrets in a shared language.

Photo: MCF

It doesn’t help that people who feel excluded in this way also seem to believe that we use our secret languages to talk about them, probably because so many of us tend to assume that our pet conversation topic, ourselves, unquestionably extends to others. This is not surprising, really, given that Oxford English Corpus frequency counts for written English, for example, report that one of the most common words is “I”. It might be hard to persuade those people that our secret conversations concerned banalities like Stop picking your nose, Do you want to go potty?, Let go of your brother’s leg, or Can I have your cake, daddy, if you’re not finishing it? and I want to go play with their goldfish. I often wondered whether I shouldn’t have asked these people two things, a) what do they talk about with their children, and b) in which language.

Things did get better, in time, as everyone got used to everyone else’s linguistic quirkinesses in the different places where we’ve lived. Not least, we parents came to feel free to switch language to our children, when they became aware of what linguistic politeness is all about, and thereby realised that it tops any feelings of personal offence, on their part, to their own language policy habits.

The children themselves came to put their secret languages to good use: when receiving their friends at our home, it happened that they deliberately switched to one language that they knew their friends didn’t understand, in order to ask us parents, for example, whether their friends could stay on for dinner and sleepover combos. This was the only strategy they could think of, as they explained to me, to protect their friends from assuming that they were not welcome, in case the answer had to be “no”, for some logistic reason.

Languages can indeed be used as strategic tools in more than one way. One well-known example relates to the “uncrackable” codes used by Code Talkers in World War II – their own languages. The site of the Navajo Code Talkers explains how the coding took place, and how its success seamlessly drew on native cultural tenets.

My next post looks at other linguistic codes, which also appear to be successfully uncrackable for the same reason.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Linguistic ghettos. Saturday 10^th November 2012.

Braving monolingual worlds

If you ever had to fill in an official form, online or on paper, you may have just sat there, wondering how to go about satisfying form fields and/or boxes marked with cute little stars. The stars are there to tell you that they demand obligatory information, but they don’t tell you why they demand that information in an obligatory shape that fails to provide accurate information about you, and they don’t let you do anything about this.

Your name, for example, is a favourite obligatory piece of information, which is often required as “Full Name”. The trouble starts there. Some of us won’t be able to comply, faced with space sizes which appear to have been designed to cater for people whose full names are Bo Ek or Ana Sá. If your official full name, like mine, happens to consist of two first names, followed by mother’s surname, father’s surname and husband’s surname, some of which are in addition double and hyphenated, you are truly in a bind. Attempting rational tricks, like abbreviating some of your names by means of initials, may be greeted with human or electronic brightly flashing rejections. Unless, of course, the form contains a specific field for things like (obligatory) “Middle Initial”, which in turn stumps those of us who have no idea what a middle initial might be, because we are identified by name through first or last initials – or we have no initial(s), or no “surname” counterpart to “first name(s)” at all.

Form-filling and other exciting bureaucratic endeavours have ruled and go on ruling OK. So OK, in fact, that their morphing from hardcopy to digital medium does not seem to have affected their basic design. Official forms reflect the belief that there is a “preferred” (universal?) way of identifying individuals, whoever and wherever you are. But bureaucratic standards, like any standards, vary with time and place. They are certainly not local-size-fits-all. Assumedly cross-national forms (or “global” forms, to use a fashionable word), like the ones we find on the internet, are “global” only in being there for anyone who can access them online. Their make-up draws on the local, often country-bound tenets of the people who designed them. Heather McCallum-Bayliss and Carolyn Temple Adger discuss these matters in an article titled Variability in naming: Database challenges in multicultural and multilingual settings, focusing on database management, which, as they observe, “is especially challenging in settings that are culturally diverse. The consistent handling of names requires their appropriate cultural interpretation.”

Assuming that there is a single variant of people’s names, full or partial, matches the assumption that people have a single nationality and a single language. Those of us who have more than one of each of those things go on staring in dismay at form fields which either allow a single entry, or force us to “Choose One” from among a fixed set. Country lists are sometimes available, more or less updated on those countries that gain or lose official recognition as such. But you can’t list all the languages there are – even if we knew how many and which languages there are (or what is a language, for that matter), which we don’t. So why not give us, form-users, the choice? Why do we users have to serve the tools that are supposed to serve us? 

Languages and countries, and cultures and identities are not luxury commodities, of which you should own no more than one. Treating them as such only serves bureaucracy itself, as the comments to a previous post make clear.

Image: © Chrysaora (Flickr)

Official ideology shows even where users’ individuality appears to have been taken into account: in those cases where forms do allow us to choose all of our languages, we’ll have to rank them. The next post has some more to say about wanting multilinguals to pull linguistic rank.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Dominant languages and balanced languages. Wednesday 18^th April 2012.

