Multilingualism Is Not A Curse, part 2
Transcription by Aileen Marshall: contact her at aileentranscribes@gmail.com
Sadie: This is Accentricity, a podcast where I examine the eccentricities of language and identity.
This is part two of a two-part episode about multilingualism. In part one I looked at the evidence we have that living your life in more than one language is good for you. In part two I’ll be looking more into why despite all that evidence we sometimes see suspicious attitudes towards multilingualism in the UK and elsewhere.
Agnieszka Checka grew up in Poland. She started learning English as a small child.
Agnieszka: I’ve always heard that English was this language that you learn if you want to be successful in life and I think me going to extra English classes was a further emphasis on that. I think the main association was if you know English you will be able to do more with your life.
Sadie: Agnieszka says that there was a sense of urgency in her learning of English as a kid. Not being able to speak English felt like a barrier.
Agnieszka: Maybe what it meant to me when I was younger was feeling -- just feeling left out from this bigger narrative that -- and these conversations that Europe was having. I think maybe because of the nature of the history of Poland implicates -- implicates? -- implies that we were a bit separated for a long time, for decades, and when that separation was no longer there, I think there was this intense need to -- felt by some, not others -- to definitely belong.
Sadie: But for Agnieszka, her motivations for learning to speak English were personal too. Learning English gave her a chance to connect with online communities and global culture where English acted as a lingua franca: a language used as a bridge between different linguistic groups. She’s written about this in a beautiful essay called When the Curtain Falls, which has just been accepted for publication. It’s about the complicated experience of growing up bisexual in Eastern Europe.
Agnieszka: I think because of my queer identity I -- when I started to realise that about myself I felt very isolated, as I know most queer people do, unfortunately, to different degrees. Also being a teenager and thinking about those things is very complicated and makes you feel all sorts of things. It was only looking back -- when I look back at that time of my life, I realised that having access to -- I suppose to the internet and British and American different tv shows and films and just people expressing themselves online. That’s where I found a sense of belonging and a sense of community even though I was never kind of active in any of those communities. I think I was just watching from a distance. Not saying anything but paying attention and it made me feel a little bit better about what I was going through. Because especially when you’re at that age, early teen years, you feel isolated anyway so to -- I just remember looking at my surroundings and not seeing myself anywhere. I feel like that wasn’t -- maybe that wasn’t very accurate I think there were definitely people going through the same thing and there was definitely some representation. I just didn’t see it. So language and English was a way for me to explore my sexual identity and feel more at home in that identity.
Sadie: Agnieszka moved to the UK five years ago. She was very highly competent at speaking English by that point. People could usually tell that she hadn’t grown up in the UK, but they couldn’t necessarily tell where she was from: some people thought she was Irish. And she felt lucky because she understood that her perceived competence in speaking English was a big part of being accepted as a migrant in the UK.
Agnieszka: When I used to overhear people who definitely sounded Polish, and this is awful and I regret it -- well I don’t regret it, I’ve learnt since then, but I remember feeling bad for them. Feeling bad that they can’t hide where they’re from and it was even worse when I overheard people speaking in Polish, if it was families or friends, I always felt bad for them.
Sadie: Because they couldn’t just disappear?
Agnieszka: Exactly. Yeah.
Sadie: Agnieszka told me that acknowledging and confronting these feelings of internalised xenophobia has helped her to get to a place where she no longer thinks this way. You hear about these feelings quite often from migrants who’ve moved to the UK. This urge to blend in, disappear, keep a low profile.
In the UK the dominant language is English. In a lot of places in the world the dominant language is English and even in places where it isn’t the most dominant language, it tends to show up a lot: in school, in advertising, in administration.
I asked Alison Phipps of Glasgow Uni about how we got here. Where did English get its power?
Alison: It was the language of colonialism. It was produced and produced many bureaucracies. It was the language of trade and the East India company was the vehicle par excellence for the development of the colonies and the speaking of English within that. The development of print media to hold the countries together, where the bureaucrats and civil servants were all living and able to get their news from the mother country and the way in which that that was then able to develop in different areas and different contexts. But, clearly, the people who had the guns, the people who were doing the trading, the people who performed a great many atrocities against native populations, they did it in English. They did it down the barrel of a gun and that is often how languages are made to be imperial.
