Being multiscriptal: why our alphabets matter=Guest post=

Photo credit: Matt Thorsen

by Tim Brookes

Before I started the Endangered Alphabets project, I thought of myself as being multilingual: good French, decent German, solid Latin, tourist Spanish and Italian, toasts in Russian and obscenities in half a dozen languages.

Now, after seven years of carving the world’s most obscure and endangered writing systems, it’s clear what a novice I am. I just received a Facebook birthday card from a colleague who wrote in a dozen languages, most of them endangered. And my ethnocentricity has been challenged head-on by the fact that in doing more than 100 carvings in more than 30 different minority scripts I can now read precisely one word in a non-Latin script: the Balinese word suksma, meaning ‘thank you’.

The Balinese word “suksma” (‘thank you’).

Carved in cherry

Photo credit: Tom Way

Yet oddly enough my insular limitations have also been a strength in this ongoing project, or at least have offered me perspectives that might otherwise be hard to come by. My first exhibition of carvings, all of which featured Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in endangered writing systems, grew out of my stumbling upon Omniglot, the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages. It was a revelation. I thought of myself as fairly well-traveled and widely-read, yet I’d never heard of probably 85% of the languages on Omniglot. And the texts themselves were all Greek to me – well, more than Greek, given that in many cases I couldn’t pronounce a single glyph or understand a single word-cluster.

In a way, that was an advantage. I saw those languages not in terms of the communication of meaning but as a series of symbols that had evolved (or in some instances been created) for a reason, or a series of reasons. My ignorance led me to ask questions that might never occur to someone versed in that language. Why was the Inuktitut script so mathematical? Why was Baybayin so damn thin it was hard to carve and even harder to paint?

The phrase “mother tongue” in Baybayin, the pre-colonial script of the Philippines,

based on calligraphy/graffiti by Kristian Kabuay.

Carved in flame cherry

Photo credit: Tom Way

Why were the letters of Samaritan off balance? Why did Cherokee have serifs on curves – and come to think of it, why did it have serifs at all?

And the more I looked at these unfamiliar scripts, the more I realized we English-speakers never stop and ask ourselves basic questions about our own language and alphabet. Why were we so smitten with the Latin alphabet – to such an extent that the default academic font was called Times New Roman? Why were we so keen on parallels, right angels, circles, the Euclidean forms that are in fact impossible to write freehand? What does English have against diacritics, when other languages embrace them to such an extent that some scripts look like a large wet black dog shaking itself?

But the really interesting questions were about language itself, and the way people instinctively think about it. For example: it has been fascinating to me how often people look at my Alphabet carvings and say, “That one looks like an alien script”. I even though so myself when I first started. I’ve come to think of this as the Stonehenge phenomenon: when people look at Stonehenge they see pattern and therefore intent but they can’t see meaning. That’s a powerful, magnetic phenomenon. They can’t look away or stop wondering what it means and why it was created.

I think an “alien” alphabet has the same qualities: we can see it has shape and purpose and therefore intent, but it’s so utterly unfamiliar we can’t understand it, and we can’t even imagine understanding it. So we assume it must not be of this Earth. More and more, I find myself thinking in such galactic terms and seeing and hearing language as a series of variations on the concept of pattern.  

“Happy New Year” in Mongolian calligraphy,

based on the work of Sukhbaatar.

Carved in pau amarillo

Photo credit: Tom Way

Let me explain. When I’ve finished carving and painting one of my scripts into, say, a piece of curly maple and then I add the first coat of tung oil, an extraordinary three-dimensional change takes place. The wood acquires both luster and depth, as if rising and sinking at the same time. Faint shadows become deep currents. Knots become cyclones. The grain ripens one way, but in the same instant a different set of ripples will often appear running perpendicular to it. The wood becomes anatomical, muscular. And the black text seems to float both in and above it, as if it is both part and not part of the wood.

