Switching languages, mixing languages – or using languages?

Many years ago, I went, as usual, to fetch my children from Swedish Supply School, which met once a week after regular (English-medium) school in Singapore, where our family lived. On that particular occasion, one of the children was especially eager to start telling me all about her day. She spoke Portuguese, this being the language that the children and I have always shared, and she speckled it with so much English and Swedish that I felt compelled to interrupt her. “Querida!”, I giggled, “Que língua é que estás a falar?!” (‘Sweetheart! Which language are you speaking?!’). She stared at me briefly as if I were a clueless alien and then snapped, in squeaky clean Portuguese: “Uma qualquer, para dizer o que eu quero!” (‘Whichever, to say what I want to say!’).

What was I doing, here? I was giving evidence that being multilingual, as I am, hadn’t immunised me against the persuasion that languages are objects of reverence: they are there to be respected. Which meant that I was paying attention to my girl’s languages, not to her.

What was she doing? She was giving evidence that being multilingual, as she is, had made it clear to her that languages are tools: they are there to serve our needs. She had last used Portuguese in the early morning, a long time before the end of her working day, which had taken place first in English and then in Swedish. So why not use, in “whichever” language, the bits and pieces of the other language(s) in which those bits and pieces first became meaningful to her? All of my children did this, as I discuss in Chapter 10 of my book Three is a Crowd?. I found it particularly revealing that later, when they and I talked about these episodes, it was their turn to giggle when reporting their unawareness that they had been ‘mixing languages’, as this behaviour is usually called. Besides, as my girl then added about this episode, she knew that I knew all three languages in question, so “there was no problem there, right?”

Again, she left me without arguments. It may be true that only multilinguals in my children’s three languages might understand what they were saying when they used their languages in this way, but any multilingual in any languages would understand what they were doing: they were being typical multilinguals. The question then arises of why we came to talk about a feature of typical multilingualism as ‘mixing’, a word with rather negative undertones. Conversely, we might also ask what it means to not mix, or switch, languages or codes. Multilingual mixes usually raise judgemental or worried eyebrows as providing evidence of bad or impaired use of language, respectively. But “bad/impaired use of language” in fact means ‘bad/impaired use of a language’, and there is a world of difference between language and a language. So why don’t monolingual mixes cause generalised unease, and where do we draw the line?

The issue is precisely one of lines. Like country boundaries, language boundaries are figments of our collective imagination. Not even linguists have any idea what or where they might be. So why do we go on interpreting multilingual mixes as offending language boundaries? Ofelia García, in an interview conducted by François Grosjean on his blog Life as a Bilingual and titled What is Translanguaging?, answers this question pithily:

“Linguists often refer to the behavior of bilinguals when they go across these named language categories as code-switching. It is an external view of language. But translanguaging takes the internal perspective of speakers whose own mental grammar has been developed in social interaction with others. […] Translanguaging is more than going across languages; it is going beyond named languages and taking the internal view of the speaker’s language use.”

The book that Ofelia García edited with Li Wei, Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, has more on how translanguaging characterises everyday multilingual practices.

Languages are there to be used as the tools that they are, not replicated as straitjacketed instruction manuals. Different languages make sense to us precisely because they allow us to engage with what matters to us in different ways, and to give the right flavour to what we wish to say. To use one of my favourite analogies, how we deal with our languages is no different from how we deal with our food. There are (standard) recipes, that we haven’t been called upon to put together because they were devised and tried by other people; there are ingredients, and tips about method and seasonings. But then we do it our way, because we are the ones doing the cooking. Favouring observation of each of the languages of multilinguals over what the multilinguals themselves do with them is like analysing recipes to find out how they taste. Multilinguals only transgress those rules that never took multilinguals themselves into account.

The next post, a guest post, keeps to the topic of creativity, this time about how and why we find ways of preserving our languages in printed form.

© MCF 2016

Next post: =Guest post= Being multiscriptal: why our alphabets matter, by Tim Brookes. Saturday 9^th July 2016.

