Is the Mother to Blame?

When a language dies, who is at fault?

I am being inundated with gift guides already. Is it me, or is it extra early this year? I have no plans to do a big gift guide (never say never) but I will say Mother Tongue Tied makes an excellent Christmas gift! It is pretty (the cover! the hardback feel!) and smart — what a combo! And no, it is absolutely not only for multilingual parents or multilinguals. In fact, it is especially great for those who need a little help when it comes to knowledge around multilingualism, multiculturalism, immigration, linguistic diversity, linguistic inequality and more of those topics that seem straightforward, but for some reason, are controversial for many people.

You know, that uncle who worries about “too many immigrants” or talks about “strong or foreign accents”. Maybe a copy of MTT will soften the dinner-table conversation next time, or maybe spice it up further. Who knows? But at least you will have hard (literally) evidence-based proof for all your pro-multilingualism, pro-immigration, pro-humanity arguments! Let’s disrupt the myths together.

If you are in London, signed copies are available at my beloved Nomad Books in Fulham. If you can’t make it there and want a signed copy, let me know and I will work something out for you. I can even write a special note for that uncle. As always, thank you for the support.

If you’d like to read an excerpt, here is the intro and here is a part about motherhood ,with a nod to Rachel Cusk, newly published over on the Footnote Press page.

And speaking of “strong accents”, over on Instagram, I had the pleasure of speaking with Viola from CIRCE Project EU a few days ago. CIRCE is an incredible organisation working on counteracting accent discrimination, especially in educational settings. If you have never thought about accent discrimination or accentism, consider yourself very lucky.

Many people face this form of discrimination every day of their lives and it affects families profoundly to the point where sometimes a heritage language is not passed on in a family because of fears around accentism and accent discrimination. We all have accents, there are no neutral accents, and when we enter into a conversation with someone, we share the communicative burden meaning the onus of understanding is both on the speaker and the listener.

I share more here:

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A post shared by @circeprojecteu

And now, on to something I have been thinking about a lot recently:

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The Blame Game

Last week, I was interviewed for a book about endangered languages. The author, a woman in her early thirties, was raised in the UK using predominantly English in her day-to-day life as a child and teen. Her father is a monolingual English speaker, her mother is bilingual, having been raised in another Western European language, but as an adult is English dominant. Only when the author was a teen did the use of the heritage language become something that was actively encouraged by her mother. Before then, English was the language spoken in the family home and her mother’s first language was othered in many ways, including being called simply, “a dialect”.

The first question the writer asked me is something I am still thinking about, mostly because I don’t feel I was completely truthful in my answer. I have come across a version of this question many times in various forms, but it is something that is incredibly hard to answer depending on who is asking. It is especially hard to answer when the person asking is not a mother or a parent. And yes, it has to do with blame.