The perfect multilingual

In case you’re wondering, let me reassure you straight away that yes, the title of this post is meant to be sarcastic. Perfect multilinguals do exist, of course, though only in the minds of those of us who mistake ideals of perfection for reality.

Multilingual perfection awardees must satisfy a number of criteria. If you are, or were, a language learner as an adult, forget it: not having acquired all of your languages as a young child automatically makes you a non-multilingual. Either your accent, or your choice of words, your delivery, proficiency, fluency, grammar, conversational skills, in one or more of your languages, or your physical appearance, or all of the above, won’t pass the perfection litmus test, which is a match to native(-like) standards. This is an intriguing criterion, because it assumes that we know what native users are, look like, and do with their languages. I recently came across a very entertaining report in Nature, about the woes of having articles submitted to journals anonymously peer reviewed in order to assess their scholarly quality, where I found this gem: “Another reviewer suggested that the [article] authors should find ‘someone who speaks English as a first language to proofread the paper’, even though all four authors – including two tenured professors – were native English speakers.”

If, on the other hand, you’re a child acquiring your languages from birth, you may stand slightly higher up the qualifying ladder. But only slightly, because even though you might technically qualify as a native multilingual, there have been studies on such children reporting on their foreign accent in one or more of their languages, numbering their languages L1, L2, Ln to suggest sequential language learning, or arguing that one of their languages is dominant across an often unspecified board. As a young child, you are also bound to fail the LSRW condition, stipulating that being multilingual means proficiency in Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing all of your languages. This acronymic criterion does two things: first, it disregards all of us for whom language use involves neither listening nor speaking; and second, it adds the ‘RW’ twist, drawing on the well-attested confusion between languages and their printed counterparts. If I read and write Latin, but don’t speak it, am I multilingual with Latin? If I’m a native user of Singlish, but never wrote anything in it, am I multilingual with Singlish? Fascinating questions, and fascinating criterion, because it means that young multilinguals, as well as multilinguals who are illiterate, or happen to use one or more of the vast majority of the world’s languages which lack printed versions, aren’t perfect multilinguals either.

So who is? The issue is not so much that defining multilinguals looks pretty much like an exercise in shooting at a moving target: every time you think you’ve answered a question, about yourself or others (Am I multilingual? Are you?), you find that the question has changed. The issue is that the perfect multilingual matches the mythical being that I’ve called multi-monolingual and that can be represented like this:

Cover of Cruz-Ferreira, M., Multilinguals are ...?

Image © Dinusha Uthpala Upasena

Perfect multi-monolinguals, in short, have complete, unmixed, and parallel command of all of their languages. If taken seriously, this means, for example, that they must be dominant in all their languages which, if taken seriously, makes one wonder about the seriousness of the paradoxical claim that multilinguals must develop a single dominant language.

Instead of taking seriously claims about multilingualism which make no sense at all, let’s leave the sarcastic mood and take a serious look at what these criteria imply: they say that there are perfect, and therefore imperfect, uses of language, which means that those uses are best judged rather than observed. They say that living up to language standards is what steers our language uses, which means that languages exist independently of their users. And they compound the myth that being multilingual means being lesser lingual. There is one good reason why questions about the perfect (real, proper, true, etc.) monolingual aren’t ever asked: they would just make us laugh. Which monolingual has perfect command of their single language, according to the criteria that should define a perfect multilingual?

Real-life multilinguals are as linguistically perfect as their monolingual counterparts. All of us draw on all of the linguistic resources at our disposal in space and time, whether we label these resources mono- or multi-. And all of us are fair game for judgement and deprecation according to someone else’s and, not least, our own ideals of perfection.

The questions that make sense aren’t about linguistic perfection, they’re about why claims of linguistic perfection go on being made. Asking these questions is important also because the mix of ingredients in funny criteria purporting to define multilingualism carries over to funny methods that we go on using to teach and assess those who are (becoming) multilingual in school. I turn to this next.