The first time I really looked at this transformation, it struck me that something fascinating was taking place in terms of pattern. The grain in the wood and the ripples running more or less perpendicular to it, looking like patterns in wet sand, are expressions of the rhythms running through everything.

The verb “la” (‘to be’) in Nom, the pre-colonial script of Vietnam.

Carved in quilted maple

Photo credit: Tom Way

Trees have been on this planet for some 370 million years, and the patterns in the grain – well, they illustrate forces that have been acting on matter since the dawn of the universe.

Part of the human condition, though, is to try to see the shape and drift of those forces. We’re pattern-seeking creatures, after all. And what struck me about languages, especially when carved in wood, is that they show our own efforts to understand the world by creating patterns – patterns that others can recognize and convert into speech, into ideas – overlaid on the deeper, older, more complex patterns that have made us what we are.

Tim Brookes is the founder of the Endangered Alphabets project, whose carvings have been exhibited all over North America including at Harvard, Yale, and the Smithsonian Institution. He is also the author of 16 books, details of which can be found at his homepage.

© Tim Brookes 2016

Next post: Nature, nurture, and linguistic giftedness. Saturday 23^rd July 2016.

Nativeness: The curse and blessings of genes, geography and cadence=Guest post=

by Ng Wan Qing Jessie

I am of Chinese descent, with dark hair and eyes. I was born in Singapore, raised in a trilingual family. My parents spoke to each other in their respective ‘dialects’ – Teochew and Hokkien, and spoke to us in Mandarin. A large part of my childhood revolved around these three languages, and it was not until I started attending kindergarten that I had to learn English. Boy, was it a struggle! I distinctly remember how, at the age of 5, I could not even tell the teacher that I wanted to go to the bathroom. It took the aid of a Mandarin-speaking teacher to do the appropriate translation before I could avoid the embarrassment of wetting my underwear.

Fast forward to 2014. I am now working as an English language teacher in a local secondary school, having completed the Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examinations, a Bachelor degree, a postgraduate diploma in Education, and a Master degree, entirely in English. Admittedly, I have not had the need to sit for IELTS (International English Language Testing System) or TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), so I cannot tell you about my language proficiency in those terms, but I would think that it is sufficiently high for you to be able to understand what I am rambling on about here. However, I am disgruntled that as a trained and experienced teacher of English, I regularly face the discrimination that I am not a competent one.

Competence in a language, for reasons unbeknownst to enlightened scholars, appears to be defined by DNA, accent or citizenship. My dark hair and eyes, as well as my Singaporean accent and, to some extent, the red passport I hold, seem to label me as a second-rate English language teacher. In my own country, the prejudice is not that bad, although once we had a Science teacher from mainland China joining our school and I overheard people gushing about how good she must be, because she has an ‘American accent’. Occasionally, I do hear random and, dare I say, ill-informed people on the streets making comments on how their child’s teacher is ‘better’ (presumably than typical, Asian-looking local teachers) because he is ‘ang moh’ – which literally translates to ‘red hair’ and is a popular local term used to describe Caucasians –, but that has, mercifully, decreased over the years. Ironically, this is probably aided in part by the rise of xenophobia among the young in recent years, which led to the sudden realisation that ‘non ang mohs’ could also be competent English teachers.

Or maybe I have just gone selectively deaf. In any case, when I started looking for opportunities to diversify my teaching experience overseas, I fell victim once again to the curse of my chromosomal makeup. I have read quite a few ESL/EFL (English as a Second/Foreign Language) teaching position descriptions with much enthusiasm, only to have my hopes shattered at the end when I realise that they were looking only for ‘native speakers’ or ‘native-sounding speakers’. In some instances, they would list the countries where the potential candidate’s academic certificates were obtained from as pre-requisites. So far, the only success I have had is in countries where schools offering the Singapore curriculum have been set up.

