Cunning Linguist

Last night I went with a Jewish-Muslim interfaith group to view the excellent film, Besa: The Promise.

The film opens as a grey-haired American-Jewish photographer, Norman Gershman, is discovering this forgotten legacy and sets out on a mission to interview and take pictures of elderly Albanians who hid Jews and their wartimes wards—if they still live. This quest takes him to Rexhep Hoxha, where the heart of the film begins. Gershman is as dogged as he is dazzled by documenting Albania’s forgotten history of Muslims saving Jews.

It was a very moving and powerful film—cliche to say, I know. But really, it was. I don’t know much about Albania at all, but Albanians were portrayed as a very warm and noble people. Watching the film really made me want to visit Albania.

After the film, I was standing in the lobby of the theatre and some random woman came up to me and asked me what language is spoken in Albania. I was utterly perplexed by why would feel that I might have the answer to that. I did happen to know, though. I said “Albanian.” She screwed her face. “I read that Albania shares a long border with Italy and that lots of Albanians speak Italian.” she said. “I don’t know much about that region at all.” I responded, shrugging. I had a general idea of where Albania was on the map, and knew that a lot of Albanian migrants went to Italy, but not much more than that. I am ashamed to say that I had no idea of with which particular nations Albania share a border. Balkan country, that’s all I knew. I said, “I am pretty sure that Albanians speak Albanian. From the film, it sounded like an Indo-European language to me, with lots of Latinate and Turkic vocabulary.” She widened her eyes, which were enlarged with special glasses, and nodded her head up and down at that. (I could have been wrong about that, but later I googled and saw that I was correct.) If she’s going to ask a stranger such question, she should be prepared for any type of answer. At that moment, my friend came out of the theatre and we left. I wonder why that woman asked me about Albanian. Maybe it says cunning linguist on my forehead.

 

Language Learning Myths

1. You can learn a language just by being close to a speaker of that language. No, language is not learned by osmosis or caught like the flu. But if you learn to speak the language a bit, you will certainly improve by having someone to practice with on a daily basis. Also, partners and friends don’t always like to feel like language teachers or dictionaries, so be careful about that. Thirdly, partners and friends may speak the target language but they are not trained to teach the language so they don’t know necessarily how to give grammar explanations. You can’t explain things about English either unless you have studied pedagogical grammar or naturally have a grammarian’s mind. Why do you say some plurals with –s (cats) and some with –z (dogs) when they are both spelled with “s”? When should you use “She went” versus “She had gone,” what tenses are these, and how do you form these tenses? When do you use “since” versus “ago”? You probably have no clue. When you ask people why they say what they say, you will be answered by “I don’t know, that’s just what we say.” Questions should be directed at other people who have learned the language as a foreigner or at trained language teachers. Lastly, native speakers have a lot of folk beliefs about their languages, which are not actually true from a linguistic perspective. (We native English speakers have plenty, too.) Be wary of this. Do not trust people to teach you the language just because they speak it as natives. They can help you a lot, but they don’t always know what they are talking about.

2. You can learn a language by watching movies or TV in that language, especially with subtitles. If that were true, all you would need to do would be watch movies. Remember Madison, the mermaid in Splash (Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah)? Madison learned English from TV. But actually, only mermaids can do that. If you are a mortal, you won’t learn anything. You’ll just be frustrated by your inability to follow. However, if you already speak a bit of the language, you can improve by watching movies and TV programs. But you have to make a conscious and active effort to get the most out of the TV as a language-learning tool. If you have a movie on DVD or video, you can choose a segment of it and use that part as learning material. For example, choose a scene and watch it twice. Try to explain the main idea of the scene. Note important new vocabulary. Write things down or you won’t remember them. Whatever you use, books, movies, or TV, you have to use them actively.

3. You should use children’s books to help you learn a language. While the language in children’s books is simpler than other texts, children’s books are actually quite inappropriate for adult second language learners. They are riddled with words like bunny, snuggle, fluffy, booboo, and other vocabulary words that are well known by native speaker children, but that are pretty useless for most people’s second language study purposes. It is better to stick to the texts in your language learning books. When you have some grasp of the language you can move on to authentic texts. If you are learning the script of your target language, it is best to read short articles in pop magazines, famous short stories, or other short texts meant for adults. You should note vocabulary and be an active learner because just reading passively won’t help. But read, read, read as an active reader, and you will reap the benefits.

