#bilingualism

[writingwithcolor]

Not all Second-Language Speakers are Made Equal.

@waltzshouldbewriting asked:

Hello! I’m writing a story that features a character who’s first language is not English. He’s East African, specifically from Nairobi, Kenya, and is pretty fluent in English but it’s not his primary language, and he grew up speaking Swahili first. I’m struggling to figure out if it’s appropriate or in character to show him forgetting English words or grammar. From what I’ve researched, English is commonly spoken in Nairobi, but it wouldn’t be what was most spoken in his home. For context, this is an action/superhero type story, so he (and other characters) are often getting tired, stressed, and emotional. He also speaks more than two languages, so it makes sense to me that it would be easier to get confused, especially in a language that wasn’t his first. But I’m worried about ending up into stereotypes or tropes. For additional context: I’m monolingual, I’ve tried to learn a second language and it’s hard. A lot of how I’m approaching this comes from my own challenges correctly speaking my own, first and only language.

Diversity in Second-Language English

You seem to have an underlying assumption that second language acquisition happens the same for everyone. 

The way your character speaks English depends on so many unknown factors: 

Where does your story take place? You mention other characters; are they also Kenyan, or are they all from different countries?

Assuming the setting is not Kenya, is English the dominant language of your setting? 

How long has your character lived in Kenya vs. where he is now? 

What are his parents’ occupations? 

What level of schooling did he reach in Nairobi before emigrating? 

What type of school(s) did he go to, public or private? Private is more likely than you think. 

Did his schooling follow the national curriculum structure or a British one? Depends on school type and time period. 

Does he have familiarity with Kenyan English, or only the British English taught in school? 

Is this a contemporary setting with internet and social media?

I bring up this list not with the expectation that you should have had all of this in your ask, but to show you that second language acquisition of English, postcolonial global English acquisition in particular, is complex. 

My wording is also intentional: the way your character speaks English. To me, exploring how his background affects what his English specifically looks like is far more culturally interesting to me than deciding whether it makes him Good or Bad at the language. 

L2 Acquisition and Fluency

But let’s talk about fluency anyway: how expressive the individual is in this language, and adherence to fundamental structural rules of the language.

Fun fact: Japanese is my first language. The language I’m more fluent in today? English. Don’t assume that an ESL individual will be less fluent in English compared to their L1 counterparts on the basis that 1) it’s their second language, or 2) they don’t speak English at home. 

There’s even a word for this—circumstantial bilingualism, where a second language is acquired by necessity due to an individual’s environment. The mechanisms of learning and outcomes are completely different. 

You said you tried learning a second language and it was hard. You cannot compare circumstantial bilingualism to a monolingual speaker’s attempts to electively learn a second language. 

Motivations?

I understand that your motivation for giving this character difficulties with English is your own personal experience. However, there are completely different social factors at play.

The judgments made towards a native speaker forgetting words or using grammar differently are rooted in ableism and classism (that the speaker must be poor, uneducated, or unintelligent). That alone is a hefty subject to cover. And I trust you to be able to cover that!

But on top of that, for a second language speaker, it’s racism and xenophobia, which often lend themselves to their own ableist or classist assumptions (that those of the speaker’s race/ethnicity must be collectively unintelligent, that they are uneducated or low class due to the occupations where they could find work, or conversely that they are snobby and isolationist and can't be bothered to learn a new language). Intersections, intersections.

If you want to explore your experiences in your writing, give a monolingual English speaker in your cast a learning disability or some other difficulty learning language, whatever you most relate with. And sure, multilingual folks can occasionally forget words like anyone else does, or think of a word in one language and take a second to come up with it in the other language. But do not assume that multilinguals, immigrants, or multiethnic individuals inherently struggle with English or with multiple languages just because you do.

~ Rina

[sleepii-freddie]

my bilingual ass misspelling definetley for 10000000th time

[elijah-terry]

Queer Multilingualism Linguistics Survey - 2023 ; CLOSED

Hi! My name is Gabe, and I am an undergraduate Linguistics student. You may have seen me put out a linguistics survey previously; this was for a graduate course, and I am still organizing that data and working on that paper. However, I have another research paper in a different linguistics course on Globalization of queer identities, and how language may affect the way queer identities are viewed and talked about. I am running another survey to collect data for this paper as well.

If you are queer and bilingual/multilingual, please consider taking this survey! How long it will take depends on the depth of your answers, but I would say 15-20 minutes is maybe a good estimate.

The survey can be found here, and I ask that you please reblog so it can reach more people! The survey will close on Friday, April 14th, at some point, so that I can begin organizing my data.

Thank you!

[fixing-bad-posts]

[Image description: a tumblr text-post, edited blackout-poetry style. Resulting text is below, in the body of the post.]

---

You probably don't know another language go out of your way to learn learning another language is immediately useful to you. This is because Most people who speak it will look at you and will appreciate you

Submitted by Anonymous

[kutyozh]

findings from ~4 days of blogging in german on my other blog:

I now cringe significantly less at people using german to talk about feelings

this could actually help me express my own emotions in my mother tongue??? maybe?

I realised that a huge barrier for me is the fear of accidentally saying something dialectal on here* when I post in German, and then being ridiculed for it

*i do experience this irl too but for some reason less intensely... i guess it's more like in the background of my brain irl

[welcometotheravenclawcommonroom]

Whenever a death eater tried to do legilimens on a bi/multilingual student’s brain, they weren’t able to get much because everything was in an incomprehensible mish-mash of different languages in a pattern completely incomprehensible to the monolingual brain.

[seitokaisnihongo]

How to gain access to the Seitokai Discord server

Hi, friends! It's @onigiriforears (aka shay) here! I'm going to teach you how to gain access to our entire server. Step by step.