BLINGualism

I should start by saying that I unquestionably prefer the word multilingualism to the word bilingualism, to refer to uses of more than one language. I nevertheless thought that BLING, rather than MLING, would make better sense in the title of this post. What I want to talk about is the compulsion that some of us feel to wear their multilingualism.

Throughout history, people have enjoyed finding reasons which, in their own eyes, make them better than other people. This penchant takes several forms, from small children sneering at classmates that their daddy is a policeman and hence above all common mortals, or that they own at least one more wristwatch/mobile phone/TV channel than whatever number the competition claims to own, to bigger children trumping cocktail party-mates with having connections above law enforcement authorities, or having shed more body fat at their latest workout binge.

Multilingualism has nowadays entered the fray, as a tell-tale sign of superiority: if you have one language and I have more languages than you, I win. Among willing players of this game, ‘have’ seems to be the keyword. What people like to boast about is naturally bound to change, with the times and the places, but certain game rules seem to endure. For example, that what you have is what defines you, and that having more of whatever you can have is a good thing.

Multilinguals, whether going by that name or not, have indeed been associated with good things, like higher education and social breakthrough, at least judging from what Western history has kept in its records for us. Those who ‘made it’ were the ones who had more than one language in their repertoire, because they had to learn the language(s) of the intellectual elite of their time, in order to make it. According to Jean de Drosay’s Éléments de la grammaire quadrilingue (Grammaticae quadrilinguis partitiones, 1544-1554), Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French were a must in the Renaissance, for example. But history often concerns itself with, well, elites, and what we know now is that the common people are mostly multilingual. It thus seems odd to me that, nowadays, we should wish to claim privileged intellectual status for a majority of the world’s population.

Take, for example, those of us who happen to be multilingual and describe themselves as amazing or astonishing, by describing multilingualism with these very words. The only term of comparison that comes to my mind for expressed wonderment of this kind is ‘monolingualism’. Are multilinguals remarkable because they are not monolingual, then? And conversely, of course, are monolinguals unremarkable because they are not multilingual? I’ve tried to imagine, really hard, what would be accomplished for our understanding of human language uses and human language users, by having monolinguals describe monolingualism as amazing and astonishing.

Images: David Shankbone; David Vignoni/Stannered

(Wikimedia Commons)

I think the problem might be that human beings appear to have difficulties dealing with difference. Qualitative differences between us are routinely interpreted as quantitative items which make some of us better or worse (off) than others, and which the privileged ones should duly decorate themselves with, in case no one notices any difference otherwise. To me, wearing number of languages like chattels, for this purpose, simply perpetuates the myth that multilinguals are ‘special’. Being multilingual was special when we were persuaded that being monolingual was the norm, and being multilingual goes on being special when we found out that being multilingual is the norm. Using whatever number of languages we need to use to function appropriately in our respective environments cannot be special, because we all do it.

We all adapt, in other words, which is a good thing to be able to do. Or is it? In some cases, the results of proficient adaptation arouses frowns instead of smiles. Like, for example, adapting uses of language to new technology. I’ll have a few things to say about this next time.

© MCF 2011

Next post: Breaking rules, or making them? Saturday 13^th August 2011. 

Mobile multilingualism

Being multilingual and in need of using mobile technology is not easy. Especially if you’re literate. Current mobility means access to cyber stuff, which means that you can move around the whole wide world without leaving your couch, but which also means that you must be conversant with printed forms of language. We interface via portable gadgets through the manipulation of keyboards, whose output shows instantly on screens, through which we also monitor the output of keyboards that are manipulated elsewhere.

Being both literate and able to adapt literacy skills to what new technologies may have in store for us is all fine, of course. The trouble is that cyber-technology is monolingual, in ASCII-Language. ASCII is a set of codes devised to represent text in computers, among other communication devices, from which most character-encoding standards have since derived. The acronym stands for ‘American Standard Code for Information Interchange’, so it is easy to guess which (printed) language the said codes and text are based on. I’m not sure how to pronounce “ASCII”, by the way, because this is one of many words that I’ve only seen, and never heard.

Computer keyboards and screens are ASCII-friendly. So is the internet. Its creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (can one say Sir “Tim”??), is British, and his invention naturally speaks ASCII too. Now, it is a fact of development that, in technology as elsewhere, we prefer to evolve from origins rather than break off from them in order to serve new needs. This is why motor vehicles still use the unsettling explosion-based engines that their inventors came up with centuries ago, and this is why we have only recently started seeing (literally) signs of tildes, cedillas, å, ø, and ü being granted rights of citizenship in cyberspeak, instead of undergoing transliteration to ?iso-8859-1?, =F6, unknown, ☐, or   . Related illegibility endures, though. Just look to your right (yes, as you’re reading this), at the Recent Comments panel of this blog, where typed so-called “smart” double quotation marks, for example, appear as ", which is really smart.

