Numbers and languages

When my children became initiated in the arts of school homework, they welcomed assistance from us parents in revising, among other things, their times tables. It didn’t take me long to start suspecting serious innumeracy in all three children: they took unsettling amounts of time to reply to my questions, whether toughie ones like Seven times eight...? or easy-peasy ones like Three times two...?

It took me a bit longer to realise that the problem had nothing to do with number skills, and all to do with languages: I naturally used Portuguese in these drilling sessions, but the children were learning their times tables in English, their school language, and were therefore computing the sums in this language. Which meant that they had to mentally translate my questions into English, and then re-translate the answers into Portuguese, which does indeed take ages. Which in turn meant immediate revision of home language policies: English became the language of homework, because homework comes in tongues. Part 3, ‘Acquiring a Third Language’, of my book Three is a Crowd? has more on multilingual division (and revision) of language-based labour.

Now, you may be wondering that the reason I naturally used Portuguese to drill times tables was that this is “the language in which I count”, since I am Portuguese. Well, not really. First, my times tables became forever etched in my brain in both Portuguese and French, through similar school-bound drilling. I used Portuguese with my children because this is the default mummy-child language in my home. Second, there’s no denying that numbers associate with languages, because everything else that matters to us does, too. But not necessarily with a single language: numbers, like homework, also come in tongues. In my case, for instance, I can only recall phone numbers (or recipes, for that matter) in the language in which I memorised them. Ask me to tell you, say, a Swedish phone number in another language, and watch me jotting it down in mental Swedish so I can read it to you in spoken non-Swedish, much like my children were doing with their times tables. And third, language names and nationality names don’t designate coextensive concepts, and never have. It makes as much sense to ask South Africans or Singaporeans which language they count in, as it does those of us who happen to have a nationality which happens to have the same name as a language.

Most of us know our times tables – and our other sums – in the language(s) in which we were made to drill them, in school. Whatever we learn in school, number goodies included, we learn through some language. Unless we want to claim that school-trained behaviours represent “the” essence of overall multilingual cognition, and that the language(s) of schooling play “the” core role in it, I don’t see the relevance of questions like In which language do you count? for our understanding of multilingualism. Several years ago, Marguerite Malakoff made this clear in The effect of language of instruction on reasoning in bilingual children.

Numbers, it turns out, aren’t essential to our languages, because numbers aren’t essential to human beings.

Numbers rule?

Image © clipartheaven.com

The interesting questions are whether numerical skills relate to numbers at all. For example, does numeracy depend on command of number words? Researching Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children, Brian Butterworth and colleagues compared numerical concepts of child speakers of languages with restricted vs. broad number-related vocabularies, to find no correlation between numerical thought and number words, a finding that they extend to claims about adult numeracy and vocabularies. Christine Nicholls also turned to child users of Australian languages, to show that numbers aren’t at the core of mathematical reasoning (even discounting the common confusion between arithmetic and mathematics). Quoting from her article It’s time we draft Aussie Rules to tackle Indigenous mathematics, “Aboriginal mathematical systems are largely founded upon spatial relationships rather than on numbers, which is the case in Australia’s dominant culture.”

“Dominant culture” is the key phrase here. The association of numeracy and/or maths skills with languages which feature number vocabularies, and are featured in mainstream schooling, draws on misguided and misguiding dominant, Western, monolingual models of language use and language education. So does the related assumption in meaningless questions like In which language do you X?, where X variously stands for “higher-level”, “fundamental”, “spontaneous” and/or “emotional” exponents, believed to be descriptive of what we are, such as thinking, dreaming, swearing or being miserable and happy.

Finally, in case you’re feeling that something is surely missing here, because numbers must lay bare essential findings about us in that they’re factual and therefore indisputable, then don’t: numbers are no more than what we do with them – whatever our languages. Darrel Huff said so in his enduring pearl of a book, How to Lie with Statistics, and so did Sebastian Wernicke in his TED Talk Lies, damned lies and statistics.

I’ll keep to ways of deceiving, in my next post.