Sadie: The English language is so dominant that it has a habit of squashing other languages out of the picture. In the UK, the first home of English, its power is keenly felt. English has always shared these islands with other languages but for a long time now it hasn’t been very good at playing nicely with the others.
You don’t have to go back very far to find a time when children were literally beaten for speaking languages other than English in school. These days you might not get beaten, but that doesn’t mean that those prejudices have gone away.
John helps with the production of this podcast and is also my boyfriend. As a Gaelic speaker from Skye, he’s really helped me to understand a bit about what it’s like to speak a minority language in Scotland.
John: Your language has systematically been beaten back, where they put in place an education act to ban you from speaking your own language. Where my Granny was -- two things happened to her in school: one her hand was tied behind her back for being left-handed and she was forced to write right-handed and she’s got dreadful handwriting. Or had dreadful handwriting I should say. And she was beaten for speaking Gaelic. Her language, her ancestor’s language, the language everyone spoke around where she was, she was beaten for it to the point where despite me learning Gaelic in school and speaking Gaelic as a child, she didn’t speak Gaelic to me until two or three years before her death. Because that’s the affect that policy had on her. A deliberate policy to deny her her language to the point where she told me there was no point speaking Gaelic. I guess that’s what kind of makes you angry and upset. Gaelic hasn’t just died out because people thought it was pointless. Gaelic is on its arse as a language because it’s been systematically attacked. So when there’s a tiny bit to redress the balance and then people push back against that, then it’s just language prejudice. And it’s not just Gaelic. I see it with Gaelic and then I see it again with all the other languages that are happening in Scotland. That they’re viewed with suspicion because they’re not English and people might be talking about the other person.
Sadie: In the UK today, if you look around you for long enough, you’re likely to catch a glimpse of ideologies which view any language other than English with suspicion and which view any type of English which isn’t thought of as being proper English, with disdain. Alison told me about Deborah Cameron’s writing on the idea of verbal hygiene.
Alison: She points to the way in which we have all these hygiene practices, as she calls them, around language and that we’re constantly trying to police the boundaries. I mean you see it with the grammar police, you see it with pedantry, you see it people going that’s a wrong word, that word doesn’t mean that any longer. You see it with all the sudden outpouring of vilification about Gaelic sign language that suddenly came up out of a clear blue sky.
At the moment, in these very troubling moments, where we’re seeing people being attacked on the street for speaking a language other than English, or what is thought to be a language other than English, I think people have a very visceral response to linguistic otherness and I think that is very troubling. I think that is clearly a task for education because it’s about a tolerant society and about an educated society but it’s also I think where these hygiene practices point to something much deeper that’s going on around us.
So what Deborah Cameron says about linguistic hygiene is that people are treating languages as a symbol for something else. Something that they might be fearful about and that hygiene is always about cleaning things up to look the way you think they should look. It’s about identifying what you think is dirt and what you think isn’t. When people are involved in these linguistic hygiene practices some of what’s going on for her is actually about designating some languages as inferior or as even as dirty compared to others -- or some practices within a language -- because these codifications happen within a language as well as outwith where we might place a language barrier or a language border. It might be about whether or not your accent is Oxford English, or whether it is a regional variety. What a lot of linguists have done obviously over the years is really examine what that means and look at the many class hierarchies that have been built in within the UK to what it means to have a regional accent: how seriously you’ll be taken.
Sadie: It's not so much that it’s only acceptable to speak English in the UK. Kids learn French or German or Spanish in school, sometimes other languages too but verbal hygiene is about keeping languages in their place. French is acceptable in the French classroom but not Polish in the English classroom. Not Gaelic when there are non-Gaelic speakers in the room. Not Urdu in public places. Eva Hannah, who spoke to me about her work with multilingual communities in the last episode, is married to a Greek guy and the parent of two multilingual children.
Eva: I live in a bubble where I’m around people who value bilingualism and Edinburgh is a very multicultural place but in the backdrop the sort of political -- Brexit, Trump, everything that’s going on right now. There have been these high-profile news stories about people being verbally abused on aeroplanes for speaking another language or for their race, for their ethnicity, and for the first time I’m starting to ask myself should we maybe not -- should we speak quietly if -- should I tell my family when they’re speaking Greek to maybe stay a little low profile? And then I think no. We can’t submit to the ugly climate right now, but I just have to say that’s the first time I’ve really felt this way. I keep seeing things in the news where some awful person just rages against somebody for speaking another language in public and I keep asking myself, what would I do in that situation?