Or take my daily cyber-routines as an example. I need to switch among three different keyboard layouts, in order to be able to engage usefully with any portable keyboard. Even so, some of the symbols that I need to use refuse to reveal themselves, unless I click open lists of “special characters”, scroll down and click them, or press a number of keys in a specific order which is, of course, different for each keyboard layout, and/or involves, of course, different keys in each. All this is again different, of course, if I use a Mac or a PC. 

Multilinguals mix their languages in print too (of course), as a previous post illustrated, which means that being multilingual when you’re facing a computer screen, fingertips at the ready, can involve quite sophisticated logistics. And don’t get me started on what happens to your texts when you’re typing away fluently and forgot to turn off the AutoCorrect function that reverts automatically to some random language every time you open the word-processing or text-messaging software that you’re using at any given time. I have an additional problem, in fact: I also need to use IPA symbols in much of my writing, not because I’m multilingual, but because I do phonetics. Web browsers and mail servers disapprove of them as much.

One related issue is that many other readers/writers (not just mechanical, either) have become persuaded that cedillas & Co. are not the legitimate representations of spoken language that they indeed are, but symptoms of some ornamental compulsion on the part of the scribe. Let me put the record straight here: in Portuguese, for example, força means ‘strength’ and forca means ‘gallows’; e means ‘and’ and é means ‘is’; têm is the verbal plural of tem; and à is not the same as a. Assuming that they’re all the same is like assuming that a d might as well be printed a because the thingy sticking up from the back of it is just batty flourish. A ñ is not ‘an n with a tilde’, as little as a j is ‘an i with a tail’, or an m is ‘a three-legged n’. A ñ is a ñ.

¿Hablas computadora?

Image: Marco Regueira (Wikimedia Commons)

I shouldn’t complain, really: I’m one of the lucky few, because all of my languages share a single script, the Roman one. And I have blind faith in development: not so long ago, we didn’t even know what “cyberspace” could possibly mean.

Not so long ago either, we wouldn’t have dreamt that multilingualism is something that people can, and perhaps should, brag about. I’ll have a few things to say about this next time.

© MCF 2011

Next post: BLINGualism. Saturday 30^th July 2011. 

The effects of monolingualism

If someone tells you that coffee keeps you awake, or makes you sleepy, or has no effect whatsoever on its drinkers, and you didn’t know this, then now you know what coffee does. This piece of information tells you nothing about the effects of Cuba Libre, herbal tea, plain water, or any other drink. The statements are about coffee.

If someone tells you that multilingualism is good for you, or causes language delay, and you didn’t know this, then now you also know that monolingualism is not good for you, or that it doesn’t cause language delay. This is because human beings are traditionally seen to come in two complementary sets, those who use more than one language and those who use only one, so that what applies to the one does not apply to the other, and vice versa.

For historical (and bizarre) reasons, comparison has been the method of choice to gather information about multilinguals, an issue that I address in my book Multilinguals are ...?. The core point is that comparisons are one-way: multilinguals are compared to monolinguals, but never the other way around.

There is no methodological reason for choosing one of the complementary sets as benchmark, or for not using comparison both ways around. And there is the good statistical reason that multilinguals outnumber monolinguals, which would make multilingualism a natural benchmark. Nevertheless, monolingualism took on this role, with two consequences: that the benchmark is unquestionable, and that we are therefore entitled to ask questions of multilingualism that we don’t ask of monolingualism.

Making statements about multilingualism through comparisons with monolingual benchmarks further misleads us to believe that such statements indeed concern multilingualism, and multilingualism alone. But the assumption that takes multilinguals and monolinguals as complementary sets tells us that this cannot be so: statements about multilingualism, like statements about monolingualism, are statements about both multilingualism and monolingualism, as I’ve noted before.

This being so, I suggest probing monolingualism in the same way that multilingualism has been probed, through a set of popular FAQ: 

• What are the effects of monolingualism on language development?
• Does monolingualism affect the development of a child’s single language?
• Will children grow up confused with a single language in their environment?
• How does exposure to a single language affect cognitive and social development?
• Should parents speak their one language to their children?
• What is the best method to raise children monolingually?
• At what age should a child start learning a single language?
• How do people become monolingual?
• Should we expect delays in monolingual development?
• Does monolingualism cause speech-language disorders?
• If children are at risk of speech-language disorder, should they switch to several languages?
• If a child is underachieving academically, should we recommend schooling in several languages?
• What do we know about the monolingual brain?
• What reasons are there to nurture monolingualism?
• What are the advantages of monolingualism?
• What are the disadvantages of monolingualism?