4. Traveling to the country where the language is spoken will make you learn the language. This only works if you actively try to learn the language while you are there. However, traveling will definitely speed up the learning process when you are actively making an effort. This is because you will be able to seek out situations in which you are forced to communicate in the language. But you have to study and know the rules or else you will get stuck speaking with very broken grammar. You can’t absorb grammar rules just by talking to people. You have to study them. But you can practice the rules you learn on the people you meet while abroad. Abroad you will have many practice opportunities and a lot more live modeling of speech. Your motivation will be higher. Meaningful communication will take place. So, you will learn very rapidly, especially if you have a high language learning aptitude. But don’t think that just by being there with no language study and no effort you will achieve anything. We all know people who have lived in a foreign country for years and, due to lack of interest and motivation, have learned very little. There are hundreds of thousands of non-native English speakers who have never been to an English-speaking country, but who are quite good in English. So going abroad is a great opportunity to learn, and it is a sure fire way to learn quickly if you make an effort.

5. Pronunciation is of major importance. You should try your best to have good pronunciation, but don’t worry about it too much. Pronunciation only matters when a bad accent is impeding communication. If the person you are speaking to can understand you, that’s all you need. Studies show the majority of people can’t attain a native speaker-like accent in a foreign language if they haven’t been exposed to the language before puberty. It is a big topic of study for neurolinguists. But having an accent in a foreign language won’t kill you. Think of people you know who speak English with foreign accents. Surely some of them are more articulate than you and have mastered the English language to a very high level of eloquence without sounding like they are native speakers. Your accent may bother some people, or sound jarring. There are many languages that aren’t studied very frequently by English speakers. So your foreign accent will sound very strange to native speakers of these languages. Just remember, swallow your language ego and say, “Who cares,” as long as people can understand you. You may have a hard time with certain sounds like trilled “r”. That doesn’t matter. What can help you is if you try to imitate the stress patterns, tones, and rhythm of the language more than try to pronounce individual sounds perfectly.

6. You can learn a language from a special book that promises to teach it in one month or some other short time. If that were true, we’d all just buy one of these books and be fluent right away. The truth is that language learning takes time and commitment. It involves study and practice. You can’t soak it up from a book, especially in a short period. Crash Course language programs are good to build on what you already know or review rusty language skills, but they are useless for beginners. Phrase books are also no good because they only encourage memorizing language “chunks” rather than understanding the grammar and vocabulary behind these chunks. Buy a phrase book to know what is said in specific situations, like greetings and so forth, but don’t expect to learn a language by memorizing isolated phrases.

 

How to Learn Another Language

I posted an older version of this on a now defunct blog several years ago. I thought I’d repost it here because it is always a useful topic.  If you are interested in learning another language, I hope you find this helpful.

1. The key is motivation. Learning a language as an adult is hard. You must make a commitment to study and practice and allow your motivation to help you work past hurdles. Motivation in language learning comes from many sources. Many people learn a language because it’s a school requirement, an asset to finding a good job, or because they have some kind of religious, cultural, or personal interest in the speech community which uses the language. There are many reasons to learn a language. What is your reason for learning the language, and how can you use your reason to motivate yourself?

2. Recognize how you intend to use the target language. Are you going to write a PhD thesis in this language? Do you just want to communicate with people? How high do you need your level of understanding to be and in what context do you plan to communicate? If you don’t care about understanding news broadcasts or literature, and you just want to chat with people or go shopping in a foreign language, what level will you need to do that? What type of vocabulary will you need? Of course it is ideal if you can learn to read and write in the foreign language’s script, and I highly recommend learning the script, but don’t bother if you don’t have time and if reading and writing in the foreign script don’t serve your language learning purposes. (However, I’d still recommend that you practice the language by doing exercises and writing in a transliterated version of the script, and seeking out transliterated readings.)

3. Find suitable language learning tools. Choose a book, website, or software that has easy, clear grammar explanations and vocabulary organized in a systematic way. For example, some books have vocabulary divided into semantic categories like “at the shop” and “visiting a friend’s house” or “in the kitchen.” Other books just give vocabulary randomly as it arises in each lesson. Some books use a lot of grammar terminology: subjects, prepositions, gerunds, and preterite tense. Does that suit your learning style or confuse you? You may like one book’s method over another. Choose the tool that works for you. Stocking your shelf so that it looks like a language institute won’t help either. It is better to limit yourself to a couple of good books.