Recently, I have been harbouring suicidal thoughts. No, not of the literal sort, but the semi-literal kind. I have been feeling restless after completing my Master of Arts degree in June 2013, and slowly but surely, the fatal thought of enrolling in a PhD programme has been creeping up on me. Understanding the importance of casting my academic net far and wide, I pored over my options. It was to my dismay to discover that many institutions require me to submit either IELTS or TOEFL scores, even though I had completed both my undergraduate and graduate studies in English. It was even categorically stated by one particular institution, and I quote, 

“All applicants whose native language is NOT English or who have NOT received their undergraduate education in a country where the native language is English MUST submit scores from one of two internationally recognised assessments of English language proficiency, IELTS or TOEFL. Receiving your bachelor’s degree in a country that lists English as an official language such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Nigeria, or Singapore does not exempt you from the English language proficiency requirement.”

I guess many of the young Singaporeans who are raised in English-speaking homes, and hence would logically qualify as ‘native speakers’, would now be quite confused about their ‘native language’. I can hardly blame them, because I am confused too. Instead of being defined by the language spoken from birth, native language users seem to be defined by the country they took their first breath in.

All hope is not lost, however. Recently, I was invited to attend an interview for an English language teaching position in Japan. They were looking for Singapore-trained teachers. My interest was automatically piqued because this seemed to be in such contrast to what I have known all along. At the interview, I asked my interviewer why his company was specifically looking for English teachers in Singapore. After all, I probed, would it not be far ‘better’ to look for candidates from ‘native-speaking countries’? His response revived the dying flame in me that, with my profile, I could actually be considered as being on par with the traditional perception of a ‘native speaker’ as having certain skin pigments, accent or nationality. He spoke of his admiration for our education system, our working language as English, and our teachers having to go through rigorous training in a world-renowned teacher training institution. The parting line left a smile on my face: “I do think you are a native speaker, never mind if your accent is different!”

Ng Wan Qing Jessie is a Science-turned-English language teacher. She graduated from the National Institute of Education (Singapore) in 2013 with a Master of Arts (Applied Linguistics) degree, with a focus on multimodal discourse analysis. A copy of her dissertation may be requested from the NIE Digital Repository. She is currently working as an adjunct teacher in a secondary school in Singapore, while considering graduate school options.

© Ng Wan Qing Jessie 2014

Next post: The multilingual scapegoat. Saturday 13^th December 2014.

Native multilinguals

Some of my language teaching students sometimes express out loud their heartfelt desire to become native speakers. I was quite baffled the first time I heard this: we’re all native speakers, surely, and we can’t become natives, if we take the word “native” to mean what I supposed it is meant to mean, ‘from birth’. But does it? It turned out that my students’ previous teacher training had included the mantra that “native” means ‘flawless’ in this collocation, and flawless, whatever we take this word to mean, is certainly something that all of us can at least aspire to become.

This latter meaning of the word “native” has in fact been made quite explicit in the literature about “second” (or “foreign”) languages – with my profuse apologies for the scare quotes that will crop up all over this post: I’ve no idea what the scared words might mean, in this literature. This meaning explains, for example, why some of us think it a worthwhile endeavour to compare school language learners to “native speakers”, for purposes of language quality assessment. But there is a snag: if learning languages from birth entails flawless use of those languages, how come multilinguals across the board, including simultaneous multilinguals who learn more than one language from Day One, go on being compared to “native speakers”?

The thing is that “native speaker” has yet a third meaning, ‘monolingual’, this time a covert one, which nevertheless heeds the overt, systematic practice of comparing any multilinguals to monolinguals. This meaning explains, for example, the virtual absence of acknowledgement that multilinguals can be “native” users of their languages. If we accept that multilingual proficiency should be assessed through comparison with “native” proficiency, then we’re saying that multilinguals and natives are two distinct kinds of language users, since we can’t compare a thing to itself.

But there is another snag. If multilinguals aren’t native users of their languages, then they must be “non-native”, by the logic of the assumedly useful labels which populate research on language uses. However, they aren’t, because multilinguals get compared to non-natives, too. In addition, simultaneous multilinguals can’t be “non-native”, if their languages are there for them from Day One, which is one of the meanings of “native”. Multilinguals, in sum, appear to inhabit a Linguistic No Man’s Land.

