Beloved Gym Bubbe: Translanguaging.

Y, you use the word code-switching, which I would also use for this type of bilingual speech. I had never heard of translanguaging. Is this word the new technical one? or am I missing something crucial?

… французского с нижегородским…

I have to admit, I have yet to figure out what the advantage is of relabelling this kind of thing as “translanguaging”. There are some types of bilingual discourse that intermesh too much to label given sections as belonging to one language of the other, but this one looks like classic CS, with every element clearly assignable to one or the other discrete language.

There is inherent comedy in an unexpected mismatch of accents and identities. Mel Brooks’s Yiddish-speaking Indians is a purposeful example of this. Another Israeli example popular right now are Shauli and Irena, two recurrent characters in the popular TV program Eretz Nehederet (‘Wonderful Country’). Shauli and Irena are working class types, kind of crass and not too bright. Irena, in particular, is a Russian immigrant, who speaks with a heavy Russian accent (not too consistent to my ear), but seasons her speech heavy-handedly with slang, particularly slang associated with lower-class Sephardi and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews. The mismatch is obvious and funny, and realistic. The great wave of immigration from the former USSR in the 1990s included a great deal of people not recognized as Jews (such as children of non-Jewish mothers) and for a long time were marginalized societally, along with Mizrahi Jews, and were shunted to the same towns. It is not hard to see how an immigrant would assimilate to this variety of speech.

My experience of speaking Hebrew is a year volunteering on a kibbutz in 1978. Effie’s accent is … ouch! How does the interviewer keep a straight face?

@Y are you saying this is typical of Americans who’ve emigrated to Israel?

The kibbutz I was on had many West Coast Americans, who emigrated after the war, to get away from the caricature of Jews as Dentists and Bankers. None of them gave me such Ouch!, although I could hear their accent, as compared with the youngsters who’d grown up in the Beth Yeladim.

I was glad to find a new term here (whatever it means:)). This is why:

I see the term “code-switch” in a very specific context: a very formal syntactical/ morphological study at the level of utterances. This is because I read literature of this sort, of course. Even though this literature is often called “sociolinguistics” it is interested in very classical “grammar”. The assumptions are:

1. there is a thing that we can call
*my-Russian grammar (supposedly identical to any Russian)
2. and there is a thing
*my-Klingon grammar (supposedly identical to any Klingon)
3. we are trying to find formal patterns and rules in syntactical and morphological embedding of elements of *m-Rg in *m-Kg.

It is a very limited treatment.

Meanwhile when I hear “code-switching” from someone interested in languages rather than linguistics (an enthusiastic lanaguge learner: these people often know the term) I hear things like: “I love to code-switch!” or “I code-switch a lot“.

And it does feel as polysemy to me (I caught myself thinking about this). She is speaking of what she is doing to langauge.

90s ex-Soviet immigrants typically poorer

A relative and his wife had to flee from Bender and settled in Tiberias. Naturally, they took with themselves only what they could carry.

Well, whistles and clubs in the case of my relatives—both were police officers.

The horrid term “translanguaging” appears to be calqued from Welsh (yes, really):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translanguaging

It dates from the 1980’s, so I suppose it may actually antedate “code-switching.”

“Translanguaging” seems to refer to the whole complex of regular use of more than one language in a particular social context (for example, diglossia in the Arabic mode, obligate linguistic exogamy of the Vaupés type, or parents with different mother tongues each using their own L1 in speaking to their children), so that code-switching is only one possible manifestation of it (and by no means a necessary one, at that.)

Avni’s use of “translanguaging” rather than “code-switching” in this particular case is therefore somewhat imprecise.

Judging by the WP article (which comprises all I know about the topic), the term was invented as a “hooray” word in specifically educational contexts to counter the implication that any of the forms of speech involved were in any way inferior (hence the po-faced claim that it excludes classic diglossia, because “hierarchy.”)

Judging by the WP article (which comprises all I know about the topic), the term was invented as a “hooray” word in specifically educational contexts to counter the implication that any of the forms of speech involved were in any way inferior

That corresponds to my impressions. Compare this interview:

Q: The linguistic phenomena mentioned in the previous question have been studied by researchers for more than 60 years. What are the benefits of replacing them with “translanguaging” when the behavior is clearly the same?