4. Focus on all four language skills and use them together. Make sure you get adequate practice in all areas; combine reading, writing, listening, and speaking tasks. Even if you don’t learn to read and write in the script of the target language, don’t discount reading and writing altogether because it can help you learn. You can read transliterated texts in many language books (like the Teach Yourself and the Colloquial series), and you can write small paragraphs using English transliteration to represent the sounds. You must also get listening comprehension and speaking practice from movies, shows, and possibly friends. If you use other materials to supplement the book or software you select, then choose materials that use the skills at your level or slightly above. Don’t choose anything too hard or you will get discouraged. Materials that are too easy will bore you. Also, your competency in each skill area will vary. You may understand (listen) better than you can speak. You may speak better than you can comprehend reading texts. This is normal. To really improve, sometimes you have to work on your weakest skill. In the beginning, just get through the first units in your book of choice, and then proceed from there.

5. Lose your ego. Be ready to practice even though you will feel like you are making a fool of yourself. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes or sounding silly. Very articulate people are reduced to sounding like simpletons in a new language. It is like crawling before walking, and you just have to accept that. Don’t be shy. Especially if your goal is basic communication, not writing a doctoral thesis. Some people will laugh at you, but most will be appreciative and even impressed by your efforts.

6. Make a plan and execute it. You won’t learn a language without putting in effort. You have to set aside time to study. It is like exercising. You have to have a scheduled time for it. At least three times per week should be good, but daily is better. The very early stages of language learning involve a lot of memorization. You have to commit yourself to that if you want to get ahead.

7. Live and breath the language. Try to get interested in the culture of the target language. This helps motivation, too. Hundreds of thousands of students around the world study English and are not particularly interested in the cultures of native English speaking countries. These students will probably never need to interact with native English speakers, and are studying English due to its current position as a global language or lingua franca, and its usefulness in various fields on an international level. I am not saying that taking an interest in the culture where the target language is spoken is necessary. However, it does help to increase motivation. In addition, gaining an understanding of the culture where the target language is spoken will aid in attaining sociolinguistic competence in the language. A language is more than just words. One should, for example,  know how and when to say things, understand how politeness and formality works in different languages, and have an idea of what topics are culturally inappropriate or taboo. All of this is part of gaining competence in another language just as much as grammar. So it is useful to take an interest in the culture where a language is spoken.

8. Recognize that language learning is a slow and tedious process. Be realistic. Don’t beat yourself up for not learning the language very quickly. Adults cannot learn languages very rapidly. It is a scientific fact. First, you have to build a vocabulary base and know basic grammatical structure and use that for rudimentary communication practice. You will plug the vocabulary into the structure for practice. But it will take years to get really good. A fast learner who has a high language learning aptitude can pick up enough of a language to communicate basic needs very quickly, especially when immersed in a setting where the language is spoken, but it would still take a person of high language learning aptitude a couple of years of dedicated study to become truly fluent. (And for adults, does 100% fluency ever occur? Language learning is really a never ending process for the non-native speaker because there will always be contexts in which one will encounter something new to learn.) You may not have  a high language learning aptitude. If you are a slow learner, it could take a long time to become comfortable with using even basic structures in the target language. That is okay. Take your time. (And remember to lose your ego and accept that you will make mistakes.) You will achieve your goals if you are realistic about how lengthy a process language learning truly is.

9. Practice, practice, and do more practice. Do readings, listenings, study grammar, make flashcards for vocabulary. Stick vocabulary labels around the house. Speak to anyone who will talk with you. Be active and take control of the language learning process. The more work you do, the better results you will see. In terms of applied study, focusing on a foreign language can be a bit like exercising at the gym. You have to have to designate time slots during your week to studying, and follow through. Relating to point #6, can you spend 20-30 minutes on Thursday and Sunday evening reading a short text, going over a grammar point, or doing an online exercise in the target language? Can you set a bi-weekly hour dedicated to watching a broadcast in the language? Just like one would supplement the attainment of weight loss goals by going to the gym and parking the car further away from the shops to get in extra walking, what additional  actions can you take to incorporate more of the language into your life so that you get more practice and exposure? Is it possible to listen to radio broadcasts of your target language in the car or online? Do you have a person who is willing to practice with you? Be opportunistic by making the most of any presence of the target language in your environment in order to get practice.

