Four Words for Friend by Marek Kohn

Author:Marek Kohn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300231083
Publisher: Yale University Press

The search for objective evidence about the possible effects of languages upon thought leads to the question of subjective experience. What does it feel like to be bilingual?

CHAPTER SEVEN

Being Somebody Else

Being bilingual often seems strange to bilinguals themselves.

People with more than one language at their disposal often feel that they have extra selves to explore as a consequence. In the largest survey of its kind, more than a thousand of them were asked ‘Do you feel like a different person sometimes when you use your different languages?’ Two-thirds answered ‘Yes’.1

This was nothing like a representative sample of the world’s multilinguals. It was recruited through the internet, and distinguished by strikingly high levels of education. A third of the respondents had doctorates. Most worked in professions closely bound up with language, such as teaching and translation. The results revealed little or nothing about how, say, transcontinental lorry drivers or migrants in domestic service feel when they use their different languages. But they were intriguing and suggestive precisely because the respondents were so strongly attuned to language. The most sensitive souls are the most sensitive instruments.

For some of those who answered the questionnaire, feeling different was a natural consequence of a change in culture and manners. Speaking a language entailed adopting the style of behaviour that went with it, in dimensions such as attitude, tone of voice, gesture, posture and direction of gaze. Each verbal language has its corresponding body language. It also has a characteristic set of associated norms, assumptions and conversational preferences, arising from the culture with which it is intertwined. ‘Language and culture are a package,’ observed one respondent, Louise, a speaker of English, German, French, American Sign Language and Lakota. Anna, whose languages are Greek, German, English and French, commented that if she spoke English in the ‘very lively and very expressive’ manner in which Greek people speak, it would lead (and often had led) to misunderstandings.

With his characteristically breezy scepticism, the linguist John McWhorter has suggested that the whole phenomenon is simply an effect of inadequate knowledge. People feel like different people not because bilingualism has magical powers of transformation, but because they have learned a second language as adults and are not as adept in it as they are in their mother tongue. They feel like people who are less witty or more blunt than their usual selves because their command of the subtleties of the language they are speaking is limited. It is easy to imagine that a person clocked speaking English at 145 words per minute felt different when he switched to American Russian and slowed down to 59 words per minute.2

Jean-Marc Dewaele, one of the authors of the questionnaire, checked this proposition against the survey data. He found no relationship between the age at which a person acquired a language and the likelihood that they would say they felt different in it. Some did say that their limitations in speaking a language made them feel different, but statistically the association between levels of proficiency and feelings of difference was insignificant.

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