Woolston, C. (2015). Scientists offer advice on how best to respond to reviewers. Nature, 522 (7554), 9-9. DOI: 10.1038/522009f

© MCF 2015

Next post: Textbook languages. Saturday 11^th July 2015.

Sign-speech multilinguals

Opinions and decisions about multilingualism involving sign languages suffer from the same resilient fantasies which have plagued multilingualism in general over the past 100 years or so. With sign languages, however, there’s the aggravating factor that fantasies about them join the chorus. Only the other week, for example, I had a couple of (speech-speech) multilingual friends wonder why all the fuss about sign languages among linguists like me, since these languages are but a set of universal gestural primitives, like rubbing your tummy to indicate you’re hungry, as they put it. Aren’t they?, they nevertheless asked at the end of their reasoning. No, I replied. This would be roughly equivalent to saying that spoken languages are but a set of universal groany primitives to indicate your mood, as I put it.

I took this chance to dispel their other illusion, that sign languages are straightforward fingerspelling systems, which draws on the interesting assumption that all signers must be literate. Many sign languages do include fingerspelling components, but the fact that, say, BSL (British Sign Language) and ASL (American Sign Language) use two-handed and one-handed spelling, respectively, for the same printed language, should help reassess the presumed straightforwardness of fingerspelling. In addition, BSL and ASL are as mutually unintelligible as other sign languages around the world.

My friends are well educated, cosmopolitan professionals. Their take reflects the overarching myth that sign languages really aren’t languages at all, which goes on shaping policies devised by other professionals, those who have been empowered to deal with language education and who therefore aren’t in the habit of asking questions at the end of their reasonings. In a book chapter discussing The British Sign Language community up to the early 1990s, Paddy Ladd gives a distressing review of the ignorance and associated prejudice which, among other rulings, sanctioned physical violence to ‘cure’ deaf children of their signing ‘compulsion’. Just like, as I reported elsewhere, multilingualism came to be beaten out of hearing schoolchildren, the hands of deaf schoolchildren were tied behind their backs in order to force them to use spoken language. Just like, as I also reported elsewhere, multilingualism came to be medicalised, the language of deaf people was “pathologised” (Ladd’s word). Small wonder, then, that sign-speech multilinguals came to be viewed as doubly ‘handicapped’.

When sign languages finally became legitimised, as it were, as objects of linguistic enquiry, sign multilingualism turned out, unsurprisingly, to match speech multilingualism. It comes complete with mixes, as David Quinto-Pozos reports for LSM (Lengua de Señas Mexicana) and ASL in Sign language contact and interference, for example, and with a lingua franca, International Sign, which Anja Hiddinga and Onno Crasborn discuss in Signed languages and globalization. But sign multilingualism remained the business of signers, so hearing communities needn’t bother with the eccentricities of deaf communities. Dealing with sign-speech multilingualism, however, appears to invite regression to hand-tied Fantasy Land: sign languages may be languages after all, but they are less so than spoken ones and should therefore not take priority in (so-called) multilingual education.

It may help to understand that we’re talking about difference here, not winner-takes-it-all competition of gradable merits. It is as useful to compare the contexts of use of distinct linguistic modes as it’s useful to compare multilinguals and monolinguals. Insisting on doing so fails to recognise one of the many paradoxes reflecting our perennial difficulty in defining what languages are: do we want to say that speech beats sign, hands down, because we’re persuaded that auditory resources rank higher than visual ones in linguistic sophistication? Or should we rank those resources the other way around, because we believe that spoken languages are subsidiary to spelt ones?

Language is as independent of the modes we’ve found to represent it – whether natural, sense-bound ones like sight, hearing, touch, or artificial ones like print – as music is independent of the instruments (our voice included) through which we produce it. What’s more, our senses seldom serve us to the exclusion of other senses. Manual gestures, for example, are intrinsic to spoken interaction, where attention to both visual and sound clues necessarily assists (de)coding. There’s even evidence that adequate gesturing enhances learning, as Martha W. Alibali and colleagues showed for a speech-based maths class in Students learn more when their teacher has learned to gesture effectively. In this sense, speakers and signers alike are multimodal users of language, and so are all of us, speakers or signers, who are literate.