 

Spanish up to speed

My Spanish has gotten a lot better since I’ve been back in Texas. I never lost the ability to understand, but I was having a hard time communicating everything I wanted to say at first. I used to speak fairly fluently when I was younger, so it was frustrating to feel so clumsy when speaking. When I first came back, I was talking to a lady and she told me that her mother got attacked by bees. I could understand everything she was saying, that her mother (who lives back in her home country) was going out from a beach house towards the sea and went into a little cabana and disturbed a hive and suddenly the bees swarmed her and there was a pool nearby so she jumped in the pool and the bees kept on attacking her when she would come up for air. Her poor mother was hospitalized and kept developing bumps on her skin for weeks after the attack because the bee venom was coming out of her system through her skin. Her mother is elderly and it was a very traumatic experience for her to say the least. Anyhow, so the lady is telling me this, and I am listening and stunned by the terrible story, but I was unable to articulate anything appropriate to say back to her. Obviously it was a sensitive situation and all I could muster was “Oh, that’s terrible.” “Oh, and how is she now?” I talked to this other friend and told her that while the lady was telling me the story, I was just shaking my head up and down and couldn’t think of anything to say. My friend told me that when she came to the US she noticed that when English speakers had conversations with her, they always interjected to show that they were listening and following along. She says that in Mexico people don’t interrupt as much. I was like, okay, if that is the case, then that’s good for me so that I can think of something useful to say if someone is telling me something sensitive about a problem or ill health or whatever. Anyway, I still make a lot of mistakes when I speak, but I have a very good (Mexican!) accent and I feel a lot more comfortable communicating now. Recently, a neighbor was telling me that she had been married three times and that people were always shocked by that, but it wasn’t her fault. Her first husband turned out to be gay. Oh, I had A LOT to say about that situation! Women always suffer so much! I feel sorry for him, too because he probably didn’t want to acknowledge his feelings or didn’t understand them or just wanted to conform to avoid prejudice, but your life was ruined due to all of this. I just blabbed on en español like a motormouth. Anyway, her second husband had some emotional problems and became physically abusive, so she left him. But she has been married to #3 for nearly a decade and he is a great guy. So good for her.

Where I live, Spanish is very useful. As a teen, when I worked in food shops, customers would just start out speaking in Spanish sometimes, never asking if I could understand or not. Now, even with hijab on, people sometimes still start out in Spanish with me or comfortably switch to Spanish with me without asking about my hijab or acting like it is weird if I switch into Spanish (I only switch if I notice that their English is far worse than my Spanish, just to facilitate ease in the communication). Once, in the Walmart, I asked an employee where the shampoo was. She looked at me and I could see her eyes on my hijab, but she just said to me in Spanish “Over there near to the pharmacy.” Sometimes, I can understand people who are talking about me in Spanish. Once these two ladies were standing near to me and said that I looked like a nun and started laughing. At one of the taco trucks near to my house, the owner has called me Mother Superior because of my headscarf, ribbing me in that Mexican Uncle sort of teasing way.

Sometimes people do ask about my origins and my religion. “No, I am not Mexican, I am Anglo. I just speak Spanish cuz I grew up here, I did study it in high school also. Why am I wearing this? Oh, because I am a Muslim and it is in our faith. No, my husband isn’t Arab, he is Pakistani. No, well, I converted out of conviction, not for my husband. I was a Muslim before I met my husband.” That’s how it goes. I have had a lot of hispanohablantes ask me much more sophisticated questions about my faith than the English speaking strangers do, for whatever reason. Mostly other Anglos stick to hijab questions. I have tried to analyze why that might be, but haven’t come to any conclusion.

In addition to talking to people, I have been watching Spanish language TV (A guilty pleasure is Caso Cerrado) and also reading Spanish language magazines which I pick up in the check out aisle at the grocery store. I usually go for People En Español, but once I got this cheap tabloid magazine and in the back of it there were ads for psychics and healers and you will never guess what I saw. Among the pictures of Indigenous or Afro-Latino curanderos, there were ads that contained pictures of Sultan Qaboos (the ruler of Oman) and Madhuri Dixit (famous Indian actress). Since they look exotic, Gypsy, Eastern, or whatever, someone had just probably taken them from the internet and put them in their cheesy ads!

Anyway, it is good to be home and to slip back into the Texan life with our diverse population and bilingual English/Spanish atmosphere.