“Day One”, unfortunately, may not be what clinches the issue either. If the language(s) in which we’re brought up from birth happen to be imported languages, then those languages aren’t “ours”. And if we learn a new language in early childhood, though not exactly from Day One, how many days should we count to count as a native user of it? Can I, for example, claim French as native language, having lived with it from just before age 3? Or was I then already way past my native learning prime, as I must have been when I learned my other languages several years later? If you’re interested in the mysteries of “critical periods” which snipe at “native” language learning abilities, Carmen Muñoz and David Singleton’s state of the art discussion, A critical review of age-related research on L2 ultimate attainment, is a must-read.

Scare-quoted terminological acrobatics about multilingualism would be hilarious, of course, if it didn’t appear in “serious” research, thereby proving that we’ve no idea what we’re talking about. Have a look in my article First language acquisition and teaching, to see what I mean. The muddle got compounded when researchers developed a preference for labelling the languages of a multilingual by means of numbers, possibly on the belief that identifying things by numbers makes them look scientifically unquestionable. There’s always some “L1” lurking in there somewhere, which means that there must be rankings of L2, ... Ln, where the numbers apparently serve the purpose of showing that languages either politely follow one another or should do so.

But what do these numbers mean when, say, simultaneous multilinguals learn one or more new languages in school? Not much, it seems, because we prefer to stick to labels rather than acknowledge their undefinable uselessness. Since “L1” represents an inherently singular concept (in more than one sense of “singular”), the logic of cardinal and ordinal numbering requires that L1 = “first language”, whereby everyone must have a single “first” language, endowed with rights of primogeniture associated with other firstborns. If there’s no single chronological first language, no problem: we just assign one to children, for reasons of administrative expediency, and call it their “mother tongue”. Finally, by the logic that first = “best”, we end up talking about “dominant” and “balanced” languages, and about all the other hopeless labels which do no more than betray our hopeless beliefs that multilinguals are, in fact, funny monolinguals.

This state of affairs may well explain why multilingualism goes on being blamed for anything that deviates from monolingualism, to which I’ll return some other day. Meanwhile, the next post, a guest post, goes back to where this post started, to report vivid encounters with “nativeness” from a language teacher who’s also had plenty of reasons to wonder about the meaning of this word.








Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2011). First language acquisition and teaching. AILA Review, 24, 78-87 DOI: 10.1075/aila.24.06cru

Muñoz, C., & Singleton, D. (2010). A critical review of age-related research on L2 ultimate attainment. Language Teaching, 44 (01), 1-35 DOI: 10.1017/S0261444810000327


© MCF 2014 

Next post: =Guest post= Nativeness: The curse and blessings of genes, geography and cadence, by Ng Wan Qing Jessie. Saturday 15^th November 2014.

Mother tongue education or flexible multilingual education?=Guest post=

by Jean-Jacques Weber

Mother tongue education is often advocated as the ideal system of education for all children in our late-modern, globalized world. However, in this blog post I provide a critique of mother tongue education, arguing that it is not always the panacea it is frequently made out to be. This is also the theme of my new book, Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First, where I criticize mother tongue education programmes for being too rigidly fixed upon a particular language (the ‘mother tongue’), and explore more flexible and more child-focused forms of multilingual education.

A first problem with mother tongue education is what could be referred to as ‘the challenge of superdiverse classrooms’. Indeed, in many classrooms of today’s globalized world, there may be students with a wide range of different home languages, which makes mother tongue education increasingly difficult to implement. This allows governments to opt out of their responsibilities, by means of the commonsensical argument that in any case it would be impossible to organize mother tongue education for each individual child.