Language, multilingualism and racism=Guest post=

by Jean-Jacques Weber

Since the 2008 election of President Obama in the United States of America, we are increasingly told that we are witnessing the end of racism. I would argue, on the contrary, that racism is still all-pervasive but that it has been normalized.

Racism has become such a part of everyday common sense that we often do not even notice it any longer. We do notice it at certain times, as when in Europe and elsewhere, Far Right parties score electoral victories, with increasing numbers of people voting for them and their elected representatives sitting in the European Parliament, or in national parliaments and local communes, whether in Austria, France, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland, or many other countries.

It is easy, at times like this, to construct those who vote for such parties as the racists and us, by implication, as non-racist. In fact, however, these seemingly opposed views actually exist on a continuum, on which it is easy to slide from softer to harder forms of racism. None of us is immune from racist views and in particular the language racist views that our Western societies are steeped in. Language racism refers to the manifold ways in which language is increasingly used nowadays as a proxy for race in order to exclude people.

Before I discuss some examples, there are two important points that we need to keep in mind about racism. First, racism is not only cognitive but also structural and institutional. Racism is not just a matter of individual beliefs, which can be abolished by changing these beliefs. There are also structures and institutions that are bolstered by the racial ideology and that help to maintain and reproduce racial privilege and inequality. Secondly, the biological racism built around a distinction between superior and inferior races has nowadays metamorphosed into a cultural racism focused on cultural differences, which can be linguistic, religious, etc. In this way, many racial discriminations are also about religion, language, social class or gender. The point is precisely that different types of discrimination overlap, and that race, class, gender, religion and language issues intersect in all sorts of ways.

However, mainstream contemporary discourses are marked by what is usually referred to as ‘colour-blind racism’, which consists in the denial (or erasure) of race and racism. An illustration of this would be the August 2014 events in Ferguson, Missouri, a small town located within the metropolitan area of St Louis. Long-standing spatial, economic and cultural segregation in Ferguson has involved a high level of distrust between the largely black community and the mostly white police force, which culminated in the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on 9 August 2014, which in turn sparked off massive protests on the streets of Ferguson and all over the USA.

One widely reported comment after this tragic event was that of the white Republican mayor of Ferguson, who insisted that we need to ‘blame poverty, not race’ (Guardian, 23-08-2014). In this way, he attempted to shift the blame away from white supremacy and the structural racism of the social system, and upon poor people, who could then be looked upon as responsible for their own poverty. Thus the erasure of race and racism involves a number of factors:

• an emphatic assertion that we, or a particular individual (Darren Wilson), are not racist;
• an inability – or unwillingness – to see the wider picture of structural racism in the social system;
• a mistaken belief in the one factor that explains it all: ‘it’s about poverty, not race’.

Language racism works in a similar way. A recent example of it occurred in Luxembourg, the country where I live and work. Luxembourg is a highly multilingual country, with three officially recognized languages (Luxembourgish, French and German). It has a high number of foreign residents (45.3%), with the largest immigrant community being the Portuguese. Many foreign residents speak French (as well as other Romance languages such as Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Cape Verdean Creole). As a result, French, which used to be the language of prestige and of the educated elite, has now become associated with migrants and is being viewed in an increasingly negative light by many locals. They fear that the rapid spread of French may endanger the small Luxembourgish language and, concomitantly, the Luxembourgish ‘nation’ itself.

On 7 June 2015, the Luxembourgish citizens were asked in a referendum to decide for or against extending the right of vote in legislative elections to foreign residents. The government campaigned in favour of a ‘yes’ vote, as a way of reducing the ‘democratic deficit’ in Luxembourg, where only about half of the population are allowed to vote in legislative elections. However, the motion was rejected by 78% of the voters. In the aftermath of the referendum, many of these ‘no’ voters felt the need to defend themselves against possible charges of xenophobia and racism, by arguing (in online comments, letters to the editor, etc.) that theirs was not a vote against foreigners but against the French language. In the following letter to the editor, for example, it is claimed that the sole aim of the ‘no’ voters was to defend the Luxembourgish language against an encroachment by French:

The 80% against voting rights for foreigners is not a vote against foreigners. It was a vote against the further ‘Frenchification’ of the country … That proves: we are not hostile to foreigners. (Luxemburger Wort, 17-06-2015)

Here we have another instantiation of the ‘denial of racism’ strategy (‘it’s about language, not race’), and we are reminded that multilingualism does not automatically tally with tolerance and open-mindedness. Even more worryingly, this form of language racism underlies widespread societal discourses which are ostensibly about language but are often tied up in more complicated anxieties about race, for example the politics of integration in Europe and the English Only movement in the United States. Anybody interested in this topic will find further examples and analyses in my new book Language Racism.