Questions like these have two things in common with their counterparts that go on being asked about multilingualism, both to do with ignoring contexts. First, they disregard the context in which the questions were originally asked, usually within the framework of experimental or fieldwork research. Second, they disregard the context in which the use of one or more languages is relevant. This is why, in my view, both sets of questions make as much sense.

The other problem with questions like the above is that you can’t answer them without, yet again, comparing multilinguals and monolinguals. Choosing description, instead of comparison, might be a good idea. We can then start asking questions about multilinguals, similar to the ones we ask about coffee. Like, for example, what do multilinguals do?

The next post asks a number of such questions about multilinguals’ use of mobile communication modes.

© MCF 2011

Next post: Mobile multilingualism. Saturday 16^th July 2011. 

The monolinguals in the family

In many families around the world, being multilingual is the norm. I take the term “family” to mean ‘the extended family’ here, as opposed to the parent-child ‘core’. Whether or not everyone in the family uses the same languages, becoming multilingual, including from birth, is as (un)remarkable as growing up itself.

In other families, becoming multilingual comes as a disruption of monolingual norms, among monolingual relatives. These are the families that have so far caught public attention, whose language uses are, expectedly, observed and discussed through monolingual lenses. Our routine practices (or lenses) tend to become the benchmarks through which we peep outside our boxes, because we tend to forget that we are wearing lenses. I sometimes call this the Tuba Effect:  

The Tuba Effect: tubas affect vision.

Photo: MCF

This cuts both ways, of course: multilinguals play the tuba too. My children were raised with Portuguese from mum and Swedish from dad, and one of them, aged 3, came home from her first playgroup session frowning at some “very odd children” she had met there. The reason? Their “mum and dad speak the same language”, she explained. So no wonder that the monolinguals in one’s family have opinions about the oddness of growing up with several languages. They may have scant contact with the children, because becoming a multilingual family often goes together with moving away from near relatives. The extended family’s first-hand experience of what their little ones are developing into may be sporadic, sometimes through hasty and hassled visits complete with assorted gigantic bags and suitcases, unwieldy prams, cranky youngsters and jet-lagged parents. Add to this that there may be two sets of monolingual relatives, one from each side of the family, and sparks are likely to fly.

They did, in my family. Our children were the first children raised multilingually in our respective families. And, let’s face it, they did behave oddly. They expressed Swedish requests with Portuguese intonation, they used Portuguese words to convey Swedish attitudes and, like any other children, they lavished their unintelligible baby-talk creations on anyone in sight. Our respective relatives didn’t notice, because they couldn’t notice it, that the children were using their two languages. They noticed that they were not using the one language that is expected from “all the other children” that they had known up to then. Add to this the monolingual assumption that people can only speak one language “properly”, and we had both sets of relatives interpreting child gobbledygook as Foreign-Speak and asking us why we were raising our children to be able to speak only “the other” language properly.

There’s a first time for everything. Parents of small children are beginner parents, and veteran (grand)parents naturally want to help. Many things may change in educational practices with the flow of the times, all of which are taken in everyone’s stride with more or less minor quibbles: owning a cell phone virtually from the day you’re weaned was not part of earlier generations’ tuba scores, for example, but is becoming a given in current ones. Where languages are involved, however, any changes appear forbidding. Perhaps because budding multilingual parents and veteran monolingual relatives are all beginners here. There is a delicate balance to be reached in the management of this shared but uncharted territory.

Nurturing multilingualism in trainee mixed families often means two things for us parents: raising our children multilingually, and assuaging our relatives’ fears about not raising them monolingually. Toshie Okita’s book Invisible work. Bilingualism, language choice and childrearing in intermarried families vividly portrays the conflicting pressures that can make or break a home language policy. Okita focuses on Japanese-mother, British-father families living in the UK, but her findings go well beyond countries and cultures. Invisible work indeed. Most of what multilingualism is about goes on behind the scenes, and the monolinguals in the family play centre stage there.

Many of their worries in fact reflect a broader issue. It’s not just that being multilingual is “odd” because multilingualism continues to be treated as the “special case” of language uses. The issue is rather that we are beginners, all of us, on the topic of what typical multilingual development involves. I’ll have a number of things to say about this in my next post.

© MCF 2011

Next post: Little multilinguals. Saturday 26^th February 2011. 

Multilingual everyday uses vs. monolingual school views =Guest post=

by Jasone Cenoz

I would like to discuss an issue I have been thinking about lately because it is related to my work and my personal life.

I am a specialist in multilingual education, a multilingual speaker and a mother of a multilingual teenager. I live in the Basque Country, in the city of Donostia-San Sebastián where Basque and Spanish are spoken. Basque is a minority language that has become the main language of instruction at school. As schoolchildren are exposed to Spanish, the majority language, they become fluent in Spanish as well (Cenoz, 2009). English is a third language at school and it is an additional language of instruction in some schools.  