Butterworth, B., Reeve, R., Reynolds, F., & Lloyd, D. (2008). Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (35), 13179-13184 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0806045105

Malakoff, M. (2008). The effect of language of instruction on reasoning in bilingual children Applied Psycholinguistics, 9 (01) DOI: 10.1017/S0142716400000436

© MCF 2013

Next post: Multilingual liars. Saturday 2^nd November 2013.

Multilingual dreams and nightmares

Multilingual nightmares can take many forms. Children, for example, may be discouraged from using their languages, in the name of resilient myths equating linguistic health with monolingualism; parents intent on raising their children multilingually may agonise over recommended enforcement of monolingual home language policies; and people (and places) that we’ve adopted and wish to cherish as our own may suddenly turn hostile because we unwittingly cause offence by using the languages we’re used to using.

Rather less disquietingly, some of us may find ourselves uttering fluent gobbledygook when attempting to speak language X, while actually speaking language Y in X: the other day, after an intensive English-only week, I heard myself asking Mas ela não fez isso, fez ela?, complete with falling intonation on the tag, in what I thought was Portuguese. I did realise it wasn’t, and I also realised that my Portuguese must at the time have been yawning away its drowsiness after the week-long nap during which I had had no need for it.

All good: such glitches are evidence of the natural tidal motions which regulate our use of our languages, and of which we are more or less conscious. But it is also true that we may wake up in the morning in irresistible language-bound moods, which lie beyond our control and whose compulsion suggests that our languages don’t necessarily go to sleep when we do. We may well dream about our languages, but do they otherwise take part in our sleeping activities? Namely, do we dream in them?

Dreams, good and bad, have regularly intrigued us as tell-tale reflections of what we are when we’re not in control of what we are, on the assumption that selves on the loose are our real selves. On the further assumption that multilinguals are in fact monolinguals in disguise, only one of our languages can apparently mirror our multilingual selves. Questions like In which language do you dream?, part of a rich battery of like-minded FAQs addressed to multilinguals, attest to this view.

The problem is that if we accept that languages mirror selves, then we must also accept that all languages of a multilingual do so, because multilinguals routinely use all of their languages – or they wouldn’t have need for them. If what matters to us, in turn, naturally came to matter via our engagement with different languages, it must follow that our expression of our selves reflects that engagement, whether we’re awake or asleep. I, for one, can confirm that members of my family who talk in their sleep (while, presumably, dreaming), me included, indeed do so in different languages.

An alternative take to how multilinguals dream has it that multilinguals can in fact dream in more than one language, but only if those languages are well developed. That is, dreaming in a language is a reliable gauge of proficiency in that language. The problem is that there is no evidence supporting this claim. Jessica Sicard and Kees de Bot make this point in their article ‘Multilingual dreaming’, and conclude that factors such as the length of our engagement with the environments in which we use a language play a role in triggering dreams in that language.

What to say, then, of the meaning of multilingual dreams? Dream analysis assigns an interpretation to what a dreamer dreamed, and must likewise proceed in tongues because analysts use languages, too. The dreamer reports dream contents in some language, preferably one which the analyst shares – which may or may not be the one(s) in which the dreamer dreamed, or the one(s) best suited to express what the dream was all about. The analyst then attributes meaning to what the dreamer reported, also in some language. This (bad) dream, for example, got interpreted in Spanish:

Image ©: Francisco Goya (Wikimedia Commons)

The problem is that different languages represent meanings in different ways, because meanings associate with cultures. Dream analysis traditionally makes use of symbols, analogies, metaphors, whose interpretation does not necessarily match across languages. If, say, I dreamed of snakes last night (or owls, or bats, or feline creatures), did I have a good dream or a nightmare? The decision may rest entirely on how the dreamers’ culture and the culture of their dream analysts symbolise snakes (or owls, or bats, and so on).

Next time, I’ll deal with numbers, which don’t seem to be as open to cultural interpretation as dreams, but which also rank high on the list of FAQs-to-nag-multilinguals-with: “In which language do you count?”

Sicard, J., & de Bot, K. (2013). Multilingual dreaming International Journal of Multilingualism, 10 (3), 331-354 DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2012.755187

© MCF 2013

Next post: Numbers and languages. Saturday 5^th October 2013.