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 Language Racism (Palgrave, 2015), Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First (Multilingual Matters, 2014) and Introducing Multilingualism: A Social Approach (Routledge, 2012).

© Jean-Jacques Weber 2015

Next post: Multilingualism and disorders. Saturday 5^th September 2015.

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.

Some languages are more languages than others

Our ways of speaking and signing naturally evolved to serve our needs. This means first, that such ways must be bound in time and space, because so are we. This is why we use different languages and why we use the same languages differently. And second, that there must be agreement about how we speak and sign, because random sounds and gestures don’t make sense. In other words, there must be standard ways of sounding and gesturing, shared among those who share our times and spaces.

But there is a problem. Two, actually: what do we mean by “standard” and what do we mean by “same/different language”? Let’s see.

A standard, loosely defined, is a set of rules. Rules, in turn, are of two kinds: descriptive rules, which emerge from our observations, for example the rule that water boils at 100 degrees C given constant pressure; and prescriptive rules, which impose a specific conduct, for example the rule that you should stop your vehicle when a traffic light shows red. Descriptive standards, those mentioned in the first paragraph, tell us what goes on, whereas prescriptive standards tell us what (someone thinks) should go on. ‘What goes on’, however, does not readily associate with the word standard, as far as linguistic uses are concerned, because this word’s own everyday use has come to evoke mostly what someone has decided is meritorious and/or worth adopting: the word standard signals prescription rather than description. Would you say that colloquialisms, or slang, or dialect, or similar instances of actual language use are “standards”? Linguists would, because the job of linguists is to observe and describe how we use our languages. If you’re curious about how linguists go about doing this, by the way, have a look at Paul Newman and Martha Ratliff’s book, Linguistic Fieldwork, which gathers together a set of the most lucid (and entertaining!) reports I’ve read on this topic.

A language, in contrast, doesn’t have a definition, loose or tight. When we talk about languages, we’re likely to have no idea that we’re talking about figments of a collective imagination. Attempting to define “a language” is about as straightforward as attempting to define “a nation” – which, incidentally, might explain why these two labels keep each other such good company. But this hasn’t deterred some of us from claiming that certain uses of speech and sign *are* languages, which is equivalent to claiming that other uses are not.

Bestowing (non-)language status to linguistic uses results in identifying “languages” with specific varieties of them, those that (someone thinks) should be used. The process consists of two steps. Step 1 puts together the word standard and the names we give to languages, to get things like, say, Standard English – capitalised and all, for added effect. A Standard Language is a set of prescriptions of “good” use, where the word good can mean whatever we wish it to mean, including prestigious, respectable, correct, desirable, or even pretty, as Kellie Rolstad notes in Rethinking Academic Language in Second Language Instruction: we’re heirs to “centuries of an approach to language study which has been largely of an esthetic nature.”

Step 2 then omits the qualifier as redundant, to get things like, say, English. This is why those of us who enrol in, say, English learning courses aren’t told which English we’re going to be taught, or whether that English will serve the purposes for which we enrolled. This bit of information is deemed irrelevant, because only the Standard Language *is* a language. So much so that we have different names, in all of our languages, to refer to those languages which (someone thinks) should not be called languages, like patois, Mundart, gíria, argot, vernacular, calão, dialect, all disparaging in various degrees: just look up the meanings and synonyms of these words in any standard dictionary. Disparaging to their users, of course: I’ve argued before, for example here and here, that labels about language uses are labels about people. As if only “good” (or pretty) people deserved to be called people?