A: The behavior may look to be the same from the external social perspective, from a perspective that doesn’t question why named languages and language hierarchies exist or the relationship between language and power. But seen from the internal perspective of the bilingual speaker, translanguaging behavior is clearly different. Translanguaging legitimizes the fluid language practices with which bilinguals operate. It posits that bilinguals have a much more complex and expanded repertoire than monolinguals. Bilingual speakers then appropriate all their linguistic features, no matter their social standing, instead of categorizing them as belonging to one national group or another to which they may not belong.

The point seems to be to “legitimize fluid language practices”, rather than to bring new insights.

I do get the idea of rejecting “named languages”, insofar as such folk categories can be very misleading – prescriptively idealised (“‘irregardless’ is not English!”), unrealistically broad (“Both in Hong Kong and in Beijing people mostly speak Chinese at home”), unrealistically narrow (“this phrase is in Hindi, not Urdu!”), etc. But that’s an argument for categories that correspond better to observed practice, not for abandoning categorization. After all, the “internal perspective of the bilingual speaker” needs to include the knowledge that some parts of his/her repertoire will not be understood by some people.

Ofelia García does rather talk as if the existence of water disproves the existence of hydrogen and oxygen: there is no real parallel between the very real difficulty of defining language versus dialect, and the competence of a bilingual in two undoubtedly distinct languages (such as Welsh and English, in the ur-case.)

Well, there may well be some difficulty in deciding which language a given word belongs to, given the constant possibility of nonce borrowing – rather more in one direction than in the other, though…

It seems they don’t exactly deny the competence of a bilingual in two distinct languages, though it sounds a lot like it; from this article, they’re saying “the dual ontology of the two separable named languages is anchored in sociocultural beliefs, not in psycholinguistic properties of the underlying system”. Matras defends essentially the same idea from a rather different perspective; it effectively changes the question from “how do contact phenomena occur?” to “how are contact phenomena prevented from occurring?”, and makes the answer to that essentially social. That’s fair as far as it goes, but I think it risks understating the importance of structural factors – phonological, morphological, selectional differences are often conspicuous, strictly language-internal cues as to what belongs in which language, and the fairly wide attestation of Parallel System Borrowing shows that we can keep separating out lexical strata even _after_ borrowing them.

@Stu:

You must get in touch with your inner Welshman.

@JWB:

Ah, yes. Bachtyn. A true son of the valleys, that bachgen.

Note also that the somewhat revisionist-to-nihilistic sensibility of the Otheguy et al. piece is maybe explained in part by his being the honoree of a recent-ish festschrift entitled “Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry: Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy.”

I’m not confident that an analysis that accounts well for Spanglish will necessarily account well for that.

Yes indeed.

I wonder if this attempted conflation, between dialect diversity and competence in completely distinct languages, is based on some Chomskyan preconception that all languages are basically the same anyway, or simple ignorance of the degree to which this is resoundingly untrue. Or both, of course.

Of course, as a programme for education of bilingual children, “translanguaging” might well still be fruitful, even if the supposed theoretical justifications are partly incoherent. They wouldn’t be the first to come up with bad reasons for doing the correct thing.

The use of the word [Spanglish] demonstrates how race has been re-mapped from biology onto language , as Urciuoli maintains, i.e., comments about language become substitutes for comments about the biological inferiority of a group.

(from JWB’s link)
This business about race has being re-mapped from biology onto language is helpful in showing me where all this is coming from, and indeed sympathising; still, a bad argument remains a bad argument even when used to support a valid conclusion. And the Otheguyistas seem to be attempting to draw universal purely linguistic conclusions about bilingualism from phenomena which are essentially sociological (and parochial), and (much worse) picking and choosing the evidence to fit their conclusions.

The matter is further confused by the fact that the participants confessedly mean quite different things by “Spanglish”; they do all seem to agree that it is the actual distinctive fully-functional L1 of a community, interestingly, which is not what I ignorantly supposed. They really seem only to differ about whether the actual name “Spanglish” should be proudly reclaimed, like “Black” or “Queer” (or “Methodist.”)

And what’s wrong with blended contact languages, anyway? Seems to me these Otheguys are in danger of falling into creolism. Creolophobia. Whatever. Mi fa, a no go giri.