A second problem with the call for mother tongue education is that it can involve a kind of arrogance on the part of the (frequently white, Western European or US American) ‘expert’ who tells people what is good for them – e.g. that they should keep up their minority language. It has been too easy for researchers to take an attitude of superiority and to look upon (e.g.) South African parents who prefer their children to be educated through English rather than an indigenous African language as ‘victims of false consciousness’ or as ‘afflicted by an attitudinal malaise or syndrome’.

A third problem is that mother tongue education tends to lead to rather fixed multilingual education systems, because politicians, policy-makers and teachers often rely on a discourse of ethnolinguistic essentialism in attributing a ‘mother tongue’ to the schoolchildren. In many cases, however, attribution of a single mother tongue involves at least a simplification of an increasingly complex multilingual reality. The problem is that ‘mother tongue’ is a politicized concept, and hence not the best one for a pedagogical approach to be based upon.

There is therefore a need to move from rather fixed mother tongue education programmes to more flexible multilingual education. While mother tongue education tends to be focused on the standard variety (the ‘mother tongue’) ascribed on the basis of children’s perceived ethnicity, flexible multilingual education builds upon children’s actual home linguistic varieties, upon the whole of their multilingual repertoires including non-standard varieties, urban vernaculars, etc. Moreover, while mother tongue education tends to provide delayed access to a global language such as English, flexible multilingual education prefers very gradual shifts between local and global languages from an early stage (at least for children with multilingual repertoires).

Furthermore, there is a key difference in the primary aims of flexible multilingual education, as opposed to mother tongue education. The latter is often concerned with the revitalization of a particular local language, which is to be achieved through a struggle against the hegemonic encroachment of (usually) English. In the process, it sometimes overlooks the needs of particular groups of students such as migrant students. On the other hand, the primary concern of flexible multilingual education is to include all schoolchildren and to provide them with high-quality access to the languages that they need for educational and professional success. Take, for example, the mother tongue education systems in francophone Canada or Catalonia. The fact that the system may impede migrant students’ access to a global language such as English is ignored by the mother tongue education advocates, in whose eyes the maintenance of French or the revitalization of Catalan is the overarching goal, in front of which everything else pales in significance.

Finally, with its focus on the standard variety of the assumed ‘mother tongue’, mother tongue education frequently erases non-standard varieties or ‘dialects’, which as a result are not seen as worth preserving. This has happened in Singapore, where the focus on the ‘official’ mother tongue – Mandarin in the case of the Chinese community – involves the deliberate eradication of all other varieties of Chinese. Somewhat surprisingly, even academics tend to look upon this as a highly successful language policy to the extent that it has managed to supplant the different varieties – Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, etc. – with the standard variety, Mandarin. The same is happening in China, where nation-building efforts involve the imposition of standard Chinese – here referred to as Putonghua – and the marginalization of the other varieties of Chinese. In light of the political nature of the distinction between language and dialect, these are very disturbing policies and attitudes that seem to be encouraged by mother tongue education: only the standard variety is perceived as being in need of protection and preservation, whereas non-standard varieties are largely erased and considered to be worthless. Another example of this can be found in parts of South Africa, where some mother tongue advocates object to the use of mixed Xhosa-English varieties in the classroom – though these correspond to many urban children’s actual home linguistic resources – and aim to enforce instead the use of a ‘pure’, standard variety of Xhosa, even though this may seem like a foreign language to many students.

In my book, I explore these and numerous other case studies from around the world and show that flexible and child-centred multilingual education programmes would be preferable to mother tongue education, in that they would allow a full acknowledgement of the hybrid and transnational linguistic repertoires that people actually deploy in our late-modern, superdiverse societies.

Jean-Jacques Weber is Professor of English and Education at the University of Luxembourg. He has published widely in the areas of discourse analysis, multilingualism and education, including Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First (2014), Multilingualism and Mobility in Europe (2014), Multilingualism and Multimodality (2013) and Introducing Multilingualism: A Social Approach (2012).

© Jean-Jacques Weber 2014

Next post: Some languages are more languages than others. Saturday 26^th July 2014.