Metaphors and multilinguals

Many years ago, one of my children decided that one good way of putting his newfound walking ability to use was to bolt around the house targeting furniture and people, and asking about the names of whatever he bumped into. One day, he crash-landed on the arm of an armchair. Having asked what that was, and having received the answer um braço (‘an arm’), he forgot to race to his next victim. He was dumbfounded: an arm?? He already knew the word for ‘human upper limb’, so he endlessly repeated his question, first slapping the arms of the armchair, then slapping his own arms, and then alternately slapping each of the two ‘arm’-thingies, until he satisfied himself that those completely different objects indeed went by the same name.

He had no idea, of course, that we adults decided that one good way of putting our vocabularies to use was to extend the meaning(s) of words, for example by means of metaphor. Metaphors use comparisons without using the word like: the arms of an armchair aren’t like arms, they are arms, and we call them so by name. My boy’s bafflement got me baffled, too, about two things. First, why do we say that adults use metaphor and children use overextension (or overgeneralisation)? When big ones call a part of a table leg, and when little ones call any cutlery spoon, we’re all doing the same thing: giving the same name to whatever strikes us as similar. You can read introductory accounts of metaphorical and overextension processes in Chapters 9 and 12 of my book The Language of Language, respectively, and a full account of this armchair episode in Chapter 8 of another book of mine, Three is a Crowd?.

The second thing that got me wondering was what exactly is it that prompts our perception of “similarity” – whether we’re intending to compare things metaphorically or not. Do we say that an armchair has arms because armchairs look like sitting human beings relaxing their arms on their sides, because their lateral appendages feel like arms when we sit, or because we rest our arms on them? That is, what does the “arm” in armchair mean? And, for those languages which have equivalent concepts designating armchairs, does the arm bit mean the same? Not to speak of the chair bit, of course. That is, how are metaphorical meanings got at, in different languages? For a thorough discussion of metaphor generation and usage in English, try Andrew Goatly’s book The Language of Metaphors.

Words and word-based constructions, however, are just one fraction of the linguistic devices that we can use metaphorically. Our languages come complete with gestures, including vocal gestures, through which we can create meanings. Prosodic metaphors are the reason why the “same” word can be used – and interpreted – as a term of endearment or of abuse, as I noted in a previous post. It all depends how you say it: our uses of words create their meanings. Do we use rising (as opposed to falling) tones of voice, say, because rises vs. falls carry distinct meanings in our language(s), because we want to show politeness or encouragement, or because rises but not falls happen to be characteristic of our language(s)? And what do these vocal gestures mean to other people, when we use them, unwittingly, in a different language from the one(s) in which they’re meaningful to us?

Metaphors build on constructed associations of meanings, in arbitrary, culture-bound ways. The same is true of other forms of comparison which permeate our everyday uses of language, including analogy. In a review of Cameron Shelley’s book Multiple Analogies in Science and Philosophy, I argue that analogy is “central to everyday reasoning about everyday happenings”, so much so that “we hardly realise the extent to which it shapes our thought.”

Predictably, metaphors and analogies abound in scientific thought, too. Their use “overextends” our thinking from what is familiar to us to what we know (nearly) nothing about, and then, once accepted as legitimate ways of expressing our observations, they constrain further thought, for better or for worse. If we call an X a big bang, say, we want to associate X to whatever we already know of bigness and of bangness. Which, of course, may not match what someone else understands by these words, even if we’re all using them in the same language.

And what to say of the metaphors that riddle discussions about multilingualism? What, exactly, do we mean by labels such as balanced, half-/semi-, dominant, first, mother, standard, which have become “standard” in shaping our thought about language? Why, exactly, do we go on using such terminology? Have a look in my book Multilinguals are...?, for more about this.

My next post keeps to the topic of things we like to interpret metaphorically.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Multilingual dreams and nightmares. Saturday 7^th September 2013.

Multilingual rudeness

Swearing fluently and insulting people where it really hurts isn’t easy. The thing is that you manage to be rude only if someone acknowledges your rudeness. That is, only if someone understands that you’re being rude. You may have intended a compliment instead, or you may have had no intention of being either polite or rude. This is probably what explains the common perception that profanity is the hardest thing to master in a new language.

