The Cultural Memory of Language: Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 5 9781472583734, 9781474236614, 9781472583758

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The Cultural Memory of Language

Contemporary Applied Linguistics Series Editor: Li Wei, Birkbeck College, London, UK Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 1: Language Teaching and Learning, edited by Vivian Cook and Li Wei Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 2: Linguistics for the Real World, edited by Vivian Cook and Li Wei Discourse in Context: Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 3, edited by John Flowerdew Contemporary Second Language Assessment: Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 4, edited by Dina Tsagari and Jayanti Veronique Banerjee

The Cultural Memory of Language Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 5 Susan Samata

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Susan Samata, 2014 Susan Samata has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-8373-4 PB: 978-1-4742-8806-4 ePub: 978-1-4725-8374-1 ePDF: 978-1-4725-8375-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Samata, Susan. Cultural memory of language / Susan Samata. pages cm – (Contemporary applied linguistics ; 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-8373-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4725-8374-1 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4725-8375-8 (epdf) 1. Psycholinguistics. 2. Memory. 3. Language attrition. 4. Sociolinguistics. I. Title. P37.5.M46S36 2014 401’.9–dc23 2014021551 Series: Contemporary Applied Linguistics Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd Printed and bound in Great Britain

To Habeeba, who didn’t even speak her own language, and to Li Wei, who saw that there might be something in that.

Contents

Preface 1 Introduction 2 Exploring the Background 3 A Category Marked Miscellaneous 4 Method and Practice 5 Findings 6 Discussion and Conclusions Appendix 1 Transcription symbols Appendix 2 Interview Schedule Notes References Index

viii 1 31 75 101 121 149 172 173 175 177 186

Preface In the situations of complex language contact that can arise in conjunction with migration, the language acquired in childhood as a ‘first language’ does not necessarily turn out to be the same as that of one’s parents (PL1). In this book I ask not how this happens, but what the consequences are for the individual. The phenomenon of not fully sharing a first language with parents, or grandparents, is taken to be a language issue that fits within the definition of applied linguistics offered by Christopher Brumfit: ‘the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue’ (Brumfit, 1997, p. 93). However, the real-world problem addressed here is in fact the felt lack of a language, and therefore presents little or no analysable form or function – those mainstays of linguistics. Nevertheless, like a black hole in space, PL1 is not, not there; its influence is felt. Straining the astronomical analogy a little further, to pick up faint or infrequent signals from space requires a very extensive radio telescope array. Likewise, this book extends the elastic boundaries of applied linguistics to take a perspective from cultural memory studies, which takes as an overarching theme, ‘the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts’ (Erll, 2008, p. 2). This provides a useful dimension of subtlety in the inclusion of a longer diachronic reach, and a range of contexts; after all, while language is often central to real-world problems, it is rarely the only factor at issue. Applied linguistics and cultural memory studies are similar in being essentially interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinarity can enable a welcome intellectual freedom of movement but bring its own difficulties; terms may be left ill-defined, theorization unclear and methodologies inconsistent. These issues are discussed at length here, but the guiding principle has been to err on the side of an organized inclusivity, even at the expense of a strictly empirical methodological rigor. I adopt a broadly phenomenological perspective (for more detail, see Chapter 4).Throughout this book, I seek to remain grounded