Nowadays the need to learn English is strongly felt in society. At the same time, a lot of effort is made to maintain and develop the use of Basque. Basque is an ancient non-Indoeuropean language that has survived for many centuries surrounded by Indoeuropean languages. Schools in Donostia-San Sebastián also offer French and in some cases German and Latin as optional subjects.

The issue I would like to comment on is multilingual teenagers’ use of languages among themselves, and how far their language use is from the way languages are taught at school. This is even emphasized if we look at the way adolescents chat on the internet, as it can be seen in the following example. The actual words are in italics.

         Miren:  zmz?? 
                     (Zer moduz/‘How are you?’)

         Jon:     osond ta z 
                     (Ondo eta zu/‘Well and you?’)
         Miren:  osond te e vistoo
                     (Oso ondo te he visto/‘Very well I saw you’)
         Jon:      yaa yo tambienn pero stabas lejos 
                     (ya yo también pero estabas lejos/
                      ‘I saw you too but you were far’)
         Miren:  jajajja lasai te e visto tambien kon el skate  
                     (jajajja lasai te he visto también con el patín/
                      ‘jajajja don’t worry I have seen you also with the skate’)
         Jon:     jajjaja es de un amigo 
                    (jajjaja es de un amigo/‘jajjaja it belongs to a friend’)

         Miren:  ok

A Facebook conversation between two Basque teenagers

(red=Basque; green= Spanish; blue=English; purple=non words)

This short exchange shows that the three languages are mixed and also that teenagers adapt these languages to their needs, and use them in non-conventional ways. These uses have increased with access to the internet, but code-switching and code-mixing have always been characteristic of bilingual and multilingual speakers. The text shows that these teenagers are creative and not only mix languages but also add “non-words”, change the spelling conventions or emphasize words and syllables by increasing the number of vowels.

But let’s focus on the mixing of languages. The greetings are in Basque, which is the school and family language, but then Spanish, the majority language, becomes the main language. The use of English is more limited but the words used (skate, ok) can be common in this age group even if not for other speakers.

This way to use the languages is in clear contrast with the way languages are taught at school. Most language classes follow the “one language only” policy, whether Basque, Spanish or English, depending on which language is used as the medium of instruction or subject matter at a specific time. The use of any other language is avoided, even when other languages, which are also taught and used at the same school, could be an important reference and even facilitate the learning process. The language practices are separated in an artificial way that is different from the way multilinguals use their languages in everyday life. Separation creates tension.

What can we do about this? The first step would be to consider students as multilingual speakers/learners rather than as learners of each language. In this way they could be encouraged to use their resources when learning and using languages. It could also help to have more coordination among teachers of the different languages so that they plan their syllabuses thinking about the way they can benefit from the children’s multilingualism.

The idea could be to encourage interaction between language teachers and also between languages. In this way, teenagers would not only benefit more from their knowledge and use of other languages but their language practices at school would also be more related to their out-of-school practices. Interaction is more natural.

Jasone Cenoz is Professor of Research Methods in Education at the University of the Basque Country. She is editor of the International Journal of Multilingualism.

© Jasone Cenoz 2011

Next post: One person, one ___. Wednesday 16^th February 2011.

“We shall overcome monolingualism.”

The title of this post is not, but could be, a slogan befitting the pro-multilingualism campaign of the day. If you do an online search for “being multilingual”, as in the innocent title of this blog, and then count the number of advantage, boost, reward, enhance, benefit, improve, good, opening, and other affirmative-action words that collocate with these two, you’ll see what I mean.

Let us think for a little while, in the quiet of our own heads. Why are people monolingual, or multilingual? This is like asking why do people use chopsticks to eat their food, or why do people organise rodeo shows to entertain themselves. So the answer cannot be that it is because they wish to achieve enhancements by doing the one, or because they don’t know that enhancements can be achieved by not doing the other. The answer must be that chopsticks and rodeos are what makes sense around them. The languages that you use must therefore also make sense in the contexts where you live.

We’ve all learned that multilinguals and monolinguals are different, because differences between them are what’s apparently interesting to focus on, nowadays. Findings from sociology, psychology, neurology, and so on, and from their hyphenated counterparts with linguistics, constantly remind us of this. But the people who typically use chopsticks and the people who typically enjoy rodeos are different too. Findings about differences are bound to be replicated for anything we are, do, or live through. So what else is new?

Differences in cognitive, social or whatever behaviour reflect our adaptation to our environments. Adaptation is precisely the reason why expecting multilinguals to behave like monolinguals, or forcing them to do so, is unnatural. I’ve said this time and again in this blog. So I fail to see why we should strive to achieve the converse, and turn monolinguals into multilinguals, in order to “enhance” their quality of life. Introducing multilingualism for its own sake in a monolingual community, for example, isn’t likely to “benefit” either multilingualism or the community.

