Deutschbad

Now there's a multilingual mix if ever I saw one: a German invented composite noun to express an metaphor which exists in English and French, even if it's rendered slightly differently. In English, you immerse yourself in a language, like you do in a bath; in French you literally bathe in it: "baigner dans une langue". And that's what we are going to do next week on holiday in Allgäu, so it will be interesting to see if it has any effect on the kid's German. Although a week is very short. Might be more fun to think about how they will cope with the Bavarian accent/dialect, as they've never heard anything other than neutral German without a regional accent. I know I have my difficulties.

But actually, we're just going on skiing holiday.    

Thanks Peppa!

Yep, believe it or not, it's thanks to Peppa Pig that I got to change identity. I've become a "Mummy", instead of, or rather as well as being "Mama", which I've been since Leonard started speaking. Now thereby in itself hangs a tail, would you believe. 

Leonard was a relatively late speaker. His sister was anything but, so I now think it probably had nothing to do with his multiple languages, especially as their patterns of starting to speak are both within the normal ranges for monolingual speakers, and I believe reflect the general gender trends of girls often speaking more and sooner than boys. Nevertheless as parents of a first child we were a little nervy about it, and decided at some point, probably entirely nonsensically, that the reason he had not yet said either "Mummy" or "Papa" was connected to the fact that the other parent NEVER used those words. Instead, OPOL oblige, Thomas would refer to me as "Mama" and I to him as "Daddy". So in our worried ruminations we came to the conclusion that he was more likely to gratify us by giving us a name if he only had two rather than four words to deal with. Of course, this was much more to do with our emotional needs as parents than anything as mundane as words and languages. But it gave rise to the decision to call ourselves exclusively "Mama" and "Papa". 

This was not without its challenges, particularly in terms of pronounciation when speaking English, because the German words use vowel sounds which are not used in English. I only realised that I had basically trained myself to use the German pronounciation in the middle of my English sentences when my monolingual English parents came to visit and had huge difficulties trying to say the same thing as Thomas and I. It mostly came out like "Momma" and "Poppa", which to me sounded like fake American accents, so doubly strange/foreign - whereas I was perfectly at home with the German sounds. (I am at least relieved they never tried out the 19th century upper class pronounciation of "Mu-maaah" and "Pu-paah" - although I think that might even amuse me to become a Victorian lady at this stage...)

But anyway, I got used to it and figured that was it. Until for Annabelle (and only for her) I recently morphed into Mummy (as in Mummy Pig), after she had just indulged in a particularly long Peppa Pig binge. I think she even asked me if she could call me Mummy, so I said yes - why not?

So is this wierd, being called one thing by one child and something else by the other one? And even more wierdly, have one using an English word in an English sentence and the other in effect mixing a German word into his otherwise exclusively English talk with me? Not really, like with many things I think I've just got used to used to it. And I still refer to myself as Mama. And that seems to be fine with everybody too.

More to the point, am I worried about the immense influence a two-dimensional (as commented on by Annabelle herself : "Peppa only moves sideways, doesn't she") cartoon pig has on my daughter's language choices and my maternal identity? Go figure.

Chronologies and linguistic EQs

It's funny how many people say there are some things they can only do in one language, whether it be talk to babies and animals, or swear (I enjoyed this article and the comments on it on Multilingual Living on the subject). I can really identify with that: to this day Thomas and I tend to speak German on the phone, for reasons that will become evident later in this post. But I have also experienced how these habits can change, sometimes unintentionally and often unnoticed through changing circumstances, but also sometimes as a result of a quite deliberate effort. Can I indulge in a bit of reminiscing and take you through some of our language chronologies to illustrate the point?

When Thomas and I met, we only spoke German. We were both living in Germany, I spoke German well enough to communicate everything I wanted to, and in any case I was there as part of my degree programme to improve my German. 

This didn't change when we both moved away from Berlin. Over the next four years, each of us lived variously in the USA, in Russia, in the UK and in Germany, but never in the same country at the same time. We spent a LOT of time on the phone, always in German (hence I believe our tendency to revert to German when communicating via a piece of plastic without being able to see each other).