Sadie: In its most extreme forms, verbal hygiene can mean people being attacked in the street for speaking the wrong language, but it can also be sneakier than that. It skulks around muttering darkly about the Scottish Government spending money on Gaelic. It corrects your spelling on Twitter. It makes fun of the way you talk. It teaches you to feel ashamed when your mum speaks the wrong language in front of your friends.
My friend Natalie was raised multilingually by her German mum and her Scottish dad. Until she started school, she thought that being multilingual was normal and fine.
Natalie: I thought everybody in the world could just do this and then you realise no, you are maybe a bit weird, is probably how you think of it. Or I did anyway. If your mum’s picking you up from school and talking German at you, everybody’s like “what’s that?” Nobody at any age wants all the attention drawn to them unless it’s something that you’re doing and you’re showing off or something but have your mum show you up even if you’re five years old is not really that cool. It then dawned on me that this is a bit different. All kids want to do is fit in and be like their friends I suppose. Now I realise that’s really horrible for parents and they get really upset about it, especially if they’ve been trying for five years so, so hard to bring you up completely bilingually. And they know you’re going to regret it later on and they’re totally right but when you’re five, or seven, or twelve, or fourteen, it just -- you can’t see it like that.
Sadie: But the thing is, if by normal we mean the most common thing, then yeah, multilingualism is normal. The majority of people in the world are multilingual.
This is poet and performer Harry Josephine Giles, who does research on minority language writing.
Harry Josephine: I think the problem is that the UK is chronically monoglot: that we’ve built an education system and a society on monoglotism and in eradicating multiple forms of speech. I wish more British people understood this. That is not the norm. That is a freaky thing to have done in a global setting. Most people in most countries speak multiple languages fluently, easily, naturally and shift between them most of the time and British people don’t understand that they’re freaks for not doing that. Like utter freaks. It’s not good for the brain and it’s not good for society. Like it makes for atrophied brains in an atrophied social system.
Sadie: Alison Phipps suggested to me that we can even question the very existence of monolingualism in our world.
Alison: My colleague David Gramling has just written a fantastic book called The Invention of Monolingualism, where he shows how monolingualism was invented. It’s a myth. It’s a construct. It’s not something that actually exists in the world. So even people who say, “oh we should all be monolingualism” or “we should all be a monolingual” or “we should all speak the same language”, they’re actually talking about something that doesn’t and isn’t possible. Because everybody has their own inflection, their own variety, their own dialect, their own forms, and language isn’t something that’s static, that stays in one place. We know this because perhaps the place where it is most static is in a dictionary and I’ve forgotten how many editions we now have of the Oxford English Dictionary. Every year it has to change the words in it. Every language is changing all the time and borrowing from other languages. There’s no such thing as a pure language and even if you speak English, you’re already speaking multiple languages within the speaking of English.
Sadie: But even though monolingualism is a myth we’ve constructed, like other myths it plays an important role in our lives. We have strong ideas on what’s English speech and what’s something else. Where non-English languages are allowed and where they’re not. What’s good English and what’s bad English. I asked Alison if she thinks that there are ways that we can break monolingualism’s hold over us.
Alison: We can learn from Sub-Saharan Africa where “multilingualism is the mother tongue” as my colleague, Angela Scarino, would say. Multilingualism is really important, and it is how people relate to one another. People relate multilingually in many contexts. Yeah, they might have the colonial language of the country they’re in but there’s all kinds of other languages people will speak. So when I’m in Ghana, for example, people will speak to one another in Twi, in Ga, in Ewe, in Akan. They will be moving in and out of those languages really easily and others too. And they will be speaking in Hausa and they’ll be speaking in Dangbe. What I’ve seen happen in those contexts, there are some connections, some words, you can hear, a bit like we might find that between French and English, for example, but they understand them as discreet languages. They are a source of local pride. They’re a source of belonging, they’re a source of identity and they are how you enable others to come in to and belong in a space.