I don’t think either that the way to redress the (many) injuries done to multilinguals is to increase their numbers. Promoting is not synonymous with understanding, and being multilingual doesn’t necessarily mean having insight about being multilingual, as I’ve noted before. We need to understand what multilinguals are, which, to my mind, leads to understanding of what we all are, regardless of our respective linguistic resources. Highlighting differences hasn’t got much to speak for itself. We’re all familiar with the old quip:

and its small print:

Rash claims about multilingualism simply perpetuate the myth that multilinguals are special in some way or other. Saying that “special” nowadays means ‘beneficial’ instead of ‘detrimental’ in turn persuades multilinguals of their entitlement to the same kind of smugness that monolinguals flaunted about in older times. Feuds, whether drawing on what my great-great-grandmother did to your not so great ancestor, or on the number of languages that we happen to need to use, are pointless and never-ending. The see-saw of opinions about multilingualism is clear evidence of this.

Contradictory and fuzzy messages like these keep us baffled about what multilingualism is, and seeking shelter among the herd of the day. The first victims of this insecurity, and I mean victims quite literally, are our children. The twin myths of the ease, speed, perfection, with which children acquire languages, and of unquestionable multilingual bliss urge us, responsible and caring adults, to make our little ones as multilingual as possible, as soon as possible. Perhaps we should turn away from the “effects” of multilingualism to the effects, without scare quotes, of myths about child learning. I’ll do that, in my next two posts.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Child prodigies. Saturday 4^th December 2010.

Multilingual woes and joys

Opinions have divided rather neatly about what being multilingual does to you, ever since multilingualism became worthy of attention in Western(-like) parts of the world.

Early views about multilingualism took it as only marginally less noxious than the plague. Today’s views market it as wholesale cure for all human woes, from dissolving cognitive rust to ensuring world peace. Few of us seem willing to agree that multilingualism is about as exciting as monolingualism: you go about your daily business using whatever linguistic resources happen to be relevant for going about your daily business.

Multilingualism is currently good for you: we should pop a couple of tablets of it every day, to keep us healthy. It triggers assorted enhancements, which leads to the interesting conclusion that most of the world’s population must be enhanced. But – there’s always a but – we should also beware of side effects.

Trendy headlines first extol unqualified “benefits” of multilingualism. Then the small print reveals that the research which is invoked to support trendy claims uses very, very careful language: possible correlations are suggested in specific areas, according to experimental investigation of a restricted number of informants of a particular age in particular settings, depending on how the data are analysed. The small print also reveals that there are “costs”.

Benefits and costs are, as usual, calculated against monolingual benchmarks. We are told, for example, that multilinguals are more gifted socially than monolinguals, but take a few milliseconds longer to retrieve names of objects from memory. The reason is attributed to the milli-time that a multilingual brain takes to decide which language is the relevant one to provide the required answer in. Although I am not aware of research showing the impact of millisecond lags on everyday communication, the message is that we trade off instant brain responses for more elaborate social skills, or vice versa. Milliseconds, incidentally, were also found of relevance when comparing the achievements of “late” multilinguals and “native speakers”, an issue to which I will come back in due time.

We are also told that multilingualism vitalises the mind, but results in poorer vocabulary in each language. I confess that I’m not entirely clear about what reports like these are meant to mean. Is it that monolinguals have astonishing vocabularies and dull minds? By the same reasoning, that would be the benefit and the cost of being monolingual, respectively. I also have some difficulty with the labels that are used to announce these reports. Speaking of multilingual response delays and poor vocabulary is, to me, a little too close for comfort to the terminology of suspected language disorder.

The decisive argument pro-multilingualism is usually said to be that, despite any costs, it rewires the brain. But so does motherhood, as reported in studies that, to the best of my knowledge, investigated monolingual pregnancies, and so does driving taxis, including monolingually, in London.

In short, the arguments about multilingual “benefits”, today, strangely remind of those about monolingual “benefits”, almost one century ago. Small print and costs included. We don’t seem to have learned our lesson, because our current beliefs and our current drive are the same as one century ago, only the other way around: everyone should become multilingual. I’ll have more to say about this next time.

© MCF 2010

Next post: “We shall overcome monolingualism.” Wednesday 1^st December 2010.

Outsourcing language products

The question of why we should wish to adopt standards of linguistic behaviour becomes doubly interesting in the context of imported standards of language. This refers to situations where a language is used in countries other than its country of birth, so to speak. Through continued use, the language naturally acquires new features, and so a new descriptive standard. This is what happened to English in America and Singapore, among other places, whereby we now talk about Singapore English, Australian English, Indian English and so on.