After this, there was a multilingually very boring period where we both lived in Germany (not in the same town, mark you, we couldn't do anything as obvious as that...) and spoke German ALL the time to everybody.

Then things started to get interesting again. Between us we gradually moved to the French-speaking area where we live now (and, Reader, I married him!) and both eventually took up work where we were mostly speaking English. Despite our emotional attachment having developed and become fully fledged in German, we gradually started to mix more and more English into our conversations without ever really noticing (except of course on the phone). And then the children came along, and it seemed fairly obvious to us to decide on the one-parent-one-language (OPOL) strategy.

All of a sudden, two things happened: firstly it actually took me some effort to make myself speak ONLY English with the children, so used was I to mixing languages in my home environment. And secondly, a significant proportion of my home communication was now taking place in English, as I inevitably spent more time with the babies than I did with Thomas (I was working part-time, so spending weekday time with them but without him). Then I got lazy: Thomas speaks fluent English, right, and is telling me stuff from his English-speaking work environment in English (why would he translate it for me???), so I more or less stopped speaking German to him (except, of course, on the phone!).

So much for it coming naturally to speak to babies in your mother tongue, and it being impossible to change the linguistic EQ of the language you fell in love in.


PS In a similar vein, you might like the interview with bilingualism researcher and adept Prof. Jean-Marc Dewaele, also on Multilingual Living. You might even want to take his survey on personality and code-switching. I did, and as with many such surveys, found it quite difficult to boil down my opinions to a yes-no answer on a subject I have rather more sophisticated ideas about. But definitely worth doing to support research in a very interesting area.

This month's bilingual blogging carnival

This is taking place on the "Speaking in tongues" blog this month, so go take a look. What is a blogging carnival? It's basically a collection of entries from different blogs made available on a host blog. Think of it like a chat show, where the host showcases the guests and what they do. So it's a good way of getting to know other blogs you might not yet have found or visited.
I'm off to have a read now. Hope you enjoy it too. 
Jen

Which language does Sofia speak?

Let me start with a quick disclaimer: Sofia is six months old. She doesn't make any utterances which constitute language yet. I am not one of these misguided parents who eagerly listen to baby's every gurgle and burp and try and translate it into something linguistically meaningful (although if pushed I might admit to having displayed such tendencies with Leonard, the first baby...). 


The interesting thing is that if you ask adult speakers of the different languages spoken in Sofia's world, they will all tell you she is speaking their language. A Swiss friend happily burbles to our babies, repeating "areuh" back to them (it's a real French word, check it out on google), whereas any English person talking with them will say "ga ga" and so will baby. For Germans this is a bit more difficult, because there doesn't appear to be a stereotypical baby sound in German. I asked a number of friends what you would see in a cartoon bubble for babytalk and they couldn't come up with anything specific. But anyway, you get the general idea.



So what does this tell us? That all adults speaking to babies are misguided and only hear what they want to hear? Or that Sofia has been reading the comics and knows what she should be saying to whom? One thing is sure (cos science says so): studies have shown that by about the age of 6 months babies have started to filter out the sounds which are not useful to them in the language(s) spoken to them. This is why Japanese native speakers famously cannot hear and often pronounce a distinction between a 'l' and an 'r', because this distinction isn't used in Japanese. It's also why I have great difficulties with 'u' and ' ü' in German. I've learnt to pronounce two different sounds which approximate fairly closely to those used by German native speakers (amongst other things by means of a hilarious exercise involving imitating a frog in front of a mirror, taught to me by a German teacher who was so square that I just had to believe that she wasn't making fun of me). But I still have huge difficulties hearing the difference between the two, to Thomas' great amusement, particularly when it comes to the difference between "drucken" (to print) and "drücken" (to press or squeeze),  especially in the idiomatic expression "Ich drücke dich", meaning to give someone a hug, which I invariably mispronounce as "I print you!"