One of the things I noticed in my work was the number of times people would be saying “oh in my language we say this” and they would give a word. Or “in my language we call it that” and they would give a word. Or “in my tradition we do this” and they would give it a name. And I for a long time thought this was something people were saying to me because I was involved in a project on multilingualism. I thought this was a high degree of reflexivity that was going on on behalf of the people who were hosting me and then I asked them “are you saying this? Is this phrase coming up a lot because of this or is this something else?” and they burst out laughing and they said ‘no, this is our normal way of speaking.
We do language pedagogy in every sentence. Which is very similar to what goes on with the raising of children multilingually and what goes on outwith classroom environments, outwith the codified curricular space. Which is important for putting a structure for a language in place but in that much more free flowing space, where we’re having a go at speaking a language we’re learning. So you might be doing time on a school exchange, you might be in a Saturday school, you might be living abroad, and in all of those interactions -- you might be on holiday having a go at using a language -- and in all those interactions you’re able to have some free reign and creative space away from the codifications that you expect. Away from the grammar police and the hygienists telling you what’s right and wrong.
There’s a place for that for giving you good guidance and strength in your language, an eloquence and a robustness to your rhetoric, but actually that place to play -- as I’ve put in in my own writing “to rehearse” -- scripts of linguistic behaviour with which you can then successfully order a cup of coffee. Or successfully have a longer chat. Or through which you might find a dear friend or fall in love or enjoy a particular piece of culture or argue your point with a police officer. Whatever it might be that you need to do in another language, that place of play is absolutely vital, and you can only really do that if you have a space in which you can perform and practice.
What I see happening in, certainly parts of Sub-Saharan Africa where multilingualism is a mother tongue, is that what is being practiced is multilingualism on the street. Not one variety monolingualism or one language with many varieties within it, where the codifications are happening internally but very, very different. A real range that is brought to bear and that allows for playfulness, but it also allows for different positions to be taken, different stances to be enacted, that can actually be part of mediation and peace building.
Sadie: Maybe we can learn to be a bit less strict about what languages belong where. Maybe we can have a go at saying words and phrases in other people’s languages even it makes us feel a bit stupid and we worry about pronouncing things wrong. We can also start to question what counts as English. I grew up being told that I was a monolingual English speaker but in recent years I’ve discovered that a lot of my linguistic repertoire can be thought of as being part of a language distinct from English: Scots.
Scots is an officially recognised language separate from English but the dividing line between Scots and English is contested because they’re so closely related. And whether I’m a Scots speaker or a Scottish English speaker, or both, isn’t that clear. Some people find this lack of clarity to be problematic and I get why but I also think that the contested nature of this border can help to disrupt our verbal hygiene practices. Trying to keep English and Scots separate is pretty much impossible because they’re so intertwined in peoples’ lives. Many of us in Scotland live our lives merrily dancing around between languages all the time. Living on both sides of a linguistic boarder that we very rarely look at. Maybe that’s multilingualism at its freest.
Agnieszka, my Polish friend from the start of the episode, has made a zine about moving to the UK. It’s called One of the Good Ones. In it she has a sentence that I absolutely love. She says “sometimes, I feel like I’m stuck on a bridge between two languages and two cultures. Sometimes I am the bridge.”
I think there’s one other thing we can do to combat the global power and dominance of English and all the harm that it’s done to peoples’ lives both in the UK and in the rest of the world. We can loosen up our ideas about who English belongs to. You still see adverts asking for people who are native English speakers to teach English to people who are not. As if native English speakers are the guardians of the language and everyone else is just a guest being allowed to play in the English-speaking world. The global power and dominance of English has meant that it’s become a global lingua franca. The fact that so many people speak it worldwide means that it’s become the language used for communication by lots of international communities.
My friend Andrew works in the European Parliament in Brussels.
Andrew: Brussels is an odd one because you could live in that city and almost entirely avoid the French language. Despite the fact that almost every native inhabitant is fluent in it and it is their mother tongue, there’s such accommodation for non-native speakers that everyone speaks enough English to get by. A lot of the official business of the European Union -- I know that with Britain’s leaving of the EU, Jean-Claude Juncker recently said that English is losing its position -- losing its importance within the EU but I think that won’t have gone down particularly well with the Eastern European countries who don’t have any other option. Very often that they are living and working in an EU environment in which English is the language that they operate in. All the Scandinavian countries as well, they are comfortable second -- incredibly comfortably second language fluency in English, but if you demanded that they work in French or German…
Sadie: UK might be losing its influence but probably English isn’t. Like it’s gone beyond the UK now.
