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.

Language “integrity”

Deciding what a language is has never been easy, although we go on talking about languages as if we knew what they are. This is partly because we’ve become habituated to having language names used all around us, but mostly because we’ve become inured to the fact that names serve as convenient labels to help us talk about imaginary and abstract concepts, among other things. We can also talk about unicorns and hypotenuses, for example.

Labels like Arabic or Kimbundu do not designate ‘objects’: they are a handy notation to refer to ways of using language which are each found to be intelligible to other language users. The criterion of cross-(un)intelligibility is regularly invoked as an equally handy way of attempting to define one particular language as opposed to another – more on which in a coming post. Let me just add two things here: in some cases, the name we use for a language in fact refers to its printed form, for example when we talk about “the Chinese language”; and in many other cases, language names have become indistinguishable from nationality names, which further complicates the matter of defining what “a language” is.

If we can’t pinpoint language boundaries in any precise way, it then makes little sense to say that languages can suffer injury to their integrity. We nevertheless go on talking about languages as if they owned territorial rights to what can be done with them. Difficulties in delimiting languages relate to both historical and geographical factors. Whether in monolingual or multilingual communities, grandparents and grandchildren, say, or African and Asian users of the “same” language don’t use it in the same way. There are virtually as many ways of using each of these abstract entities called “languages” as there are individuals – sociolinguists even devised a label for this observation, idiolect. This is one of the reasons why no one has ever produced a “full” grammar of any language, and this is the reason for the scare quotes in the title of this post.

Whatever we use, we necessarily change, because using things means making them ours, so they can serve our needs. “Things” like languages are no exception. For sequential multilinguals, for example, those of us who learn our languages at different times in life, one common observation in the literature is that our earlier language(s) affect the way in which we use our later one(s). This has been called “first language interference”, and means that we use our younger languages in ways that remind of our use of our older ones (for reasons why this may be so, regardless of learning order, see a previous post).

But research shows that the converse is also true. The Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen provided us with the first comprehensive report of how a later language (English) interfered with an earlier one (Norwegian), in his 1953 book The Norwegian Language in America. A Study in Bilingual Behavior. More recently, and particularly concerning accent, two other studies reported similar findings. In an article titled Gestural drift in a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and English, Michele L. Sancier and Carol A. Fowler observed interference from English in the production of consonants of a native Portuguese-speaking adult learner. My own report on my children’s learning of English, a language which they acquired in school, Prosodic mixes: strategies in multilingual language acquisition, showed use of English prosody in their home languages.

Given these observations, it may make better sense to conclude that using our languages cannot threaten their “integrity”. Speaking in metaphors about abstract entities (like saying that “languages affect languages”) is just that, speaking in metaphors about abstract entities. In an earlier publication, The analysis of linguistic borrowing (1950), Haugen also reacted to the unhelpful use of such imagery. Discussing shortcomings in the metaphorical use of the word mixes to describe what multilinguals do with their languages, he had this to say:

“A further inaccuracy is introduced if the resulting language is called ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’. It implies that there are other languages which are ‘pure’, but these are scarcely any more observable than a ‘pure race’ in ethnology.”

Using our languages is what we are supposed to do with them. We decide. In the introductory chapter to my book Multilingual Norms, I argue that multilingualism is not about what we do to the languages, it’s about what we do with them. If you want to read more about this, you can download the full chapter, titled Multilingualism, language norms and multilingual contexts. 

But doing things with languages is surely true of monolingualism too. Next time, I’ll have a look at why we associate threats to the “integrity” of particular languages more with multilingual than with monolingual users of them.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Being multilingual in a single language? Saturday 19^th May 2012.

The languages of multilinguals

When Western monolingual researchers came to realise that some of us went about not being monolingual, they surmised that having two languages to deal with was more than enough. That two languages would cause enough damage, that is. The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, for example, had the following to say in his 1922 book Language. Its Nature, Development and Origin:

“It is, of course, an advantage for a child to be familiar with two languages but without doubt the advantage may be, and generally is, purchased too dear. First of all the child in question hardly learns either of the two languages as perfectly as he would have done if he had limited himself to one. [...] Secondly, the brain effort required to master the two languages instead of one certainly diminishes the child’s power of learning other things which might and ought to be learnt.”

One of the interesting lessons to take home from this observation is that Jespersen was multilingual himself. He lived in Britain and he wrote extensively about English, among other languages that he was familiar with. But he left no hint that his dismal views about multilingualism held for what his own multilingualism did to him: becoming a multilingual may well have persuaded him that doing so in later years was either not damaging, or less damaging than doing so in early childhood, contrary to current mainstream persuasions. So much for mainstream persuasions, in other words.

Both of Jespersen’s points above find relevance still today. I have discussed the second one, about our brain being there to limit us, in a previous post, so I’ll deal here and in my next post with his first point, about our languages being there to limit us too.