But I digress. Sofia is definitely on her way to being able to distinguish the sounds made in English, German and French and to have the potential to be able to reproduce them. Although something strange happens along the way (or maybe not so strange: see Prof. Grosjean's expert blog). For example, the older multilingual children we know whose schooling is in French speak their other languages with the cutest of little French accents. But it goes away when they leave home to live in an entirely native-speaker environment. And the kids we know who go to the English-language international schools seem to come out with fairly spooky mid-Atlantic accents, mixing and matching pretty random bits of British and American pronounciation and slang.



I shall have to stop. Said baby has just woken up (very unusually) screaming - I'll leave you to ponder in which language. 

Which language where?

Following on from my last post, I've been thinking more about which language I'm comfortable speaking where. It occured to me that living in an area with a large multinational community (due to a big UN presence and a number of major international firms having their European headquarters in the city) makes life a lot easier. 

For example, until recently we thought we were going to move to the UK last year. I had already started thinking about what this would mean for us language-wise. I came to the conclusion that we would probably drop the French altogether and focus on making sure that the children's German was really up to scratch, seeing as we have no family or cultural connection with French-speaking areas (other than currently living in one). And as their English would be secured by living in an English-speaking environment, I figured we would make German our home language, meaning I would speak to the children in German (instead of English like I do now). 

But then I had to imagine myself standing in a playground in a suburb of Manchester screaming at Leonard "Hoer auf, dem Jungen Sand ins Gesicht zu werfen!" (Stop throwing sand in that boy's face!), and suddenly I felt less at ease with the idea. It was bad enough with German, knowing how rampant a mostly playful Teutonophobia is in the UK, but then I thought, what if you were speaking a language which is associated with immigrants? And I recalled the experience of an Asian acquaintance recently arrived in the Greater Manchester area whose family had had to deal with abuse being shouted at them as they chatted in the street. Advertising the fact that you are different to the majority culture is not always a safe strategy.

So much as it is sometimes a challenge to raise the children trilingually and in my every day life to deal with things in three languages, I have to remember to count my blessings and be grateful that we're doing it here where it's not so unusual to be a polyglot.   

Daring to speak the other language

Annabelle has a new friend at creche. It was her friend's dad who spoke to me in the creche hallway, recognising a fellow Brit (I was, of course, talking to A. in English, but the creche is entirely French-speaking). They had recently arrived in town from the UK. He's looking after the kids until he can find a new job, while his partner works full-time. So we met up one afternoon and the two girls, although a little reticent at first, soon clicked and had a fantastic time together - in English. 


That was about a week ago. Today at the creche, the staff told me that the two girls had just found out that they shared a language other than French and that when the group had gone for a walk, they had joined hands and gone on for ages chattering away together in English. 


The interesting thing about this is that for days the two girls had hesitated to use English in an (almost) entirely francophone environment, even though the friend is not yet very comfortable in French, having only recently moved to a French-speaking area. It took the relative isolation of walking together and leaving the location of the creche to remove an unspoken pressure to speak the dominant language, even though the two of them had only spoken English together when they had met each other with their anglophone families outside the creche. 


Apparently, having discovered this new freedom, they continued to hold hands and speak English once back inside the creche. I actually felt it necessary to ask if the creche staff were OK with this, which they are - so they don't in fact impose a monolingual policy. It's just that (obviously) not all the staff speak all the languages represented by the children in a multinational creche, so French by necessity has to be the most commonly shared language.


This story reflects a hesitation that many parents in our type of situation will recognise: when, for example, you're on the playground, do you holler at your kid to GET DOWN FROM THERE in your shared language, because that's what you always speak to them and that's what is most likely to get the reaction you want, or do you defer to the local language? For my part, I use English, partly because in our multinational area it's very common to hear parents using languages other than French with their kids, and I think I am also comforted by the fact that English must be the next language to French round here which is most likely to be understood. So I don't feel I'm being quite so rude and excluding people as I might be.


But certain languages belonging to certain places is a funny thing. A different friend of Annabelle's with two anglophone parents was at ours recently. The girls were happily playing (with parents in safe reach), when prompted by what they were doing, I started singing a nursery rhyme to them in French. The look of shock in A.'s friend's face stays with me to this day: how could I (of all people) be singing that song (which for her belonged in the creche) in this place (of all places)! I had clearly broken a barrier which she thought immutable.