 

Ya cain’t say tortoys now, y’all

Last night my husband and I were talking about the school system in Texas. So, my husband asks what kind of accent they will teach in the public school system. Cause in Amreeka we will Inshallah send our kids to public school.  Huh? What kind of accent? You see, in Pakistan and India, kids who go to the best private schools get groomed to speak very properly. It is hard to explain. But you can tell what type of schooling a person has had by how their English sounds. Like, for example, I have some friends who say  ”It is very crowdy” instead of “crowded.” (a lower register of this would be ‘it is too much crowdy’) And they would say tortoise as tor-toys. Stuff like that. It is all about schooling (and $paisa$). In the most elite schools, kids are taught proper diction to a more British standard and less South Asian dialectical variety. The end result on the diction of the most elites is that their speech sounds South Asian in terms of much of the phonetics and stress/intonation, and there are some colloquial usages, but their language is very polished. Their grammar certainly sounds more proper than most American native English speakers’ natural speech.  Somehow a lot of the women of this elite background speak with a very fluting voice. I am not sure why this is. This is just my observation…And about the elites, these days a lot of people make pretty good fake American accents and call rupees bucks and stuff, but anyway…My husband went to one of these more elite schools. His crowd makes fun of the “crowdy” crowd. You can read a des raised Pakistani or Indian person’s background by these characteristics in their English. (Not so unfamiliar, the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain, you know) The accent thing is important. It crops up in Hindi films as a source of humor, and so forth. I had a friend whose family was looking for a groom for her, and she was introduced to a guy who sounded good on paper, but she turned him down because his English sounded more like the “crowdy tortoys” type and she told me that she would be embarrassed to bring him around her friends because of that.

Accent/dialect and class are very tied together in the US as well. Certainly specific dialects of American English are strongly stigmatized—rather the people who speak these dialects are stigmatized. So it is the same thing as in India and Pakistan. But I told my husband that I don’t think they teach no accents in public school. Was he worried that his girls was gonna tawk Texan? I cain’t recall them learnin me no accent. I dunno. I asked my husband if he thought I had a strong country accent, being from Texas. (I don’t) I think we pick up our accents from our peer groups and environment…our teachers are of course part of that environment, but not the main influence on accent. (Most of my teachers had some type of Texan accent, anyway) I can remember studying grammar, and I can remember some teaching against non-standard usage. But not full on training with drills to have some Standard American English accent like one might get in some accent neutralization class in journalism school. We certainly get the social message that specific American English accents are bad or “low class.” We have to ‘talk proper’ to get the right jobs, and people with stigmatized regional/ethnic accents do face prejudice.  So somewhere along the line, we definately get the message that there is a right and wrong way to talk. But I don’t think no one learns us this stuff directly in school as part of the curriculum.  My husband seems to think it is very strange that we don’t get this training. Do you agree? What was your experience with this? If you went to a US public school, did you have accent training or drills in school?

 

Pakistani Urdu and perceptions of language across the border

I watched the film Ramchand Pakistani, which depicts the lives of a Pakistani Hindu Dalit community in the Thar desert for much of the film. The film is excellent, and I highly recommend it. The film takes some narrative liberties for entertainment purposes, but basically tells the true story of a Hindu Dalit Pakistani father and young son who were captured and imprisoned for 4 years in India for accidentally crossing the India/Pakistan border. A critical look is taken at how the case is (NOT) dealt with by both Indian and Pakistani official administration with special consideration of the low-caste minority religious status of the pair. The central female character, a woman who lost both her husband and son, goes through very difficult lengths to survive and stay sane. Her side story was especially thought provoking.

Among other thoughts I had on this film, my mind also wanders towards language issues.

The film is in Hindi and Urdu. One point I noted was that for some reason, the actors who portrayed the Sindhi Thar resident Dalits used “mereko” in place of “mujhe.” The film makers could not use authentic actors from that particular community because they probably don’t exist, and the well known Pakistani (and one Indian) actors who played the members of that community just spoke in Urdu for the sake of ease of both themselves and the intended film-going audience. So the native language of that community was not used at all.  I have no idea what language that would be anyway, but it is most definately not Urdu (some dialect of Sindhi, Cholistani?). For whatever reason, the film makers seemed to think it more authentic to have the Thar residents say “mereko.” Any speculation as to why? Does that make them seem more authentically Dalit or perhaps more Hindu from a Pakistani perspective?

 The film also depicted Indian soldiers and an Indian prison, and it was interesting to see some of the Pakistani cast members affect faux Hindi accents in their Urdu. One actress in particular made a strong attempt at Bombay style Hindi since her character was supposed to be from Bombay. The main character in the film, young Ramchand, spends four years in an Indian prison, and viewers witness his Urdu (which the real Ramchand probably didn’t speak, or at least didn’t speak well) turning into some dialect of Hindi common to uneducated speakers. The actor who played the 12 year old Ramchand did an excellent job at that accent.