There may be some overlap between gestural uses in spoken and signed interaction, as Trevor Johnston argued for pointing gestures in Towards a comparative semiotics of pointing actions in signed and spoken languages, but the fundamental issue is that signs and speech belong to two different linguistic modes, each with their rules, standards and practices. Precisely for this reason, sign-speech multilinguals can avail themselves of means of linguistic expression which monomodal interaction lacks, in that “distinct modalities allow for simultaneous production of two languages”, as Karen Emmorey and colleagues discuss in Bimodal bilingualism.

This means that sign-speech multilinguals, like any language users, must draw on the whole of their linguistic resources in order to be able to develop as human beings. The Position Statement on Early Cognitive and Language Development and Education of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children, adopted by the NAD (National Association of the Deaf, USA) in June this year, makes for as engrossing reading as Paddy Ladd’s chapter – with many thanks to Beppie van den Bogaerde, who brought this publication to my attention on Twitter, @HU_DeafStudies. The document examines the relationship between sign, speech and print modes, debunking the usual myths about minority languages causing delayed development of mainstream languages (why never the other way around, one wonders?), about the primacy of spoken languages over signed ones, about reading abilities presupposing “phonological awareness”, and about multilingualism itself. This is the specialist side of the sign-speech tandem. From a personal side, Jenny Froude’s book Making Sense in Sign. A Lifeline for a Deaf Child is a gripping account of her family’s journey as hearing caregivers of a deaf child.

Deaf children must be allowed to acquire a language which is meant for deaf people, because they are not hearing people in (temporary) disguise. Why should we deprive our children of their languages? Would hearing people wish to be raised in monomodal sign language? Evidence that sign is the mode that best serves deaf children from the outset lies in their spontaneous creation of languages such as the Nicaraguan Sign Language (Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua), which made headlines in the 1970s. And evidence that we all resort to whatever language modes best serve our needs comes from adults, too.

Next time, I’ll have some more to say about depriving people of entitlement to their languages.

Alibali, M., Young, A., Crooks, N., Yeo, A., Wolfgram, M., Ledesma, I., Nathan, M., Breckinridge Church, R., & Knuth, E. (2013). Students learn more when their teacher has learned to gesture effectively Gesture, 13 (2), 210-233 DOI: 10.1075/gest.13.2.05ali

EMMOREY, K., BORINSTEIN, H., THOMPSON, R., & GOLLAN, T. (2008). Bimodal bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11 (01) DOI: 10.1017/S1366728907003203

Hiddinga, A., & Crasborn, O. (2011). Signed languages and globalization Language in Society, 40 (04), 483-505 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404511000480

Johnston, T. (2013). Towards a comparative semiotics of pointing actions in signed and spoken languages Gesture, 13 (2), 109-142 DOI: 10.1075/gest.13.2.01joh

Ladd, P. (1991). The British Sign Language community. In S. Alladina & V. Edwards (Eds.), Multilingualism in the British Isles. 1. The older mother tongues and Europe (pp. 35-48). London: Longman.

QUINTO-POZOS, D. (2008). Sign language contact and interference: ASL and LSM Language in Society, 37 (02) DOI: 10.1017/S0047404508080251

© MCF 2014

Next post: Native multilinguals. Saturday 18^th October 2014.

Speech and language

Generally speaking, speech concerns physical abilities, whereas language concerns cognitive abilities. Speech is what we say and hear, in actual linguistic interactions, language is what allows us to produce and perceive speech as mediating meaningful interactions. This is why speech bubbles are called speech bubbles and not language bubbles.