Making a home for new languages

My family ended up trilingual instead of bilingual, as we parents had taken it for granted, not because we one day decided that it would be fun (or “beneficial”) to add a third language to our home, but because this thing about agreeing on family language policies has more to it than just adult know-how.

When the children came along, our home was built around our two languages, Portuguese and Swedish. Each of them was a foreign language to the speaker of the other, but both nevertheless carried within them home flavours that our former common language, English, never did. We went on building our home in the same way for a number of years, rejoicing, not least, in the added goodie that hearing our new languages spoken to our children turned out to be a very effective (and inexpensive) way of learning them ourselves. But home, of course, is only one part of a child’s world.

Our children attended preschool in both Swedish and German, although it was English that became their real language of schooling. It did so in the best possible way. Their first experience of an English-medium school was in Hong Kong. As it happened, the principal had in place what he called a “buddy programme”, something that we parents had never heard of before, to cater for children whose command of English was for some reason below par. Each new child became the ward of a veteran monolingual English-speaking child in the same class. It was the veteran child’s responsibility to make sure that the new child integrated, from knowing where the toilets were located and how to use them (Asian toilets included), through making new friends, to sorting out difficulties with class assignments. It was the new child’s responsibility to show active goodwill in integrating. There were no rewards for any of the children. They took their teamwork as part and parcel of school activities, on the awareness that if someone in some class is struggling, then the whole class is struggling.

It worked very well. One of our children had a hearing disorder which up to then had stymied integration in other schools, including monolingual schools in the children’s home languages, and this was the first time that not hearing well didn’t mean not feeling well in school. What I learned from this was that school well-being, and therefore learning, is best taken care of through assigning responsibility to the children themselves.

It worked so well, in fact, that English, the “foreign” language that we parents had once banished from our home, found its way back in through the backdoor, the children’s door. We came to realise two things: first, that we parents needed to use English to assist with homework, because homework comes in tongues; and second, that English was turning from our children’s school language into their sibling language – which it still is, by the way, now that the children are no longer children. And no, neither of these novelties lost their novelty in any smooth way. The children found it funny, to put it mildly, to hear us parents use their language to them; and we parents found it even funnier, ditto, to watch our own flesh and blood build a cubbyhole of their own around Foreign-Speak. You can read all about the negotiation of our respective toils and tribulations in Chapter 10, ‘Language input and language management in a multilingual environment’, of my book Three is a Crowd?

The title of this post, in short, reflects what multilingualism is all about: each of the languages of a multilingual serves a dedicated niche. It also reflects the dynamics of language use. Whether we use one language or more, our children cannot become replicas of ourselves, including in the niche that we assign to each of our languages, because cloning fits sheep better than human beings. Like everything that matters to us, languages matter more or matter less to different people, or matter in different ways along our lives. The next post has more to say about this.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Languages lost and languages regained. Wednesday 7^th March 2012.

First, main, best

If the title of this post reminds of the Olympic motto, it should: it’s pure competition out there. Which language, in the singular, tops the lot? Despite lingering suspicion that all languages of a multilingual should preferably stand on equivalent footing, ranking languages ex-aequo is not a preferred option.

Let’s see. First, first. What comes first comes before anything else, in time or space, so your first language is the one you have after you have no language. People can have more than one first language, of course, if they’re brought up multilingually from birth. But speaking of several first languages generates confusion when “first language” is represented as “L1”, which might have been a usable way of naming the L in question when everyone was assumed to start life in monolingual worlds. Since this is not so, and since confusing labels about language matters have a habit of persevering, you can then have several el-ones, which looks and sounds funny because if something is found to be suitably represented by the single unit “1”, then it cannot be suitably represented by several unit “ones”.

The confusion increases when multi-el-oners go to school and learn new languages. These languages, whether one or more, become their el-twos, because they are all second languages. The confusion peaks when the word first in “first language” is taken to mean not ‘first’ but ‘main’, in the sense that, say, a First Lady is a Main Lady, or ‘best’, in the Olympic sense that whoever comes first is best.