Anyhow, I am just rambling about my impressions of the underlying linguistic issues in the film. Most people who are not huge nerds like me will just sit back and watch and enjoy. It is outrageous that so many people, including children on both sides of the border have suffered due to political issues which have very little to do with them. The message of the film is very strong, and will hopefully serve as a factor in raising awareness about the issue of innocent Indian and Pakistani political prisoners whose capture was just a stroke of bad luck; a fisher man’s boat drifting too far, a camel caravan traipsing on the wrong desert, or a boy chasing a toy across a line in the sand. Such public awareness could do a lot towards the freedom of those people. When the film reaches a theatre near you, do check it out.

 

Urdu Like Mine: A Reflection on White Privilege and Language Learning

One of the many ways that white privilege affords me benefits has to do with language learning. I am thinking specifically about speaking Urdu. I won’t go into the issue of white Northern people studying “exotic” Southern languages. That is a whole other post. But let me take you right into my life and tell you what I have noticed. I speak Urdu. I live in a mostly Hindi/Urdu speaking environment. I speak Urdu much of my day. In some ways I am fairly fluent. But by academic standards, I don’t speak Urdu that well at all. There are huge gaps in my vocabulary, especially when it comes to “big words.” If you don’t speak Urdu, it might be hard for you to imagine what I mean by that. But there is daily vernacular, and then there is the strongly Persian and Arabic based realm of “book words.” I don’t have a high proficiency when it comes to the book words.

Actually, there are many Urdu speakers who speak in a similar way to me. They could be the foreign born/raised children of native Urdu speakers. If these people’s Urdu sounds like mine, Urdu speakers in Pakistan and India mock them. They tease them. They shame their parents for not teaching them properly. They call them ABCDs (American born confused/crazed desis) if these desi origin people are from America. These so called ABCDs are usually bilingual, but English ends up being the more dominant language. Since they have never formally studied Urdu, there are many gaps in the language. Gaps that were most likely also widened by the shame of speaking a foreign language in front of white people as children, coupled with playground taunts about their heritage. As adults, some of these people regret that they lost their Urdu. Some of them even have the luxury of studying at university the language that they lost. But for me, Urdu was never a loss, it was always something to gain. An achievement.

There are also many people within Pakistan who speak like me. Their second language is Urdu. Their first language may be Pushto or some other regional language. Or they may be foreigners, as am I. Perhaps they are war refugees from Afghanistan or economic refugees from Bangladesh. These people are marked by their accents and broken grammar. Native Urdu speakers, who are statistically mainly situated on the highest rungs of the Pakistani social structure, have a good laugh at these people. Their broken language is one of the many signs of their low status. They have learned Urdu to do business with, and if they are very poorly off, to serve native Urdu speakers. They receive scorn, and I receive compliments.

And then there are people from this highest stratum in Pakistani society, whose parents send them to English medium private schools. These people study and master my native language, English because it is the language of dominance, and as such both a sign of and a key to power and privilege within Pakistan. It is the language of their former colonial oppressors, and now the language of the current Empire of America. People who go to English medium schools are notoriously weak when it comes to “book words.” Though some do master High Urdu due to parental pressure or out of genuine interest, it is very common to hear that these people “don’t speak Urdu,” because all of the complex and sophisticated concepts in their brains exist in English. People of this level of society do a lot of code switching. They are often unable to complete a sentence without using an English word. And I don’t mean one of the many, many English words that have been absorbed into South Asian languages due to past colonialism and modern imperialism. I know that not all English medium graduates have weak Urdu, but many do. So people who have mastered Book Urdu poke fun at these English-medium people as well.

And then there is me. Because I am a foreigner, and a white foreigner, I get away with my funny Urdu. Not only do I get away with it, people congratulate me on my simple, unsophisticated language. They sometimes even show me off to others. Even though my Urdu is really sooo bad. Because it is such an anomaly to find white Americans who can speak Urdu, or even any language other than English, really well.