Image © Marian Sigler (Wikimedia Commons), adapted (MCF)

The medium of speech is sound, although language ability does not exhaust itself in sound-mediated languages: sign languages are a case in point, making it clear that speech and language are independent abilities.

Both speech and language feature in the job description of clinicians dealing with spoken means of expression. We can produce and perceive what sounds like intact speech but might not be cognitively processed as meaningful interaction, as John Cleese demonstrates in a lecture about the human brain; and we can have intact language abilities without being able to produce intact speech, as when we stammer or stutter: Cleese’s Monty Python co-star Michael Palin explains what led him to create the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children.

Stammering and stuttering are a source of concern among parents of multilingual children, judging by the amount of queries I receive on this topic. The usual question is whether multilingualism can “cause” these disfluencies. The answer is that it cannot, because multilingualism is a matter of language, not speech – and because multilingualism does not “cause” any problems of any kind (I’ll have more to say about “causes”, scare quotes included, in a coming post). Stuttering and/or stammering are well-attested consequences of something else, small children’s newfound abilities to string words together by means of grammatical constructions, and newfound eagerness to say everything they want to say at the same time, as I noted before. This is why children may stutter/stammer in one of their languages, but not in the others, and these are developmental rather than pathological issues, which sort themselves out in time.

Other features of child speech may have similar or different explanations. Having “trouble with ‘r’ sounds” (another common question I get) can also be developmental. These speech sounds are among the last ones that children acquire, because their production involves quite sophisticated control of articulators and airstream. Many of us have trouble with ‘r’ sounds throughout life, in early or later languages: just do a web search on e.g. “rolled r”, or “learn to trill”, or “pronouncing r”, to see what I mean.

In contrast, “not pronouncing the letter ‘s’ at the end of words”, as one parent once wrote, may be worth investigating further. Sounds represented by ‘s’ are also a typically late acquisition, and avoiding their troublesome articulation by omission is then a developmental speech issue. However, depending on factors such as the child’s age, or linguistic environment, absence of ‘s’ sounds at the end of words may point to a grammar issue, and so to a language issue: in several languages, including English, word-final ‘s’ sounds represent grammatical noun plurals or person/number verbal inflections, of which the child may not be developing cognitive command, as in, for example, SLI (Specific Language Impairment). My Ask-a-Linguist FAQ ‘Child language acquisition’ gives a brief overview of typical language development, meant to help caregivers make informed decisions about whether and when to worry about children’s speech and language development.

Language ability can be gauged through speech – though not exclusively. A bit like driving ability can be gauged by the way you drive a car, though not exclusively. Analysis of speech samples collected from clients is one of the many ways through which speech-language clinicians acquaint themselves with their clients’ abilities, in order to decide whether and how clinical intervention is required for speech, for language, or both. The ASHA site has more information on speech and language in clinical settings. And Charles Sturt University has just launched an online resource dedicated to Multilingual Children’s Speech. It includes a downloadable Position Paper, created by the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, of which I am a proud invited member.

The next post will have something to say about a well-known cause (no scare quotes) of our speech-language abilities: the ways we’ve learnt to adopt and shed cultural traits which characterise our different environments.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Roots and wings. Saturday 22^nd December 2012.

Fluent mumbles and precise vagueness

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

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

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

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

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

Languages are not this:

Photo: Ralf Roletschek (Wikimedia Commons)

but this:

Photo: Wamito (Wikimedia Commons)

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

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

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

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

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

© MCF 2011

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

You speak with an accent. I don’t.

Accents are things that only other people have. They are, by extension, things that you don’t want to have. Accents are, in short, shortcomings.

This is why, if someone tells you that “you speak with no accent”, you can be sure of two things: that you have received words of praise indeed; and that you speak with the same accent as that person. So the person is actually not only praising her own accent, she is also giving evidence that she has no idea she’s got one.