Main, then. This is variously taken to be the language you spontaneously use when initiating an exchange, the language you dream or swear in, or the language you do your maths in, for example. The problems are that when you’re initiating talk, you’re preparing to talk to someone, who also has at least one language, so you choose language not on instinct but according to what you know about your interlocutor’s language(s); that you dream and swear in whatever languages became relevant for what prompted your dreams and swearwords; and that maths is something that you learn, usually in school, from someone who must speak to you in some language, which then becomes your maths language.

Next, best. Really tricky, this one. Best for what? Or does “best” mean something like ‘best quality’, in which case do we mean quality grammar, or vocabulary, or fluency, which, again, must be best for specific purposes? For example, English is my best language for work, and also the main one and the first one that comes to me when I think about work matters, but I wouldn’t honestly know how to answer a simple yes/no question about whether English is my best language in absolute terms.

I believe that we need to shed the absolute nature of terms like first, main and best, when talking about our languages, and start thinking about them in terms of their uses rather than their properties. We’ve known this ever since the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski wrote, all the way back in 1923, that:

“A statement, spoken in real life, is never detached from the situation in which it has been uttered. For each verbal statement by a human being has the aim and function of expressing some thought or feeling actual at that moment and in that situation, and necessary for some reason or other to be made known to another person or persons – in order either to serve purposes of common action, or to establish ties of purely social communion, or else to deliver the speaker of violent feelings or passions.”

This is what we have our languages for, and each one will naturally shift from best to subsidiary to first and then back again, depending on which uses we go on making of them. But what happens, then, when we want to use our languages, and develop our skills in them, and find little or no support for this in our community? The next post, a guest post, gives us some answers to this.

© MCF 2011

Next post: =Guest post= Learning to read in a multilingual society: challenges for Africa, by Viv Edwards. Saturday 19^th March 2011.

Mother tongues

Going by straightforward definitions, a mother tongue should be the tongue that your mother uses. Assuming that she uses it to you and so you learn it from her, your mother’s tongue is then your mother tongue too.

“Is that your tongue, mother?”

Photo: Drawn on wood by T. W. Wood, 1869 (Wikimedia Commons)

However, as I’ve been arguing in this blog, things to do with languages are seldom straightforward and, when they happen to be, someone is sure to mess them up. In lay and specialist circles alike, the meaning of the term “mother tongue” ranges from ‘first language’, through ‘best language’, to ‘main language’. We sometimes even find mother tongue equated to “L1”, a term belonging to an intriguing tradition of identifying languages by numbers. I will have quite a few things to say about 1^st Ls and other numbered Ls in future, but what these supposed definitions of mother tongue have in common is that they are all undefined themselves. So saying that your mother tongue is, for example, your best language, or vice versa, if you don’t know what a mother tongue or a best language might be, is like explaining that sulphuric acid is H₂SO₄ and that H₂SO₄ is sulphuric acid, if you have no idea what sulphuric acid and H₂SO₄ might be.  

In short, there is no definition of mother tongue. We could live with this: other things that we talk about, like life, or love, or languages, or multilinguals, have no definition either. But what “no definition” in fact means is ‘many definitions’. Which means that everyone defines mother tongue their way, which means that nobody is talking about the same thing when they are talking about mother tongue. The only thing on which there seems to be some agreement is that mother tongue is singular (meaning ‘just one’, not ‘funny’).

One solution to mother tongue singularity is to assign one to a child, or the other way around, on the strength of the child’s presumed ancestry. But since someone decided that ancestry is also a singularity, and since children can have multi-ancestries through no choice of their own, this solution in fact solves very little. In Singapore, to give but one example, a child’s mother tongue is defined according to the ethnicity of the child’s father. This raises the fascinating question of how a child’s father tongue might be defined, not to mention a child’s other-caregiver tongues, which do not necessarily match the parents’, in multilingual communities like Singapore. (A side-thought: isn’t it interesting that so many terms that have to do with language, languages, their uses and their users are undefined, undefinable, or funnily defined?)

