Summer Memories, Meltdowns and Moving Away from “Native Language”
Thoughts on recent language-related articles in Cup of Jo, The New Yorker & Motherly
We are away on holiday this week in an area of Europe we have been coming to for a few years now. Growing up, I often envied people who had a family summer place passed down from generation to generation, like a cabin or cottage in a remote area, on a lake, near a picturesque little town with an ice cream shop where everyone knew their name. (It is not lost on me how specific, romanticized, and beyond privileged that is.) But it is also so very Canadian to have even a tiny, rundown cabin/cottage on a lake; “cottage” is mostly out East while “cabin” more West. At least it seems very Canadian from an immigrant’s perspective, especially in Saskatchewan, where I grew up.
We don’t own property where we are right now, but we know the picturesque towns, the beaches, the best places for gelato. No, people don’t know our names but that is probably for the best. And for the first time, my children remember places, events, and meals from previous trips. There is something to be said for continuity and familiarity, a place to return to, a (summer) home (emphasis on home because it is a complicated term for many of us). I have been reading a lot about cultural memory and language recently so perhaps, these notions of what we remember, what we hang on to, is more acute in my mind right now.
Related, I tweeted this after our plane ride (are we still tweeting? threading? I can’t keep up). And then a couple of days later, my smug self faced a couple of bigger-kid meltdowns, and I needed my own words of reassurance. Traveling with children is wonderful and challenging, babyhood and beyond.
This newsletter is a longer version of links/recommendations or, mini reviews of three language-related articles I came across the past couple of weeks. To preface, I am always thrilled to see articles and content about multilingualism and raising bilingual children. My philosophy is, the more we talk about it, the more people will know. I loved all three of the articles for different reasons and want to share a few things I thought about while reading them to expand the conversation or get you thinking about language and multilingualism in different ways.
First up, Thao Thai,
the author of the debut novel Banyan Moon wrote a beautiful piece for Cup of Jo titled, “My Path Back to My Family’s Language”. The story touched me deeply perhaps because it sounds like Thai immigrated to the U.S. at the same age I immigrated to Canada. Our experiences with languages are different, but there are similarities and more importantly, Thai’s story of language loss is a common one among immigrant children and children of immigrants.When Thai was a child, her mother was told, if not explicitly, in not-so-many but enough words, Vietnamese, the family’s home language had to be replaced with English, the school language if her daughter was going to catch up with her peers at school.
“From that day on, my mom forbade me from speaking Vietnamese in our home. If I wanted a certain food, I’d have to summon the English word. My television time, formerly restricted, was now unmoderated. I’d watch until my eyes crossed. My mom guessed — rightly, it turns out — that I could catch up by watching endless television shows.”
I’ve heard and seen so many examples of when the school language pushes out a heritage one, even when no one irresponsibly recommends it to the parents directly. But the worst is when I hear from parents how trusted professionals like doctors, midwives, teachers, speech pathologists, recommended they give up one language in favour of another. Multilingualism does not cause speech delays or confusion and schools should always work with families to ensure a heritage language continues in the family while the child is learning a new one.
When my son was a toddler, a nurse told me to make sure his English was strong enough before introducing Polish. As you can imagine, I had some stern words with her about simultaneous bilingualism and told her she had to stop spreading incorrect information like this. But what if I was an immigrant mother like Thai’s mom who just wanted her child to succeed and thrive in a new country? I would likely accept this advice without question and stop speaking the home language. The damage would last for generations.
“Mom lifted the prohibition on speaking Vietnamese, but by then, I’d begun to feel the taboo, like a piece of food lodged in my throat. After speaking so little Vietnamese for almost a year, the words felt clunky. They resided low in my chest, rather than in the mouth, where English lived. I could hardly choke them out.”
On a happy note, at the end of the piece, Thai talks about making her way back to Vietnamese as an adult.
The subject of Martha Swann Quinn’s “The Joys and Frustrations of Non-Native Bilingual Parenting” article in Motherly, is an important one. I especially loved all the interviewees as they are some of my favourite people from social media creating important, accurate and evidence-based content about raising multilingual children. As an editor, I would have liked to see more interviews of families like the writer’s as she only interviewed one other mom who is a “non-native” speaker of Spanish raising her child in the language. But I appreciate the subject matter as I think many parents want their children to learn a second language but might not feel confident doing it at home if they feel, or are made to feel, they can’t because it is not a first or dominant language.
As I’ve written before, I don’t use the term “native/non-native” speaker because it is incredibly loaded and problematic for a variety of reasons. Yes, we all have languages we learnt first (L1s) but there are way too many assumptions with the terms “native” and “non-native”. What makes a language “native”? Is it the first language you learnt as a child? But what if that language is no longer your dominant language? For example, Polish would be considered my “native language” because I learnt it first. And yet, I am dominant in English, the language I was socialized in as a child after our immigration.
The terms native/non-native are often intertwined with raciolinguistics when it comes to the English-language learning space. When you see an ad for an English teacher for example with, “native English speaker”, it usually means “white English speaker from North America/UK”.
The article hints at a sense of inferiority but if someone feels comfortable in a language and wants to raise their children in that language, why does there have to be a distinction between native/non-native? Things get a bit more complicated when it comes to cultural appreciation/appropriation, yes, but not all bilinguals are bicultural and vice versa. I think much of what the article describes happens with all multilingual families, not just “non-native” speakers and I loved some of the advice from the experts on how to foster bilingualism in any form and family. I hope the writer feels empowered to continue and keep doing what she’s doing without focusing on whether the language she is raising her child fits into an arbitrary category.
Finally, last week, I wrote about the emotional resonance of a language. It is a huge topic; I will write more about it soon. But this New Yorker article by Jennifer Krasinski on the Hungarian author, Ágota Kristóf is a perfect example of using one language over another as a form of protection, a barrier between emotions and parts of one’s life that are too painful and too horrific to articulate in the language they were lived. That line about “the natural slippages between language and life” left me breathless.
Additionally, she wrote, “I know I will never write French as native French writers do, but I will write it as I am able to, as best I can.” Yet she deployed her estrangement as a kind of protection, both for herself and her readers. She explained, “I use French as opposed to Hungarian to create distance between my terrors and my writing.” This distance might be understood the same way one would an act of translation, which admits the natural slippages between language and life—between a story as it is lived, as it is remembered, and as it is told.
And this part below, that offers another point of conversation about how grandparents feel in different languages. I talked about this with my mom recently and how some of her friends worry about feeling distant from grandchildren if they do not communicate in the child’s dominant language (this also comes up in research).
In an interview from the last year of her life, Kristóf noted that, after she fled Hungary, she made little effort to pass its language along to her three children. She stopped using it with her first, and never tried with the other two. She mentioned that she’d taught her youngest grandson the word mackó, which means “bear,” but was otherwise worried that if she spoke to him in Hungarian he would feel estranged from her.”
Thank you for reading. I am off to soothe big-kid meltdowns with gelato and beach time.
Hope you are enjoying the holidays. Xxx