The thought that having two languages may be just about enough endures in current terminology. The prefix bi- in the word bilingualism and its cognates often means, literally, ‘two’ – although these words are as often used to mean ‘more than one’, sometimes with no indication of which meaning is intended. Learning a new language is likewise said to be a matter of second language acquisition, with dedicated acronym, SLA, and all. The idea seems to be that the number of languages in one’s repertoire matters, judging by recent queries that have reached me, from private people and media corporations, about whether findings about bilingualism (where bi- means ‘two’) can, should, or must be extended to tri-, quadri-, penta- or, generalising, n-lingualism.

The idea seems also to be that the order in which you learn your languages matters too. You may well be a (relevantly) different multilingual if you learn Amharic before Icelandic, rather than vice versa, or if you learn both these languages simultaneously, in addition to another language you had before. And so on. This is probably why multilingualism is often described as a “complex phenomenon”. No wonder: we just have to imagine the (roughly) 7,000 languages we believe we have identified in all possible bi-, tri-, and so on combinations, plus whether they’re first language(s), second or third, and so on, plus whether they’re learned simultaneously or sequentially, and so on, to see what the word “complex” is meant to mean. We can also predict that this way of approaching multilingualism is likely to spawn brisk research for n number of years. But I wonder: why don’t we say that monolingualism, in the same (roughly) 7,000 languages, is also “complex”? Why is a monolingual a monolingual, regardless of the particular languages they are monolingual in, whereas multilinguals are all different multilinguals because of the particular languages they are multilingual in? Surely a Portuguese monolingual is a different monolingual from a Swedish monolingual, by the same token. I wonder why different monolingualisms are less worthy of curiosity than different multilingualisms.

The idea, in short, is that the languages of multilinguals are what matters. Jespersen thought so too. His twin concerns mirror today’s concerns: one, what multilingualism does to the languages; and two, what multilingualism does to you. What the language user does is nowhere in sight. I’ll try to work out next time why we came to think of multilingualism in this way.

© MCF 2012

Next post: Language “integrity”. Wednesday 9^th May 2012.

Dominant languages and balanced languages

You may have noticed, as I have, that people who talk about balanced multilinguals seem to be talking about people who are dominant in all of their languages, whether “balanced” is taken to mean ‘equally proficient’ or ‘perfectly proficient’. This got me wondering about the usefulness of the concepts that these terms represent to make sense of multilingualism.

Take the association of dominance with proficiency, for example. Defining “linguistic proficiency” is not as straightforward as the everyday use of the term might lead us to believe, and neither is, accordingly, the setting up of fair criteria which may assess proficiency in order to decide on language dominance. For each language, do we count, say, richness (another nebulous concept) of vocabulary, and/or of grammatical resources (shared ones, or specific to each language?), in either active or passive use, or both? Or do we focus on, say, fluency (if we can define this too), and/or versatility, as in the number and type of situations, or people, in which and with which each language is used? Do we count points for all of these, and do we count them in the same way, or do we make qualitative appreciations of our data here and there? Results are likely to vary with each criterion that we choose to take into account, thwarting any hope of finding a single language which ranks tops on all of them, all the time.

To my mind, the issue is whether we need to talk about dominance in order to talk about multilinguals. The term may have gained popularity from perceived analogies with our uses of handedness: although some of us are ambidextrous, most of us have a dominant hand. But it is also true that if my left hand, say, is dominant for holding the pen I’m writing with, this is because my right hand is dominant at holding the piece of paper I’m writing on. Try using your hands the other way around, to see how awkward they both are at doing what they haven’t been trained to do?

Another reason for the endurance of the term “dominance” draws of course on the archaic belief that the natural state of humankind is monolingual: given that the proficiency of monolinguals in their single language is seldom questioned, having a good language became synonymous with having a single good language. Or it could just be that our fixation with dominance simply reflects our enjoyment of war metaphors, inspired on environments where differences get settled by means of territorial claims: 

Photo: © lightmatter (Flickr)

Whichever the case may be, the trouble is that dominance comes complete with its counterpart, subjugation:

Photo: © lightmatter (Flickr)

If we take language dominance to associate with language proficiency, it follows that we must be non-proficient (or less so) in our non-dominant (or less so) languages, whereby we come full-circle back to the paradox that multilinguals have balanced languages, one of which is nevertheless (more) dominant.

The only way I can see the word “balanced” beginning to make sense in this connection is to say that our languages are balanced because they all serve the needs that they are required to serve. (We do this balancing act so well, in fact, that we resort to so-called mixes in order to say what we mean, as I’ve discussed before and will come back to in a future post.) But this means that one language will be dominant where, and when, and with whom another cannot be, as I reported in my book Three is a Crowd?. Everyday alternation of “language dominance” defines multilingualism itself, which amounts to saying that adding ill-defined words like dominance and balanced to discussions of multilingualism adds nothing to our understanding of what multilinguals do with their languages.

Analytical dead-ends such as these stem, yet again, from the persuasion that the languages, instead of their users, are what matters in multilingual matters. I’ll expand on this in my next post.

© MCF 2012

Next post: The languages of multilinguals. Saturday 28^th April 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.