washing machines and other vehicles

Today, my son pointed to the washine machine, and said: "Mama, Auto Tür auf!" (Mama, car door open!)
I didn't know what he was talking about, since he wasn't pointing at any cars. Then his dad, said in Russian,
"No, that's not a car ("mashina") "that's a stiralnaja mashina"

So basically our son had done a back-translation from Russian to German, and decided, since both cars and washing machines are types of "mashina" in Russian, that a washing machine was an "Auto."

Glad we managed to sort out this little misunderstanding ... :)
I am sure there are plenty more to come so keep reading!

My favourite code-switches

So it has been established that code-switching follows rules and is not a sign of confused, undifferentiated language mixing.
It is actually really quite difficult to define the syntactic rules of code-switching, but bilingual speakers have very clear intuitions as to what is grammatical and what is not. (I thought it might be a fun project to write the Syntax of German/English code-switching for example)... But anyway, it's clearly not random mixing, as indeed studies on code-switching also confirm.

Because code-switching is such a very striking feature of early bilingual language production (and indeed all bilingual speakers code-switch when they speak with other bilinguals) this apparent mixing often causes parents of bilingual children some concern that their children are not able to "tell their languages apart." Generally, code-switching is discouraged by parents.

However we know now that language mixing in production does not mean that the child does not differentiate between their languages.

Here is some anecdotal evidence from my son!
For some words, my son can actually tell you what each of us says:
Yesterday, he was holding a spoon, and he said:
"Kindergarten! Boon" (and said with a real Scottish accent!)
I said, yes, and what do you say?
"Löffel"
and Papa?
He had to think a little bit, and then said:
"Loshka"
Then he said: "Thoko auch "boon"" (Thoko also says spoon)

Anyway, here are some of my favourite code-switches from my family:

Habt ihr schon eingefütet? (German/Hungarian)
"Have you already switched the heating on?"

He really honked that one up.( German/English)
"He really messed that one one up- eg er hat das wirklich verhonkt)

Hát hiszen ez lófat! (Hungarian-English) (this one is from some relatives in the US)
"But this is lowfat!" (this one sounds quite rude in Hungarian)

And here is a nice one from a friend:

Sometimes I start a conversation in English y terminó in español (English/Spanish)

I have actually noticed that you can be more or less fluent in code-switching depending on whether you have contexts in which you have other bilinguals to "practise" with. I, for example, am very good at code-switching in Hungarian/German (family context) and German/English (from my school) but I am not very "good" at Hungarian/English. I had a Hungarian friend here in Edinburgh, and I kept code-switching into German when speaking with him, which he found quite funny. He took me up on it and asked me to switch into English instead, because he was having difficulty following me. And I found that really hard! In my life, Hungarian and English just do not mix!! (But I will practise...)

So, over to you: what are your favourite code-switches?

The rules of code-switching

People often remark that bilinguals "mix up their languages" a phenomenon that is sometimes referred to as "code-switching." How much mixing happens obviously depends on context, and the highest rates of mixing is when bilinguals talk amongst themselves.

I clearly remember a friend of mine at school (an English speaking school in Germany) saying:

"I had to do a KRASSE UMWEG this morning" (crazy detour)

But codeswitching is not at all random and it actually follows its own grammar. For example, there is just no way that you could say the above sentence with the determiner "a" in German:

eg.
* I had to do EINEN KRASSEN UMWEG this morning

This is just impossible.

Likewise, you could not say
*Heute morgen musste ich A CRAZY DETOUR machen (which is essentially the phrase above in "German")

It would have to be:
"Heute morgen musste ich einen CRAZY DETOUR machen" with the determiner "einen" in German.

Do you German/English bilinguals out there agree??

C is for Dog.

So I have been advised (by my dear brother) that I should include more "cute stories" about my son"s bilingualism, so that my stories become less academic and more digestable for the "casual surfer" (thanks for the tip, A.)
So here is the "cute story" for this week:

We have a book at home for teaching the alphabet to Russian children and my son really likes looking at it with his dad. It has a mascot for every letter, which normally starts with the first letter, or looks like the letter somehow. So the mascot for the letter "C" (which is the Russian "s") is a "собака" (pronounced "sobaka"i.e. a dog.)

Now whenever we are out and about and my son sees a "C" (the other day he got really excited by three Cs at once(!!) on the side of a car of the "City car club") he points to it, gets all excited and says "Hund!!!" (which is German for "dog")

If you didn't know his particular background, you'd really have no chance of understanding where on earth he came up with that particular association!

I thought about saying, well, yes, but no, cos that's actually a "c" and not an "s" because this is Mama's letter and not Papa's letter. But then I dropped that line of arguing and said, yes, that's true, that letter is for dog. Well done!