Step 1: The first message and channel that you'll see when you enter the server is in the #welcome channel. It'll look something like this:

Step 2: Please follow the directions and head over to the #rules channel. This channel is going to make sure that you understand the rules and guidelines of the server. It's imperative that you read it because even though this is a server focused on learning and free resource sharing, we're a community server that's trying to make sure that we don't violate Discord's guidelines. READ THEM IN ENTIRETY. If you're confused, feel free to message me on Discord (I'm the "shay" that's mentioned/pinged in your welcome message. I know you're in the server--I allow the server's notifications to push through my DND settings.) You could also message me or send me an ask @onigiriforears, but discord will get you a faster response.

Step 3: From there, please go to the #verify-yourself channel. In this channel, you'll be confirming that you didn't lie about actually reading the #rules. We (me, mods, and admin) can tell if you're lying based off of what #roles you have (or don't have). Why do we have it set up this way? We're trying to discourage trolls and bots from entering the server. Because, unfortunately, we have been raided and trolled more than once. Some specific moments would be when someone broke through our (at the time) low-key "pick a role" option and stole our roster list. They used it to find mutual servers that they shared with members and then harassed them in the mutual servers after being banned in ours. (That included stealing ppl's stuff in the dank meme bot and whatnot.) A second time would be when someone broke through our mandatory #roles and spammed channels and told everyone that people who can't get to N1 in a year are dumb <not a good look. He was promptly banned lmao.

Step 4: Head over to the #roles channel. IT'S SO IMPORTANT. This is where you'll have to choose the one role that's mandatory--every other role within that channel is optional besides the JLPT level roles. Why? Since we're a community server focused on resource sharing and engagement, we also make sure we pay attention to our server demographics. If we have a slew of N5 or beginning members, we make sure that we have a lot of N5-targeted events and resources available. For a while, we had no N2 and N1 members, so we were able to hold off on posting kanji for the levels for a bit while we focused on something else. Now, we have a good mixture.

Step 5: ENJOY THE SERVER! If you've properly followed steps 1-4, you'll have gained access to the entire server. If not, please message me or you might find yourself in server purgatory where we ping you to get your attention until you either ask for help or you follow through lmao--aka the #temp channel. It's a private channel that only admin and other purgatory-dwellers can see. Once you get your appropriate roles, the channel disappears for you.

If you're thinking, this is a pain of a way to get in: it was a pain for me to set it up like this, too. Trial and error over almost 2 years of being a server. I can say that after setting it up this way, we haven't had anymore trolls or bots enter.

[reimeichan]

Any other systems who are native bi/multilinguals out there? As in, grew up speaking two or more languages? Curious how yalls native language proficiencies present in different alters.

For us, we're all able to speak and understand Mandarin/English, but how easily that comes to us may be different. Some alters prefer speaking Mandarin as it comes easiest to them and need to "translate" words to English in their head when communicating with English speakers. Some of us are the other way around where we prefer speaking English and may need to internally translate words to Mandarin. Some of us are fully fluent in both with no need to translate between languages. Some of us have obviously American accents when speaking in Mandarin but otherwise sound fluent. Some of us have a subtle Chinese accent when speaking English. Between ourselves, we often have conversations that's a mix of Mandarin and English, either swapping between the two languages (code-switching) or one person mainly speaking one language while the other speaks another.

And even if you're not natively proficient in multiple languages (as in you learned a second language in your teenage or later years), I'm still curious how language proficiency may present for yall!

[your-local-lucifer]

Spanish Teacher: ¡Hola! ¿Como estas?

Me, crying: Mera naam...Lucifer...hai...

[tabby-shieldmaiden]

*Becomes a daring, braver, more open person in my other language because I didn’t make my worst mistakes in that one*

[smhalltheurlsaretaken]

it's interesting to me how i'm not struggling to express myself in english in any way, but flipping the 'switch' each day still requires some effort. i'd say my inner monologue is 50% french, 50% english, but clearly thinking and talking aren't the same and talking naturally comes to me in french. once the flip is switched i can go back and forth between the two effortlessly but the switch is still there

[naranjapetrificada]

This is what happens when I think about fanfic genre and language conventions for too long on a Saturday afternoon.

As my fanfic consumption has recently grown by an exponential degree and I a) have the autistic-with-strong-language-skills brain that I have and b) speak two languages, I've started noticing some really interesting patterns in English-language fanfic writing that I can't unsee. And not being able to unsee them isn't a bad thing, it's just started to make me curious about what's going on behind the scenes. Specifically, I'm wondering about patterns that scream L2 English to me, and are the kind of thing that would have been significantly less likely to spread quickly before the internet? Or maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about?

So a quick google tells me that the tense in question is the present perfect, meaning the "have [verb]" construction. Have been, have got, have worn, have seen although I'll be paying special attention to the possessive have got. English loves a contraction, so it's 0% surprising "person + have" becoming I've, you've, they've, etc. What's interesting to me is when it's how often I'm seeing people drop "got" when it's possessive, so instead of "I've got a purple hat" it will be the much more archaic-feeling (to me) "I've a purple hat"?

Maybe it's not about multilingualism? Maybe there are plenty of L1 or monolingual English speakers doing it too? Maybe it's not about fanfic. Maybe that construction isn't even that archaic? I'm not a linguist or even that good at explaining grammar in either language I speak because I didn't learn them academically, but being someone who Thinks About Language a lot means I pay way more attention to usage. And that's a usage I noticed so I figured I would ask around!

[littleplasticthings]

Bilingualism, 1973

[dkniade]

Though I’ve realized I can indeed type and converse in Mandarin, even if they sound like they’re translated from Japanese (‘cause I drop the subjects)

aside from that, it seems I’ve been thinking about Childe more lately