We seldom hear people say “We speak with an accent” or “I speak with an accent” – unless we’re talking about our uses of foreign languages. I will come back to this in my next post. We also routinely attribute to other people other features of language: they use funny words, she mangles her grammar, he doesn’t know how to talk politely. This must mean we don’t, don’t, and do, respectively. Writing in a book edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, titled Language myths, John H. Esling deals precisely with the myth that “Everyone has an accent except me”.

So let’s check out your accent.

This is (choose the nearest answer – I was going to say “the best answer”, but I suddenly remembered that “best” has prescriptive connotations):

Photo: David Besa (Wikimedia Commons)

1.  a tomahto
2.  a potahto
3.  a tomayto
4.  a potayto

I could tweak this test a little, like this:

     1.1   a tomahto

     1.2   ay tomahto

     1.3   ay toemahto

     1.4   a tomahtoe

and so on, and I’ve barely started on the vowels. How do you say the two “t” letters, for example? Do you aspirate the sounds that they represent, which means that you release a little puff of air straight after them? (You can also look up “aspiration” here.) Both times?

And so on. Accents are made up of many, many interrelated features that we’ve got used to hearing or seeing, and saying or signing, as we grew up, and that, like everything else that becomes routine around us, we fail to notice. This is why we may say that we have a “neutral accent”: it blends in with the rest of our identity. In contrast, we instantly react to any mismatch to this “standard” that we learned to make ours, and often treat it as a deviation.

There have been fascinating studies on attitudes that people have towards (other people’s) accents, showing that our opinions about accents have nothing to do with the accents themselves and all to do with our opinions about those people. One sure way to make our (fellow-accented) friends laugh is to do impressions of accents that we, and they, learned to rate as funny. People from neighbouring countries love to do this – and not just for accents either. Malaysians poke fun at Singaporean Malay, Spaniards double up in stitches about Portuguese, and Swedes, Danes and Norwegians can’t decide among themselves which of their languages sounds more like a throat disease, a silly singsong, or just a ridiculous way of pronouncing the other two.

For accent ratings from native and non-native speakers of a language, other fascinating things happen. Take the British RP accent, one of many spoken on tape by trained actors for purposes of the experiments carried out in these studies. RP stands for Received Pronunciation, by the way, sometimes also called BBC English, although the BBC nowadays sports other accents too, or Queen’s English, although the Queen’s accent has evolved since it got named after her. British users of other accents found the RP speaker pompous and off-putting, whereas non-native users of English found him intelligent and genial. On tape, mind you. Without even meeting the man face to face. Small wonder some people can and do lose job opportunities as soon as they open their mouths, because their prospective employers dislike the way they got used to using their languages.

What goes on about different native accents of the same language goes on about foreign accents too. We all have accents, of course, in all of our languages, spoken or signed, and we all talk funny, in someone’s eyes or ears. Except native speakers of the languages we are learning, or have learned, in school. We find out about this next.

© MCF 2011

Next post: The natives and the speakers. Wednesday 27^th April 2011.

Talking bodies and listening eyes

Languages are not just the things that we have been trained to dissect while sitting in general or specialised classrooms, where we are told to recast sentences in the past tense or identify phonetic properties of allophones (sorry, I just had to include this wink to fellow linguists here). If they were, how come we make faces and gesture emphatically even when we are talking on the phone? It seems that there’s more to languages than meets the ear.

Some languages have no sounds, and therefore cannot be spoken. This is because sound, the medium of many languages around the world, makes sense only if you hear it. Some of us cannot hear, and so use languages that make sense when you see them. Saying that some languages use audible movements of the mouth to produce meaningful exchanges, whereas other languages use visible movements of the hands for the same purpose, makes it look (or sound) like we’re talking about two completely distinct kinds of language. We’re not. As I hope is becoming clear throughout my posts here, things about languages are not as all-or-none as we sometimes like to believe: it’s rather a matter of clines.