I have something of a Punjabi accent in my Urdu. I just picked it up that way. Despite being a foreigner, my accent in Urdu is actually not bad. I do have a slight foreign accent, but I have been told often that I sound native. And I have been told that I sound like a Punjabi. When Punjabi Urdu speakers speak to native (Hindustani or muhajir) Urdu speakers, this gets them made fun of as well. With me, often people think it is cute. White, funny, Punjabi-fied, and cute. Punjabi as a language is often under attack by native Urdu speakers. There are negative stereotypes attached to Punjabis and these overlap with their language. As a white person who speaks with a somewhat Punjabi accent in Urdu, I can overlook it when a native Urdu speaker tells me “Don’t say that, that sounds too Punjabi.” Although I bristle and feel irritated when people say such things to me, they aren’t insulting my people, my heritage, or my language. It isn’t really directed to me at all. It is ultimately directed to Punjabis. I am just a filter for it.

I speak a few other languages fairly well, too. But could I complete university level academic course work in any language other than English? Probably not. How many foreigners, non-native English speakers, come to the US and do just that? Actually, my housekeeper, who is only semi-literate (and not literate in her own native language) speaks 8 languages well. Most of the people around me here in Dubai can speak at least 3 languages. Except for most of the Anglophone white people, of course. “Why learn another language when it is sooo hard, and everyone in the world speaks English; I know how to say Hello, Thanks, Good Bye, and a few curse words”…that is their mantra. Back to my housekeeper who speaks around 8 languages, our level of Hindi/Urdu is about the same. (Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same language on a vernacular level, just in case you wonder what I mean by “Hindi/Urdu”). But people congratulate me, not her. With her, they laugh. They shake their heads. They say, you speak Hindi pretty well for a Nepali. With me, they prop me up on a pedestal. She learned Hindi because she had to learn it. She was an economic refugee in India, and worked since childhood in Indian peoples’ homes. She learned Hindi from them. I learned Urdu and Hindi because I wanted to, because I liked it. For her it was a matter of survival. For me, it was a matter of interest.

So you see, the white privilege runs very deep and comes to me on so many, many levels. The more I think about these issues, the clearer to me the benefits of white privilege become. I bet that if other whites were to think about their experiences with their own second and third languages, similar narratives would be revealed. It is just a reality. In the meanwhile, I do need to improve my Book Urdu. And since I am white and relatively affluent, have some leisure time and access to resources that could help me improve, that should be a lot easier for me to do than it would be for some of the other afore mentioned people whose Urdu is like mine.

 

Example of language gaps referenced in previous post

I was looking out of the window at our little patio yesterday with my toddler. I said to her in Urdu, “Look, there is a birdie. She has come to drink water from that little hole. She must be thirsty.” After the bird drank some water, it started to fluff up its feathers…it looked very puffy and cute with its feathers all standing up. It was like birdie goosebumps. I wanted to say, “look how the bird is fluffing her feathers.” I had NO idea how to say that. How do you say puffing up or fluffing? If I were to try, it would come out all wrong. I would probably had said that the bird was “swelling up” because that is the only similar verb which I can think of. I just said nothing.

 I also noticed that my daughter’s ear was a little bit red. I said to the nanny, does D’s ear seem red to you? We peeked in her ear and we saw a little pimple. The nanny said, I see a little pimple inside her ear, can you see its “beak.” She meant that the pimple has a pointed crusty scab, but she didn’t know how to say “scab,” so she said “beak.” It did look like a beak, but that isn’t the correct word. I don’t know how to say pointy crusted scab, either. I would probably use some other words to convey that like “a spot with dried blood and pus.” Neither of us really know how to say the correct words because we are not native speakers. Sometimes we talk in long roundabout ways trying to explain things because of this.

So this is the kind of broken and inaccurate language input that my daughter receives.

In addition to that, there are many problems with my grammar. Like if I were to say a complex sentence in Urdu during natural speech, I sometimes forget to carry the gender or the plurality or the formality (hain/hai) all the way to the end of the sentence. The nanny does, too. I can hear that it is inaccurate the minute I say it. But for some reason I don’t get it right at the moment of production because my mouth is moving faster than my brain.

Children learn to speak by listening and processing rules with generalizations about structure. So what structure is she picking up from us because we are often inconsistent?Sometimes correct, sometimes not.

 

We aren’t exactly wolves, but…what do you think?

Do you know what a feral child is? Linguists take a special interest in the phenomenon because it reveals a lot about language aquisition in babies and small children. Children who grow up in socially isolated conditions and do not receive regular language modeling have irreparable linguistic and intellectual deficits.