Since we know that there is a difference between the rules of physics and traffic rules, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be told that the same difference applies to the rules of our languages. We could then start seeking answers to a number of very interesting questions. For example, which criteria select a linguistic use as a language, when and where? Such criteria can’t be linguistic, because linguistics has no say in winnowing practices of this kind. So what are they, and how are they evaluated? Why are these criteria used for selection and why should there be a selection in the first place? And, not least, who mandates language spokespeople to champion language causes?

Understanding why there are standards and standards, and why all linguistic uses have standards would also allay disquiet about language policies, at home and in school. Our language choices matter, don’t they? That’s the next question I ask.

Rolstad, K. (2005). Rethinking Academic Language in Second Language Instruction In J. Cohen, K. T. McAlister, K. Rolstad, & J. MacSwan (Eds.), ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism (pp. 1993-1999). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

© MCF 2014

Next post: The languages that matter. Saturday 23^rd August 2014.

Expats and immigrants

Have you ever wondered why those of us who move to work in a different country are sometimes called expats and sometimes immigrants? The labels can’t reflect distinct purposes behind the move, because both groups leave previous stomping grounds to seek (perceived) better conditions elsewhere. So I thought of trying to understand the reason for the choice of different labels.

We could start with standard dictionary definitions. Expat(riate): ‘one who lives outside their native country’. Immigrant: ‘one who comes to live permanently in a foreign country’. I wonder why these definitions can’t be swapped, in that neither expats nor immigrants live in their “native” country – or both are “foreigners” in their new country, if we prefer. The word “permanently” appears to hint at a difference, portraying immigrants as having moved for good, whether intentionally or not. I also wonder. Many immigrants leave their country not because they’ve ruled out returning to it, but because the only way to return to it and survive in it involves spending time elsewhere creating the means to do so. On the other hand, if expats count as temporary visitors, I go on wondering what to make of families like mine (we rank as expats, not immigrants), who’ve stayed put in the same country for decades as permanent residents. How permanent is “permanent”?

We could try integration into the host community. Maybe not a good differentiator, on second thought, in that my thesaurus gives ‘alien’ and ‘outsider’ as head synonyms of “foreigner”. Whether quartered in dedicated compounds or roughing it out there in the mainstream jungle, neither expats nor immigrants are renowned for assimilation skills. Perhaps because we all tend to build our home even, or perhaps especially, when away from home? I, for one, don’t see any difference between these two scenarios where I happened to play the role of confidante, the immigrant lady fussing about (substandard) standards of personal hygiene in her new country, and the expat lady who was devastated by her realisation that her favourite (home) brand of coffee wasn’t available where she had moved to.

Could a differential (or do I mean deferential?) guest status in a host nation be it? The word expat does carry nicer connotations than the word immigrant, but connotations have nothing to do with what we are: whatever the labels we go by when we’re working in a new country, we’re aliens. We represent a nation within someone else’s nation, a foreign body in someone else’s eye. Even when we are officially recognised as citizens of more than one country, like my Swedoguese children, that citizenship is always hyphenated and therefore always “special”. Vaidehi Ramanathan’s book Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship explains the art of using citizenship as a weapon and/or shield, as needed. It is as if the countries ruled over us, people. So no difference there, either.

And then it hit me. The difference must lie in our entitlement to the languages we brought along with us in the move. Expat children attend schools featuring their home language. More often than not, these “international” schools offer monolingual schooling, which means that it’s fine for little expats to stick to remaining monolingual, if they so are and they so wish. Immigrant children attend schools featuring the mainstream language. More often than not, these local schools also offer monolingual schooling, which means that little immigrants must, in principle, become multilingual. I say in principle, because what happens in practice, more often than not, is that little immigrants find themselves discouraged to stick to any other language than the mainstream one.

There might be a few blurry edges here, though. Like immigrant families, multilingual expat families may also need to actively assert their right to keep their languages in good working order, as I report in my book Three is a Crowd?. Matthias Hüning, Ulrike Vogl and Olivier Moliner put it this way, in their book Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History: because of “the principle of ‘one language, one state, one people’ [...], multilingualism came to be viewed as an undesirable aberration.”

So how do our linguistic “aberrations” further impact the way we are treated, in more than one sense of this word? I’ll look at this next time.