In short, again, mother tongues are assigned on the strength of random criteria. It doesn’t matter, for example, that your mother (or your father) may have more than one mother(father) tongue her(him)self, and use all of them with you, or that your mother (ditto) doesn’t use any of her own tongues with you. It doesn’t matter either that your mother tongue might possibly be what you are exposed to as a child, which is (yet) another definition of this term, and might possibly mean that “mother tongue” corresponds to your full linguistic repertoire. In monolingual contexts, this is certainly what mother tongue means. In multilingual ones, your supposed mother tongue may actually turn out to be a step-tongue, to borrow and generalise the pithy title of Anthea Fraser Gupta’s book.

Singular mother tongue assignments arise in multilingual contexts only, and their consequences are far from random. If you are matched to a mother tongue, you are expected to show proficiency in that tongue, and to represent its speakers. Including if you’re a child. If you don’t, because you don’t use that tongue in the way someone says you should, or because it’s not your fault that someone decided you had that tongue, your whole future may be at stake. Especially if you’re a child.

Children go to school. Decisions about mother tongue gain relevance in schooling contexts, for schooling purposes. Knowing that children are the ones to be schooled, and assuming that schools are there for the children, one would be justified in believing that mother or other tongue assignments would take the schooling child’s conditions into account. My next post will check this out.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Schooling in tongues. Wednesday 15^th December 2010.

Linguistic virtuosi, prestissimo

We all know that children are outstanding learners, and especially outstanding at learning languages. But how do we know this? Who told us, or how else did we find this out?

Let’s see. Children are, apparently, champion sprinters. Whatever they learn, they learn very fast, and their linguistic galloping prowess is in a class of its own. Words fail us: child language acquisition is a feat, it’s staggering, it’s magic – these are not my words, by the way. Our tiny Formula One racers acquire language at astounding, breakneck, breathtaking speed – not my words here either. 

I’ve often wondered why these words appear in the same statements that say that all children acquire language in the same way, at the same pace, with the same results. The “speed of acquisition” of language has nevertheless become one of many unquestionable truths about children and their learning. But how can something that we all do be wondrous? Compared to what, since we can’t be comparing children among themselves?

Geoffrey Sampson prefers to question the unquestionable: why, he asks, “is it appropriate to regard a learning period of two years or so as ‘remarkably fast’ rather than ‘remarkably slow’? [...] The truth is that the only reason we have for expecting language acquisition to take any particular length of time is our knowledge of how long it actually has taken in observed cases”. Adults, he adds, tend to be favourably disposed towards small children, so a verdict of slowness, or of indifference, against one of speed, would make one seem “boorish”. Sampson concludes that children “are good at learning languages, because people are good at learning anything that life throws at us”. You can read the whole argument in his 2005 book, The ‘language instinct’ debate. 

It turns out that children are outstanding language learners because adults aren’t. This comparison deftly glosses over the fact that we’re talking about versions of language learning that cannot be compared. The reasoning is that children are good and fast because adults are bad and slow. Or that adults are bad and slow because children are good and fast. If, that is, this can be called a “reasoning” at all. Where children are taken as ideals of linguistic perfection, it is perhaps understandable that adults can do little more than remain spellbound – and tongue-tied.

The intellectual marvels that we go on crediting our children with might also explain, perhaps expectedly, another development. This is the quite frightening one that Susan Linn documents in Consuming Kids. Soon, on the perception of “many languages” as the latest desirable gadget, children themselves may start demanding to be made multilinguals.

If they do, they may be in for an unpleasant surprise as soon as they start school, where multilingualism appears to matter less than commitment to a “mother tongue” (one only, yes). We’ll see how, in the next two posts.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Mother tongues. Saturday 11^th December 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.