I agree. I’ve had students quite eager to show off to me their not-so-bad-after-all proficiency in the languages they want me to help them fine-tune, by inserting random expletives all over their speech, during my assessment interviews. It sounds horrible, and it *is* horrible. I’ve also witnessed attempts at verbal abuse by means of word-by-word translations of horrid expressions from one language into another, resulting in either unintelligible gibberish – or flattery. It sounds depressing, when it doesn’t sound hilarious.

“Verbal” is probably the key word here. Keith Allan and Kate Burridge’s book gives an account of Forbidden Words. Taboo and the Censoring of Language, but words are not the whole story. Words aren’t even main characters in the rudeness plot, in fact: we can either insult or compliment someone by calling them a genius or a filthy pig. Whether words will never hurt me, as the saying goes, depends entirely on our other languages, which are necessarily there when we speak: body-eye-hand language, and our prosody. They give the clues to what we mean, because rudeness is a cultural covenant, not a lexical one.

Studies such as José Mateo and Francisco Yus’, Towards a cross-cultural pragmatic taxonomy of insults, and those collected by Jonathan Culpeper and Dániel Z. Kádár in Historical (Im)politeness highlight the social nature of rudeness. Its verbal and gestural dialects evolve and vary across time and space, much through our uses of metaphor – more on which in my next post. The label idiot once described a clinically diagnosed condition, for example, and the label idiot-savant still does. In Europe, Nordic rudeness draws on mythical beings and places related to religious beliefs, whereas Mediterranean profanity is at its most flamboyant when invoking bodily functions – as well as close relatives resulting from some of those functions. And is it (more) rude to point with your index finger, your pinkie, or your thumb? Or is it rude to bite your thumb, as in this sample of Shakespearean insults?

Being multilingual and (not) wanting to be rude means being aware of these choices. I’m often asked the standard question asked of multilinguals, the one beginning In which language do you ...?, about my swearing, too. As if things like stubbing my toe or boiling inside a car in peak hour traffic jams only happened in the settings where I use one of my languages. As if the reasons for swearing and hurling insults, including at myself, came pre-packaged in a single language. I swear multilingually quite often – like just now when my server broke down for the third time today, and I found myself muttering Raio de internet connection!. I also curse monolingually, often because the curses I can express in that language are the most satisfying for whatever made me curse – even if the trigger took place in a different language. And sometimes I don’t really care whether anyone understands my insults: it just feels good to let off steam in a way that I know to be very rude.

Having said all this, I am (mostly) a nice, polite person [insert groan here], so when my children were growing up, with me as their only provider of Portuguese, I made a mistake. I thought I was being a good mother by not familiarising my nice, polite little ones with Portuguese profanity. Until, that is, a good friend expressed her bafflement at this striking gap in my children’s Portugueseness: How can they be Portuguese without knowing how to use Portuguese rude words??, she chided me. She was right, of course. I followed her advice (obrigada, Maria João!), and the kids soon became fluently rude – like me. I had forgotten that you can’t be polite if you don’t know how not to be rude. I can give one example:

Photo © parenting.failblog.org

If the gesture featured in this picture makes you cringe, you’re not alone. I, for one, am still working on taking it as a gesture, rather than the (very) rude insult I grew up associating with it.

School-language learners who intend to use their new languages, verbal and gestural, might be grateful for some insight about how other users use them, too, rather than about what those languages “are”. We may unintentionally offend (or fail to offend) by using tones of voice and/or gestures that associate with different meanings in our other languages. Prosodic false friends, as I call them, are no less than a time bomb, if we’re left in the dark about them. My study Non-native interpretive strategies for intonational meaning shows what can (and certainly will) go wrong when we attempt to speak a new language with no clue about its prosody.

Prosodic false friends tell us that words do not hold the exclusive on metaphorical meanings. I’ll have some more to say about this next time.

Cruz-Ferreira, M. (1987). Non-native interpretive strategies for intonational meaning: An experimental study In A. James & J. Leather (Eds.), Sound patterns in second language acquisition (pp. 103-120). Berlin: de Gruyter.

Mateo, J., & Yus, F. (2013). Towards a cross-cultural pragmatic taxonomy of insults Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 1 (1), 87-114 DOI: 10.1075/jlac.1.1.05mat

© MCF 2013

Next post: Metaphors and multilinguals. Saturday 10^th August 2013.

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.