© MCF 2014

Next post: Accent, dialect, or disorder? Saturday 8^th February 2014.

Multilingual moods

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: MCF

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


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

© MCF 2013

Next post: Multilingual rudeness. Saturday 13^th July 2013.

“Wait... *Where* are you from?”

= Acknowledgement =

Muito obrigada, Karin and Ruchika,

for very enlightening correspondence concerning this post

and, not least, for inspiration for the post’s title!

Has anyone ever complimented you on how well you speak your native language? I don’t mean praise for those of us who may be professional speakers, I mean praise for ordinary speakers like you and me. It has happened to me, about Portuguese, from fellow Portuguese and in Portugal, on the grounds that I don’t look very Portuguese (apparently). Before I decided that such episodes were actually quite funny, I had to overcome the unsettling sensation that I had just been insulted by being complimented.

Certain features of speech seem indeed to be expected from certain facial and other physical features (apparently), in the same sense that you wouldn’t expect your pet dog to bray. This is all fine: we all have our stereotypes and associated expectations to live and judge by, which we actually develop in early childhood. But how do we, adults, deal with human beings whose looks and speech don’t match our expectations? We could revise our adult expectations in adult ways, of course, since facts are facts and stereotypes are fiction. More often than not, however, we attempt to make new facts fit old expectations, so we can go on entertaining these. I never understood why it seems so much easier to hang on to useless theories (of which expectations are a subset) which fail to explain observed facts, than to reject flawed theories, in the face of facts which contradict them.

Expectations come complete with labels, the problem being that expected labels cannot obviously account for unexpected facts. Not just labels about looks and speech, either. I remember, for example, a lengthy discussion in the major daily newspaper in one of the places I’ve lived, seriously asking (and seriously getting serious feedback on) whether women over 50 years of age should wear jeans. And I’m just rereading Notre-Dame de Paris, where the destitute Gringoire’s fleeting moment of solace on a day of complete debacle, personified by a dancing and singing young beauty whom he’s persuaded must be a fairy, a goddess, a nymph, is shattered by a sudden realisation: “Hé non! dit-il, c’est une bohémienne.” And Victor Hugo, canny observer of human nature that he was, adds: “Toute illusion avait disparu.” Other mystifying beings likewise cease to mystify once we choose to identify them by means of familiar labels: we can now deal with the labels, and stop bothering about the beings. Just look at the labels that go on being pasted onto multilinguals, as I discuss in my book Multilinguals are ...?

On several occasions, in my teens, revealing my nationality caused Gringoire-like disillusion among international (ex-)friends, who up to then had deemed me quite worthy of their polite company. I’m sure they had their reasons, but my point is that my answers to their questions about where I was from were as straightforward as their dismissal of me upon hearing them: I “was” indeed “from” Portugal, at the time, though I’ve come to doubt whether this place I am from provides the best definition of who I am, period. Or why it should.

Image © Succu 2010 (Wikimedia Commons), adapted (MCF)

Place labels rank high in cataloguing practices: “where we have them” enables retrieval of appropriate decisions about how to relate to them, on the strength of their where. In the face (literally) of people who were, say, born in X from parents born elsewhere, grew up in W, had children in Y and T, then moved to R and Z and, to top it all, speak our language (among others) as well as we do, the same question crops up: “Where are you from?”, with stress on Where and a high-rising tone of bafflement which attempts to secure the “fact” that people must belong somewhere, in the same sense that your pet dog belongs to you.

A single somewhere, that is, because answers revealing pluralities, like “I come from Portugal and Sweden”, don’t seem to pass muster either. The “Wait...” bit in the question usually denotes glitches in processing multi-factual answers to mono-minded questions. Similar questions require simple, i.e. single(minded) answers to it: there must be an X, such that X stands for the place where your biological mother happened to go into labour, which then means that you belong to X. As if you belonged to places – or rather, as if places owned people. You can read a sample of other intriguing questions asked of multilinguals and multiculturals (and also a sample of my production when I’m in sarcastic mode) in this piece, ‘The bilemma in the bilingual brain’, published in Speculative Grammarian, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics”.