All of these are geographical varieties, duly identified by labels that refer to locations. But there is a difference, in that some of these varieties seem to be more standard than others, in the Instructions Manual sense of the word standard that I mentioned in my previous post. Japanese or Portuguese school learners of English, say, will seldom be presented with Nigerian English, say, as a possible linguistic role model. That some language standards indeed appear as more desirable than others is probably why we qualify the word standard when we talk about Kenyan or Malaysian English standards: we call them “local standards”, whereas we do not call “local” other local standards like British or American English. (In case you’re wondering why I’ve been talking so much about English, the reason is that this is the language that you and I have in common for purposes of this blog. I also use it as a handy source of examples of what goes on in other languages.)

Singapore and its English are quite familiar to me. By Singapore English I mean the Singaporean equivalent of Nigerian English and Indian English, in their respective locations. I do not mean Singlish, the other English used in the country, of whose vocabulary and other richness you can get a glimpse in the Coxford Singlish Dictionary. Singapore is an officially multilingual country in four languages, Mandarin, Malay, Tamil and English, where individual multilingualism is also the norm. 

This is a sign commonly found around building sites in Singapore.

It is not an injunction against multilingualism.

Photo: MCF

Multilingual Singapore is well known for exporting academic standards in maths and science, among other things. Singaporean standards of these and other kinds must obviously be expressed by Singaporeans but, as obviously, they must be expressed in English, in order to become exportable. So, given the excellence of local academic standards expressed in English, I’ve often wondered why local Singapore English is not the preferential standard of English in Singapore.

I think I may have found a reason. Users of “non-local” standards of language are often represented, in the specialised literature and in the popular imaginary, as belonging to a special category which has acquired a prestigious status of its own, “native speakers”. I will have quite a lot to say about natives some other day, but what I want to say here is that native speakers are implicitly, but consistently, portrayed as monolinguals. Native speakers are those of us who don’t use local languages used by other natives, whereas speakers of “local” standards do. This may well be what makes these local standards both less desirable and un-exportable: their users are multilinguals. Makes one also wonder whether striving to achieve “native” standards, a goal shared by many foreign language learners and teachers, doesn’t in fact mean striving to achieve monolingual standards. Just a thought.

Contrary to my habits, I won’t tell you this time what I will talk about next time. Perhaps I don’t need to, either.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Little Perfect-lingual and the Big Bad Funny-lingual. Saturday 13^th November 2010.

Typical multilinguals

Besides the number of languages that they use, there is one major difference between monolinguals and multilinguals: we talk about multilinguals as such, whereas we don’t talk about monolinguals as monolinguals. I don’t think anyone ever wondered whether monolingualism can affect a child’s linguistic development, or worried that school monolingualism might impair reasoning abilities, for example.

Multilingualism comes labelled, and labelled things are worthy of attention. There are websites, associations, counsellors, self-help guides, research teams, project grants, academic journals, corporate businesses, books and blogs and whatnot dedicated to multilinguals by name – this blog included, just see its title –, but seldom are we explicitly reminded that virtually all that we know about language and languages draws on monolingual data (maybe someone will now consider starting a blog called Being Monolingual?). This means that we have a lot of information on monolingual norms of language use. These norms have routinely been extrapolated to account for multilingual uses too, on the assumption that I discussed in a previous post. That is, people have been talking about multilingualism through words and concepts that apply to monolingualism. The result is that we have virtually no information on multilingual norms.

Establishing norms of behaviour, including linguistic behaviour, is important for one very crucial reason: without knowing what is typical, we cannot tell what is deviant. This is because assessment, whether informal, academic or clinical, is basically a comparison. We suspect that our child may be running a fever today because she is behaving funny today, compared to her normal self. But how can we tell whether our multilingual child is showing signs of disorder or just being, well, multilingual?

A few pointers can help us decide whether or not it is time to seek professional advice. Barring conditions like impaired hearing, which is surprisingly common in very early childhood, my take is that the presumed health of each of the languages of a multilingual matters less than what healthy multilinguals do with their languages. Let me explain that. Say you’re raising your two-year-old in Mandarin and English. She speaks in single words, either Mandarin or English. Then she finds out that words can be put together, which allows her to say more things all in one go. And one day she produces something that you interpret as want nǎi, ‘want milk’. Your child is not confused, nor is she mangling Mandarin, or English, or both: your child is using Mandarin and English. In short, your child is being multilingual. Same thing if she later on starts using the words of one language with the grammar of another. Or even if she starts stuttering, around this time. Learning to speak fluently in more than single words takes years of sophisticated coordination of breathing with dozens of muscles, in any language, whatever the number of languages. Children also stumble and fall, while they are learning to walk. If you want another example of what tiny multilinguals will do, have a look here (Hi, David!).