(I think it is maybe a bit too early to explain that Mama uses different letters from Papa!)

A little exercise in fluency...

I am reading Francois Grosjean's 2010 book called "Bilingual: Life and Reality" and he distinguishes between language fluency and language use in order to get a better picture of a particular bilingual's language "competence". I thought I would try doing this for myself (which is accurate at this moment in time!) I often get asked how many languages I speak, and I often answer "it depends what you mean by 'speak'"? Anyway, the answer is six, but as you can see from the chart above, I hardly use three of them, and their fluency is therefore quite low. But all of these change, depending on where I am, so this is only ever going to be a snapshot of my language use and fluency at a particular point in my life.
My Hungarian would move up or down and left to right depending on how much I go to Hungary and how much I interact with Hungarians, (and how much Hungarian radio I listen to!)
My English and German are right up there at the moment, as I speak them both daily now, but this has also been very different in the past.

Anyway, this is just a fun exercise and I encourage others to try it for themselves!

Bilinguals, poor people and women...

In a class he teaches on Bilingualism here at Edinburgh University, Professor Joseph Gafaranga recently said "People do not generally become bilingual by being born of linguists." I thought that was a great comment, and said I would quote him on it!

If you go to conferences on Bilingualism, or if you read the research into it, you might get the impression that most bilingual children have parents who are linguists.
So much of the pioneering literature in the field was written by researchers reporting on their own children's development (and clearly there are huge practical advantages for this, but there is the problem of the Observer's Paradox - can we really objectively observe ourselves?).

Yet worldwide the majority of children become bilingual because they grow up in multilingual societies. Relatively little research has been done on these populations. Again this is due to resources and the fact that most research happens in the Western world. But we should be aware of this discrepancy, before making too broad generalistaions from the research that we do have.

To quote another person who recently said something to me that made me laugh: when speaking with my friend Thoko about biases in research, she said "Yes, poor people and women have known about that for a long time!"

Some bilinguals are "better" than others

So if it is rare to actually find someone who really is "equally competent" in both languages, (not at least because it is hard to know how we should measure "equal competence" in the first place), then what about situations in which people are perceived and perhaps even perceive themselves to be equally bad in both their languages? And what makes speakers feel that they are bad at their own language(s) anyway?

In Germany this subject comes up when discussing issues of alleged "ghettoization" in city schools (especially in Berlin), where large numbers of (mainly) Turkish immigrants live in close-knit communities, and where local schools have large numbers of pupils from Turkish descent. The claim is that some children of these immigrant communities can speak neither German or Turkish "properly" and are therefore doomed to a life with very limited options and not much mobility.
I'm sure similar claims are made about Hispanic communities in the US - or any other larger migrant group worldwide for that matter. Clearly, however, these second generation immigrants can speak and communicate with each other fine. It is not that they somehow are "semilingual" and can't communicate successfully. They aren't cognitively impaired in any way. If you go along to a school in Berlin, you will see kids talking away quite happily. A native German speaker, and a native Turkish speaker may not recognise whatever these kids are speaking as constituting proper German or Turkish, and they may perceive their speaking as constituting a kind of "substandard" language. But why substandard if they are communicating effectively with one another? What is substandard about it?
The question then is, what are they talking? Not having studied the way these children talk, I can't actually say. It is probably some new Berlin dialect. It is only when Turkish or German speakers hear it that it appears as "bad" German or "bad" Turkish.

The response by schools has often been to discourage the use of Turkish at home and to discourage the use of Turkish in the playgrounds. But I think this completely misses the point.The problem is not that these children have Turkish at home, or that they speak Turkish with one another. They should speak whatever they want with one another.
The point is that they need sufficient input and tuition in standard German, and this is the school's responsibility. Schools need to offer specialised formal tuition in standard German for migrant children rather than expect them to acquire the standard version of the language by themselves. Where will they learn it if their social network is not made up of speakers of the standard variety?
If we want children to become literate in the standard language, then we have to provide the facilities and the means to do it. Banning the home language is not the way to do this. Of course offering a good language programme is a question of money and resources, and clearly there is not enough money for this kind of thing. But "integration" (another favourite word in this debate) is a two-way process. And the majority language has to come from the majority. Discouraging the minority language is actually irrelevant in this process, and also symbolically de-values this community's language.

It just made me think that there are some forms of bilingualism that are seen very positively (like my own), and others that are seen quite negatively (for example in migrant contexts). Schools in the UK, for example, offer French or German as a foreign language, rather than languages that are actually spoken in the community (say Urdu or Polish). So there is a definite ranking of languages in order of perceived value or utility. Some forms of bilingualism are seen as really advantageous, whilst others are seen as harmful and hindering successful "integration".