I’ll have more to say about multilingual “roots” some other day but, next time, I’d like to turn to the effects that classificatory labels can have on children’s academic and overall development. 

© MCF 2012

Next post: Language therapy or language tuition? Saturday 1^st December 2012.

Neighbourly matters

At the turn of last century, in his book The Mystic Rose, the British anthropologist Ernest Crawley described human relationships as characterised by a “taboo of personal isolation” which, together with natural egoism, leads to feelings that “all society, as such, is dangerous”. My interpretation of Crawley’s observations is that we shape our socialisation strategies through selfish assertion of our uniqueness, because we feel alone against others, rather than with them.

Sigmund Freud later drew on Crawley’s analysis to support what he termed our “narcissism in respect of minor differences”, whereby we tend to create gaps of difference, or widen existing ones, between us and those who are very similar to us. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud noted that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other – like the Spaniards and the Portuguese, for instance”. As a native Portuguese, I can attest to the accuracy of this statement, and I’m sure nuestros hermanos will nod in reciprocal recognition too.

Freud’s observation may at first sight appear paradoxical. Why should we nitpick for differences just for the sake of nitpicking, where commonalities outnumber differences? Physical nearness tends to have the effect that you become like those near you, but this is precisely what you don’t want to happen, if nearness involves chance rather than choice: you want to promote group uniqueness instead. This being so, who better to vent this inborn urge to exalt ourselves by demeaning others, than on our neighbours? They are irresistibly near at hand, and they are a constant reminder of ways and habits of our own that we may judge to be less than flattering to ourselves. Within the smaller circle of parent-child “neighbourhoods”, I cannot be the only one who’s reacted to funny and/or downright unpleasant quirks of my children’s behaviour, which nevertheless felt strangely familiar, only to realise that they were modelled on my own. The point is that our neighbours may be like us but they are not us. They are a they which happens to be too close to a shared sameness for comfort, embodying the disruption of an “integrity” whose distinctiveness we wish to claim for ourselves. (This may well be why “Love thy neighbour” entreaties strike a chord with the bad conscience of so many of us – in theory, at least.)

Terry Pratchett puts it another way, referring to neighbourly matters within the boundaries of a single country. In his Discworld novel Unseen Academicals, one character wonders why Ankh-Morpork’s paired football teams, which are so close to one another, hate one another so much. The answer is that “It’s hard to hate people who are a long way away. You forget how dreadful they are. But you see a neighbour’s warts every day.” My interpretation of Pratchett’s observations is that we’re all dreadful, and what makes us bearable is distance.

Physical distance, that is. I’ve often wondered why hearing tomayto or tomahto can either delight you or risk causing you apoplexy, depending on how close you feel to whoever uses different versions of the same words. I take this as a side effect of multilingualism in a single language. Many Portuguese, for example, think that Brazilian cadences and vowel qualities are simply endearing, but if, and only if, they come from Brazilians. Those Portuguese who use them in their Portuguese dialects are just speaking hilarious Portuguese. Many Americans (or so I’m told) fall for the charms of British accents any time, including those accents where the sound represented by ‘r’ in words like party and dear is not pronounced, while cringing at similar accents from fellow Americans. If you’re interested in English ‘r’ matters, incidentally, look up rhotic vs. non-rhotic accents, the terminology proposed by British phonetician John Wells which became standard for discussion of this issue. 

Our neighbours’ behaviours seem to strike us as funny versions of our own behaviours, rather than genuine behaviours in their own right. A bit like looking at ourselves in those distorting mirrors at amusement parks – whereby we can probably guess how we strike them, too. All this got me thinking about those of us who may feel the need to promote or even impersonate neighbouring behaviours, accents included, in our professional lives. Language teachers are a case in point, and I’ll have something to say about this in the next couple of posts.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Teaching to the standard. Saturday 11^th August 2012.

Being multilingual in a single language?

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

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

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

Act I

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

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

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

Act II

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

Me: Quê!?

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

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

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

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

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

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

© MCF 2012

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

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.