Andrew: First language English might be losing its influence which is an interesting one because there’s an entire -- the majority of English speakers are not first language English speakers.
Sadie: The answer isn’t to get rid of English. Let’s face it, that’s probably not going to happen any time soon, but maybe we can let go of the idea that English belongs to anyone other than everyone.
I started the last episode by talking about the story of the Tower of Babel. I thought I understood what the story was about but when I spoke to Alison about it, she had a different interpretation.
Alison: The Tower of Babel is in Genesis, in the Bible, and it’s the story of the hubris of humankind. There are many interpretations of it but the way I understand it is: hubris is the belief that we can actually build a tower so big and we can all get to the point where we’ll all speak the same language and understand one another. In that story God basically decides that this is a really bad thing and I think this is really interesting. On the one hand you could understand this as a punitive God who then basically says “nope, you’re all going to be cursed”, as you’ve just put it, and you’re not going to be able to understand each other. Your worlds will not be coherent to each other and life will not be transparent.
But there are many other readings of that story and one of them is that it’s actually a blessing. A hubris is a really bad thing when we build things not to human scale, we tend to end up killing a lot of people much more easily. When we are completely transparent to one another we hear and see and understand all kind of things about one another that it’s often better for us not to know, hear or see. Or that if those that are in charge of us can hear and see them, it’s also not a good idea. So this is almost around debates around privacy.
The readings that I quite like about the myth of Babel, the Tower of Babel, are that this was actually the act of a loving, transcendental signifier. A loving God who decided that actually it was better for humankind to have to do the work of trying to understand one another because in that work of relating to one another and learning about one another human beings would learn to love one another and appreciate each other’s difference.
I think for me linguistic diversity is absolutely amazing and it’s incredibly persistent, to use the word that my colleague Charles Forsdick would use about it. Diversity persists despite the many attempts for us all to just speak one language. I mean English has had a really good go but really, it’s failed and it’s not looking successful. We’re still translanguaging, we’re still producing new codifications, we’re still inventing words that mean we have to keep updating the dictionary. So I can’t really see us getting to a point where that’s going to happen, and I think there’s going to be way too much resistance because human beings just so creative linguistically. The poets always speak the language of the future and they’re out there doing really whacky unhygienic stuff with language but that’s the language of the future. That’s what we’re going to speak.
Sadie: Thanks so much to everyone who helped make this episode: Agnieszka Checka, Alison Phipps, Eva Hannah, Natalie Finlayson, Harry Josephine Giles and Andrew Macdonell. Thanks also to Deborah Cameron for having a listen before the release. You can find links to all of their pretty fantastic work and Twitter feeds in the episode description.
So that was the final episode of series one of Accentricity. I’m now going to take a break, regroup and start planning series two. I’ve got a few ideas I’m working on and I’m already pretty excited.
Thank you so, so, so much to all of you listeners for your support. You have been amazing.
Thanks to John McDiarmid for talking to me about Gaelic, for production support, for emotional support, and for doing pretty much all of the housework while I’ve been working on this series. Thanks also to Seb Philp for making the music. Thanks to everyone I spoke to while making this series, including the people I spoke to who’s interviews haven’t yet appeared: Andreas Wolff, Peter McCune, Oisín Kealy, Stacey Kean, Sean Sweeney, Colin Reilly, Karen Corrigan, Bruce Eunson, Claire Needler, Derrick McClure, E Jamieson, Karen Lowing, Laura Green, Michael Hance, Pavel Iosad, Robert McColl Miller, Ben Kinsella and Kamil from Polska Szkoła. Even if your voices don’t appear your ideas and influence do, and I hope to include your actual voices at a later date.
If you’ve enjoyed this series and you want to help make a second series happen, there are a few things you can do to help. You can tell a pal about it, you can tell all of your pals at once by sharing a link on social media, you can go to the donate page on the website and send some much-needed cash. It’s at www.accentricity-podcast.com. You can leave a rating and review on the podcast app that you use. Or finally, if you’re someone who knows a bit about funding for projects like this, get in touch and give me your tips. You can find the podcast @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook or you can email accentricity.podcast@gmail.com. Thanks again for everything. Bye for now.