To DE’s “what’s wrong” point, it also seems that if the key point here is not damaging anyone’s self-esteem, you can come up with a plausible Just So Story to justify any number of different descriptions. Should you tell Haitian speakers of Kreyol that what they speak is just a different regional variety of French that is neither better nor worse than the variety the snoots at the Academie are hung about about (which is in turn only one of many varieties that co-exist within l’Hexagon)? Or should you tell them that what they speak is actually not really a version of French at all but a cool thing their extremely resourceful ancestors invented that uses French lexemes as mere raw material to create a different language altogether? Both of those stories seem ex ante equally well-suited for boosting listener self-esteem, so maybe one could pick between them and select the best way to conceptualize Kreyol for scholarly purposes based on other grounds?

An excellent principle. It is why I never put my patentable ideas in comments here. In fact, to be on the safe side, I try to avoid discernible meaning altogether. Too many thieves about.

Pancho, what’s your take on the term “Spanglish”? In your experience, do Mexican-Americans know it, use it, and/or approve of it?

Y, in my experience yes, Mexican-Americans know the term but outside cultural or political discussions I don’t think we use the term all that much in daily life ( in my experience.) I think that’s partly because its just slang for a lot of people and kind of normal, in my opinion, for the people who use it.

The term itself is neutral or used with humor. I’ve seen people disapprove of Spanglish itself but not the label. I’ve used it and have no problems using it but I don’t think iI have ever really used it outside of discussions in school, except maybe a few times I was joking about “Spanglish” with a friend, maybe.

From what little I know of it, I don’t think “Spanglish” is a mixed language; it looks like Spanish with a bunch of English loanwords, plus some code-switching which by its nature can hardly be considered a conventionalised part of it. If some Spanish-speaking community were to maintain itself for a few hundred years far enough from Mexico – in North Dakota, say – I could imagine this going much further. But even Korandje still has a mostly solidly Songhay basic grammar, despite losing all but a few hundred words of the vocabulary. Languages aren’t just melting pots; if they survive at all, they almost always maintain a certain core stability.

The question of whether a bilingual’s languages are stored as a unit or as two units always strikes me as kind of a moot point. We know bilinguals can and mostly do separate their two languages, so clearly if you do assume a single lexicon for both, most lexical items must still include some sort of information on which language a given item belongs to – meaning you can still split up the lexicon by language any time you need to. In a construction grammar approach, that works straightforwardly with the grammar too; implementing it in a generativist one seems trickier, hence MacSwan’s objections I guess.

Some of what is called Spanglish could be English, purposefully seasoned with Spanish phrases or nouns, like “Hey baby, qué pasó”. At its cheesiest, it could be like n-th generation American Jews cutesying up their speech with “boychik” and “nudnik”, etc., or like the “Padre” in E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia stories, who constantly veers between faux Scots, faux Irish English, and faux Olde Englisshe.

The question of whether a bilingual’s languages are stored as a unit or as two units always strikes me as kind of a moot point.

Obviously, my English and Russian are a single system: they both exist in one mind, they interact. And likely if you represent the whole thing as a graph (vertices being elements of a language or neurons), there will be areas in it with a high degree of connectivity within an area, even for a monolingual speaker. Likely, what I called and imagine to be “My English” partly/mostly matches one such area.

As Brett said in another thread, defining precisely what is a “cluster” in a connnected graph is nothing easy. If you build a machine that can map my brain (literally, on a paper on the wall), things will not magically become easy.

I do not see a point in arguing in a maximalist way whether they are two systems or one system. They are both. It is just that, depending on your question it is convenient to look at it any given such graph as one system now, and as two systems tomorrow.

meaning you can still split up the lexicon by language any time you need to.

As I understand, speakers or phonologically similar langauges X and Y tend to confidently classify words as “from X” and “from Y [once borrowed from X]”, even when a linguist is unable to do that.

For what it’s worth, I’ve often had problems thinking of the Russian translation of an English word, as well as the English translation of a Russian word (and as far as I’m aware this is fairly normal). I’d say it’s strong evidence towards the “two units” option.