Attitudes towards language uses

Discussions about language uses rank among the most fiendish I’ve witnessed, short of physical aggression. Try? Just ask anyone, anywhere, any day, what they think about anything that’s been nagging at you lately in your or someone else’s (or their!) use of a word or a phrase, or whatever, in any of your languages.

Do pad yourself emotionally against the outcome, because attitudes towards language uses are attitudes towards language users. However we may have persuaded ourselves otherwise, languages and their uses do not exist without people. The whole process in fact follows a neat circular path. We start off with more or less (un)friendly comments about how people sound and look when they use their languages, including those languages that we don’t understand, such as throaty, lippy, twangy, lilty, teethy, or beautiful and ugly. We then associate these people-features with the languages that people speak, and we complete the process by concluding that whoever speaks, say, an aggressive language must be an aggressive person/people too. The supposedly descriptive labels that we go on using don’t need to make sense, by the way – including labels found in clinical settings, as this (now archived) post at Clinical Linguistics, What on earth does ‘Guttural’ mean, anyway? exemplifies.

Why the label-mania, I wonder, and the mostly hard feelings that go with it? My suspicion is that it all stems from two things. First, the top regard in which we tend to hold ourselves. Not all of us got official entitlement to pontificate about linguistic goodness and badness, of course, but the trouble is that so many of us feel entitled.

One book that I read some time ago, Beneath the Dust of Time, gave me a historical clue to why this is so. Jacques R. Pauwels reports, among other things, the hubris pervading the names that we give to our tribes, including the big tribes we came to know as “countries”. Pauwels quotes Mircea Eliade’s essays on ancients myths and religions, where it is noted that “archaic peoples believed virtually without exception that they themselves inhabited the center of the world”, and adds that “alternative names for the rather trite ‘center of the world’ were ‘navel of the earth’ and ‘place where gods descended on earth’.” In addition to assorted peoples’ names informing us that they have been chosen by assorted deities, we find that the Franks are the ‘brave people’, that the name of the Etruscans means ‘human beings’, and that the Huns are, simply, ‘the people’. Some of these labels concern the peoples’ languages: the root of Slav means ‘those who can speak a language’ (their language, that is), and Arab refers to ‘those who speak an understandable language’, whereby everyone else probably is, as the Ancient Greeks put it, a ‘barbarian’.

We may well wonder who’s whose barbarian. In 1580, Montaigne explained, in his Essais, that “chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage”, tellingly in an essay titled ‘Des Cannibales’. G. Bernard Shaw later rephrased Montaigne’s line, in his Caesar and Cleopatra, to have Caesar seek forgiveness on behalf of those who commit Britannus-like faux pas: “he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature”. Small wonder that, in our cyber-age, even supposedly aseptic IT tools, like internet-based concordancers, go on reflecting human prejudice: try the recently launched bab.la Wording for results of input like “Y are” or “Z are”, where Y and Z stand for nationality/language names and profession names, respectively (tack för tipset, Daniel!).

The second reason behind our readiness to opinionate about language uses draws on the (mis)understanding that there is a single “lawful” way of using a language, whether you’re monolingual or multilingual. (Monolingual) teenagers and (multilingual) language learners stand out as the usual suspects. What happens in practice is that your uses pass muster if they match either the uses of your interlocutors, or uses that they can recognise, and so relate to. It’s not so much that we all have our own (private) standards, it’s mostly that we take it for granted that if you and I are using the “same” language, we’re both supposed to make ourselves intelligible in it. I’ve talked about intelligibility before and I will come back to it some other day but, next time, I’ll have a couple more thoughts to offer on the tribulations of those barbarians who insist on being multilingual in a world designed for monolinguals.

Meanwhile, though, I have a goodie for you: see whether you can guess which language deserved this encomium from one of its native speakers:

“The XXX language is, decidedly, imperial in its virility, in its tuneful orchestration, in its fabulously inexhaustible contents, in its gently enticing appeals, in its riveting and beguiling seduction.”

Could be any, right?

© MCF 2012

Next post: Braving monolingual worlds. Saturday 7^th April 2012.

Multiculturalism, and other big words

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

Multi-monotasking?

Photo: MCF

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

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

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

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

© MCF 2012

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