My point is that your child (the language user) is doing new things with her languages (the tools), which are also new to her. Practising the use of new tools is a good thing. I, for one, had to figure out how to set up this first blog of mine, and how to post to it. It took me inordinate amounts of time and aggravation, but now I can do it – sort of, I’m still learning too. My point is that we need to focus on the user’s developing skills, not on predicaments of tools. We need to look at what we do with our languages, not at what we do not do. Like this:

1. Multilinguals use their languages in different ways. One with mum, another one with dad, another one with siblings. In case you’re wondering, yes, this is the scenario in my own family. Or several languages at home, several others at work. Or one language to cook, another one to argue with the cat. Or any other way. The sky is the limit.

This amounts to saying that:

2. The languages of a multilingual cannot be equivalent. If multilinguals could use all their languages in the same way, they wouldn’t need all their languages. One all-purpose language would be enough: we would all turn into monolinguals.

Which means that:

3. Multilinguals draw on all of their linguistic resources, not on the resources afforded by single languages, in order to be able to function appropriately in their environment.

Which defines a multilingual, q.e.d.

... Hmm, some of you may be wondering. If all of this is so standard and so healthy and so fine, how come there is such hullabaloo about mixing? Mixes are uses of several languages in one utterance or, more generally, in a communicative exchange. They’re sometimes called codeswitches, codemixes, blends. “Mix” is a neater word, I find. I also wonder quite a lot about the mix fuss, so I propose to talk about it in my next post.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Languages come in flavours. Saturday 23^rd October 2010.

Not being monolingual

As far as I can tell, multilinguals are quite ordinary human beings: they’re many and they’re ancient. There are more multilinguals than monolinguals the world over, and the use of several languages by the same individuals has been documented as far back in time as historical sources allow us to peer into our linguistic habits.

Those of us who use a single language throughout life are monolinguals. Multilinguals are, therefore, not monolinguals, as Monsieur de La Palice might have been credited with saying. Nevertheless, and strangely enough, there are cumulative indications that multilinguals should in fact behave like monolinguals. To me, this is about as reasonable as wishing that a monolingual behave like a multilingual. To Jacques de La Palice, this would be proof that sometimes it makes sense to spell out truisms.

I’m sure I am not alone in having been confronted with musings such as: “I see, so you speak several languages. But which one is your mother tongue?”, or “Multilingual, you say? Oh. In which language do you think, then?” Questions of this kind all have one thing in common: they attempt to extract the monolingual from within the self-described multilingual. They reach for the-expected-user-of-only-one-language that somewhere, somehow, must be lurking in there and struggling to surface for air.

We owe the reasoning behind such questions to the Ancient Greeks. Their enduring trend of thought about language uses (they must have thought in Ancient Greek) is best described by their endearing label, “barbarian”, which applied to anyone who failed to make themselves understood to educated users of Ancient Greek-only. Several centuries down the line, the assumption appears to take the form that if you’re human, you’re by definition a user of one language. Using several languages is therefore the special case.

Examples of monolingualism taken as default state of humankind crop up everywhere that it matters. At home, parents in mixed families are told to stick to one language each to address their children, even if they are themselves multilinguals. Better still, they should see to it that their offspring grow up with one main language (or a dominant one, or a primary one, or a first one, and so on). This is probably to make sure that the little multilinguals that they insist on nurturing also have a fair chance of becoming proper big monolinguals. In school, behavioural quirks, difficulties with academic performance and other signs of non-conformity are attributed to a child’s multilingualism. In clinic, confirmed signs of linguistic or cognitive disorder in a multilingual child result in the recommendation to switch to a single language, usually the mainstream language, in the child’s home.

Even on the understanding that multilinguals cannot be monolinguals, the expectation is that they should behave like several monolinguals, as many as the number of languages in their repertoire. This (rather unsettling) view of some human beings as composed of other human beings does not describe multilingualism: it describes something that I have no idea what it is, and that I call multi-monolingualism just to be able to talk about it. I suspect that taking multilingualism for multi-monolingualism is what makes people take multilinguals for patchwork: expressions like incomplete command of languages, semilingualism, split personality, deficient exposure, come to mind.

Monolingualism thus seems to be, still today, a programmatic approach to linguistic and other well-being, with both preventive and curative effects. Against monolingual mindsets and monolingual benchmarks, it is clear that multilingualism will emerge as special. But this cannot be right, because the majority of the world’s population cannot be exceptional. There must be default behaviours among multilinguals too. So what is it that makes a multilingual a multilingual? This is what I’ll attempt to work out in my next post.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Typical multilinguals. Wednesday 20^th October 2010.