I was thinking about something recently. My family’s language situation is a social experiment in someways. My 15 month old daughter’s main language models, me and A., the nanny, speak non-native Urdu/Hindi. My native language is English, but I speak Urdu fairly well. My accent, stress, and intonation are quite good (told that my accent sounds native…cuz i am cool like that ), and I speak the language comfortably. However, there are many faults in my Urdu: I use the wrong gender sometimes, I sometimes make mistakes with plurals, and also make some other Urdu/Hindi specific mistakes. I also have some gaps in my lexicon. In some ways you could say I am fluent when it comes to daily life drudgery stuff, but with sophisticated concepts, etc., I rely on English to support the expression of my ideas.  A., the nanny, is a native speaker of Yolmo, which is a Sino-Tibetan language, but she started learning Hindi in her pre-teen years and speaks it very well, as she lived submerged in a Hindi language environment for over 20 years. I think she has a deeper lexicon than I do, but she also has lexical gaps in certain situations. Her pronunciation and stress are pretty good, with some errors common to Urdu/Hindi speakers who are from the Sino-Tibetan region of Nepal. She is actually worse with gender than I am, and also makes other grammar mistakes.  My husband’s native languages are English and Urdu. We usually mix the two when we speak to each other. He is the only 100% fluent Urdu language model for my daughter in our home environment. However, because of work, he spends the least time with our daughter, especially on weekdays. He often only sees her for 2 waking hours per day. According to research on language development, it doesn’t matter if the primary caregiver of a child speaks broken language as long as the child has accurate language modeling in the environment. Children actually pick up language from their peer groups, at school, and in the larger environment, which is why children don’t necessarily have the same accent as their parents, or why a US immigrant parent who speaks broken English with the kids has children who become fluent English speakers.

My concern is this: since we live in the UAE, my daughter does not have a full, thriving authentic Urdu/Hindi language environment. With the exception of her father, everyone around her speaks somewhat broken Urdu/Hindi. She plays often with our Gujarati neighbors, their Hindi is broken. Our other neighbors are Pakistani Punjabis. The adults don’t speak Urdu fluently, and their kids mix English and Punjabi and don’t speak Urdu very well (there is a lot of language hodge-podge in Dubai, the whole place is one big linguistic experiment!) The nanny’s best friends are a Bangladeshi woman and a Goan Indian woman. They come over often during the day and my daughter is exposed to conversations between all of us in our slightly accented, somewhat broken language. Our Urdu/Hindi language errors are all different because none of us speak the same first language. With the exception of our time spent in Pakistan, my daughter is never surrounded by 100% accurate models.  Luckily, the nanny and I both picked up our Urdu/Hindi in a very Punjabi-fied environment, so we both use aap + ho constructions, and also use some Punjabi lexicon (belly button is tunni!), stuff like that. A. is also very adept with language and she quickly picked up a lot of Urdu-specific language and uses that with us in place of Hindi stuff…khwaab instead of sapna, stuff like that. So there is some consistency. Aside from that, there are many inconsistencies. I wonder what structural rules my daughter will internalize. What will her accent be? How will this situation affect her linguistic and cognitive development? Could this possibly damage my daughter because the building blocks of her linguistic and intellectual development are broken blocks?

Inshallah I am planning to send her to nursery in the Fall. She’ll pick up English there. I am not worried at all about her English. I do use English with her sometimes, but mostly it is all Urdu because I know she will get English later. Except songs. Most of our songs are in English…I mean, I’m a Little Teapot, Twinkle Twinke Little Star. I know Chota Sa MakoRa…I really don’t know any Urdu nursery rhymes and can’t remember the few I have heard correctly. I know I should be singing in Urdu, too. I guess. I think my husband and I just assumed that our daughter would be bilingual…we expect that she will eventually lose a lot of Urdu later when we relocate to the US. But I think we just kind of presumed that since we spoke Urdu to her, she would learn Urdu. But when I assess our environment, it seems more complex than that.

I don’t know. What do you think? Did any of you choose to raise your children in a language that is not your native tongue with the intention that they would eventually grow to be bilingual? What was your speech environment like? Anyone in a situation like mine? Please ask around because I would really like to know what to expect. She does have a good vocabulary for a 15 month old (mashallah, chashm-e-bad door!). Most of it is Urdu, plus some English words commonly said by desis like light. She shows understanding of the Urdu spoken to her. But maybe since my daughter’s language environment is not one of complete fluency, I should just speak to her exclusively in English. I just don’t know. At least that way she would be getting at least one model of completely accurate language. Not that I don’t never make no mistakes or nothing, but ya know what I mean.