Perhaps it works differently with true bilinguals, though (I’m not one – I’m fairly good at English but in no way native).

i’ve heard “spanglish” used to refer to both something spoken in aztlán and something spoken in new york city. the latter usage, in my experience, includes pretty much anything that uses both (new york) english and (puerto rican / dominican) spanish, from classic (phrase/sentence alternation) codeswitching, to utterances mostly one language but with some words in the other, to much more densely mixed (or higher-alternation-frequency) blends. but neither the english nor the spanish involved has much to do with the formally-taught version of either language, and the label is just as vernacular as the lect(s).

I agree with Rozele, at least about NYC.

Instead of viewing bilingualism as strictly separated languages in the individual’s mind

With the exception, of course, of those who are fully bilingual in both Serbian and Croatian.

Here we are discussing bilingualism “from a distance”, as if we did not have personal experience of it

I personally assumed it was referring to the infancy version, but I’m not sure if I would call myself fluent in English either. I certainly stumble a lot when I try to speak it.

With the exception, of course, of those who are fully bilingual in both Serbian and Croatian.

Well just to be clear, this is actually hard to do – in the same way it’s uncommon for English speakers to sound fluent in a variety of English not their own (see, eg , any American actor trying an English or Australian accent).

There are a plenty of American actors who do other English accents fine. On the other hand, one can hear lots of legendarily bad American accents coming from British actors—although that seems to have gotten less common in more recent years. Whether one notices more bad British accents or American accents presumably depends on which side of the ocean one is used to. (Gillian Anderson, incidentally, lived most of her childhood—and most of her subsequent life—in Britain; she has both accents natively, but British English seems to be her default.)

I understand “bilingual” in the context of this thread in the narrow sense. I said “of course you can not say that I (and my language knowlege) am not one system.” when I am native only in Russian, because “I have one head, ergo I am one unit” can be applied to anyone.

Well just to be clear, this is actually hard to do

People have doubts about Serbian and Croatian because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian#/media/File:Shtokavian_subdialects1988_incl_Slovenia.png.

It is patchy.

I can no longer tell whether people are deadpanning about FYLOSC or not.

I keep seeing it as ФЫЛОЩ.

“Thanks, Tito!”

https://giphy.com/gifs/tito-turbofolk-bubanj-lQb088n7aaKLbnwgjS

Not to your point, but I know a family of self-reported Croatian-speaking Croatians who spend their holidays with relatives in Belgrade. I don’t know the story behind that.

Well. Lepetane has 194 persons, of them 63 Croats, 59 Serbs, 50 Montenegrins, 3 Slovenians, 2 Macedonians, 1 Megman, 1 Muslim, 1 Unknown.

Why I am speaking about this: one of the very few Montenegrins I spoke to when I visited my freind in Herceg Novi was an old lady from Lepetane.

I did not want to pay a million dollars for a taxi (and did not know local language well enough), so I was trying to figure out where I should wait for a bus, and the lady was trying to say me something, seemingly to help. But all I could understand was “Ne razumiješ?:-(” I do not know whether it was Serbian
ne razumiješ, “you don’t understand?:-(“, Croatian
ne razumiješ, “you don’t understand?:-(“, or Montenegrian
ne razumiješ, “you don’t understand?:-(“.

Or Bokeljian?

You can’t be bilingual in Serbian _and_ Croatian, that’s impossible. They’re too different.

That reminds me of trying to learn Azeri from Turkish. So many of the words were different only in consonant voicing or metathesis, and in ways that weren’t regular enough to keep straight which was which. There was even a book published for that very purpose called Köprü Körpü after the word for ‘bridge’ in Turkish and Azeri, respectively.

A typo:(
I copied it and then substituted each word with translation. It was “German”. I understand why typo, the process “select-type-select-type-select…” is unusual enough.

But I do not understand how Ger-> Meg is possible:/

Its a portmaplogy. Megallemaniac.

Spoken like a true Belgian!

@ David Eddyshaw

I agree with everything you say in your comments on this thread except your statement that Otherguy is a pseudonym.

Otegui ~ Oteguy ~ Otheguy is a Basque family name found at least in Spain, Uruguay, and Brazil.

Ricardo Otheguy (https://gc.cuny.edu/Faculty/Core-Bios/Ricardo-Otheguy) holds a doctorate in linguistics from the City University of New York, where he now teaches.

@DLG:

I had intended my (mis)spelling to be a clue as to my level of seriousness.

That’s beautiful.