Human means of expression are, to use a fancy word, multimodal. This “multi” word, very welcome in this blog, means that we draw on several modes: spoken modes use mostly the mouth, and sign modes mostly the hands. But all of us use both hand and mouth movements in human-to-human interaction – and sometimes human-to-other too: I cannot be the only one shaking fists and uttering profanity at the vagaries of my internet connection, for example. Mouth and hand gestures each offer unique expressive possibilities, which we combine in order to produce more meaning than what a single mode can achieve. In this sense, we are all multilinguals, and we all mix our languages.

Like in any exchange, sometimes there may be glitches, or what some of us might interpret as such: a hand gesture may reinforce, but also contradict a mouth gesture, and vice versa. We may do this intentionally, for example for sarcastic purposes. Or we may fail to notice that we are giving out ambiguous, or even unintelligible signals. If you are a lip-reader, or would like to see what it’s like to be one, you can try one experiment. Experiments are of course artificial, and often probe for extreme effects, but this one may give you a feeling of how visual and auditory cues can interfere with each other. This experimental paradigm became known as the McGurk Effect. 

There is a common misconception that sign languages are spoken languages “written” in signs, as it were. This reminds of the misconception that spoken languages are simple reproductions of one another, mentioned in a previous post. One reason that might explain it is that a number of sign languages are, or contain, fingerspelling, where hand gestures correspond to printable symbols. Spelling is of course a visual representation of spoken languages too. Printed forms of language are extremely interesting, by the way, because they have managed to take over spoken ones as tokens of so-called good linguistic usage. I will have quite a few things so say about this in a future post. My point here is that sign languages are not the same as hand spellings.

Sign languages are as sophisticated means of communication as spoken ones. If they weren’t, they couldn’t serve their users. All of our languages are acquired in the same way: babies babble, with their hands if they’re acquiring sign languages, with their mouths if acquiring spoken ones. All languages show geographical, historical and individual variation. We can be multilingual in all of them, sign, spoken, or both. Sign and spoken languages are mutually unintelligible, obviously, but so are spoken languages and sign languages among themselves. It may come as a surprise, for example, that British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) are not different variants of the same language, like spoken American English and British English: they’re different languages altogether. In addition, fingerspelling can vary, for the same spoken language: BSL fingerspelling and ASL fingerspelling are different languages too.

There is a second misconception about gestural language. Gestures that go with spoken languages are often seen as just flourish: you add them because you belong to a funny culture – those who “add” gestures have equally definite opinions about those who don’t, of course. Take Latinos, for example, by which word I mean anyone sharing a Latin background. They have a reputation for not being able to keep their hands still when they’re talking, so the old joke goes that the way to shut them up is to tie their arms behind their backs. My own Latino roots are often betrayed by my gestural exuberance (I come from Portugal, in case I forgot to mention this), and so I see it as my duty to put the record straight on this one, publicly: I do use my hands a lot when I speak, but not whenever I speak. I’ve lived in several European, African and Asian countries, with two consequences: one, I’ve noticed that different peoples use different visual cues when they talk; and two, I’ve learned to adapt. So when I use my hands, I use them not because I’m Portuguese, but because I’m being Portuguese, which is an entirely different thing. In case this ability to be being different things reminds you of a trait commonly attributed to multilinguals, a “split personality”, I/we hereby pledge to say more about it in a future post.

Gestural language, and body language in general, are not ornamental. They are a necessary part of intelligible exchanges, and they have their own grammar, in that they pattern regularly. We can hear smiles in a voice and we can see passion in a face. If, that is, we’ve learned to associate passion with that particular expression, and perhaps on that particular face, just like we’ve learned to associate the word passion with its meaning. Meanings don’t come out of the blue (or out of dictionaries): we shape them, according to our cultural conventions. Some of us are professionally trained to gain awareness of cultural habits of this kind, and to interpret them in order to assess our overall state of health, including linguistic health. We’ll see how, next time.

© MCF 2010

Next post: The fight for a fair deal. Wednesday 3^rd November 2010.