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in the reported life experience generously shared by a range of interviewees. Without them, this book would not have been possible. Much research has been done on language shift, a process said to take place over two to three generations, at the community level. At the level of the individual, interest has been concentrated on first and second or bilingual language acquisition and also on ways in which an acquired language may be ‘forgotten’. That so little research has been conducted on the experience of the ‘second’ immigrant generation may be due, at least in part, to the theoretical and methodological barriers hinted at above. Also, the magnitude of practical and emotional problems that the first immigrant generation faces tends to eclipse concerns that arise only later. Families that migrate, even in wellplanned and supported circumstances, face many hurdles in their efforts to set up home in a new country. When young children need to settle into their new schools and to make friends, the focus is, necessarily, on helping them to acquire the language of the majority community. It is often taken for granted that the children will continue to speak their parents’ first language (PL1) and the point at which this ability ceases to develop and a process of attrition sets in can go unnoticed, resulting in a de facto monolingualism that was neither expected nor intended. Yet, language is not an all-or-nothing proposition; the individual who lacks fluency may remain well aware of gesture, intonation and other subtle aspects that surround the actual words. What has been termed the somatic ecology of language is imbricate in the wider cultural patterns within which the community and the individual interact. Participants in the research reported here typically began the interview by stating, ‘I cannot speak (PL1).’ Significantly, they did not go on to say, ‘but I can and do interact with it on many levels in daily life’; it is claimed, however, that this is what the data presented here demonstrate.

1

Introduction 1.1 Defining the problem In a postscript to a collection of his essays, Language Diversity and Language Contact, Stanley Lieberson relates that his interest in language diversity stemmed from his upbringing in a multilingual home; his immigrant parents had moved to Brooklyn in the 1930s. ‘Language diversity and language contact were very much part of my youth’; however, this is almost immediately followed by, ‘I myself was never any good at languages’, an odd avowal for a distinguished sociolinguist. An explanation is offered: I have a hunch that in an unverbalized way my childhood friends and I … understood the importance of language as a class marker. This was a period when merely the mention of Brooklyn and the English spoken there almost guaranteed laughter from a radio show’s audience. (Lieberson, 1981, p. 378)

This anecdote illustrates the lived experience of language change. Language shift is described by sociolinguists as a process happening over two to three generations (Fishman, 1986); beneath this generalization is found a bewildering range and variety of individual experience. Research in language attrition has examined ways in which speakers can lose the ability to access their languages through processes of attrition in various contexts. This rapidly expanding field has concentrated (although not exclusively) on attrition, in individuals, of established first languages, describing the relative rates of, or susceptibility to, attrition for features, semantic, phonological and syntactic, of specific languages. From a wider perspective, Kees de Bot identifies two main questions to be addressed in language attrition research: the how and the why (de Bot, 2007). He answers the latter by appealing to the concept of ‘major life events’ defined by lifespan developmental psychology, positing a category

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of ‘language-related major life events’, which includes, but is not limited to, migration. The question of how language abilities change is far more difficult to answer; de Bot identifies at least eight ‘major language systems’ (de Bot, 2007, pp. 59, 60). De Bot here, and language attrition research more generally, is concerned with technical aspects of language as a system, analysable in terms familiar to general linguistics and more abstract systems theory. These systems do not, however, directly address Lieberson’s personal experience; not a ‘major life event’, but the steady accretion of impressions that lead a young child, Lieberson was born in 1933, growing up in a multilingual family to become effectively monolingual in the host community language. Language attrition studies take as a starting point an established L1 which is to a greater or lesser extent forgotten or retained. Participants in the current study are members of minority communities who are effectively monolingual in the majority community language, but who feel a connection with their parents’, or grandparents’, first language (PL1) even when the relationship seems to reside mainly in their inability to speak it. The focus here is not on de Bot’s ‘how and why’ of language attrition, but on what may follow as a consequence. David Block cautions against imposition by an educational elite, of overly romanticized conceptions of language/bilingualism and ethnic minority background, and calls for researchers to ‘resist … tendencies … towards exaggeration as regards what it means for a language to disappear from the repertoire of individuals or entire collectives’ (Block, 2008, p. 200). He calls for more nuanced approaches and declares that ‘we would do better to listen a little more to the stories of individuals actually living through language maintenance and shift and a little less to those who pronounce on such matters from outside of such contexts’ (pp. 200, 201). This book focuses on just such individuals. I do not analyse actual language in use, but explore informants’ memories of use of language, their own usage and that of people around them, over the course of their lives.

1.2 Defining the people Participants in this survey are from populations which find themselves at ‘the other end’ of the migrant language experience, on the far side of language shift; almost by definition, this population is middle-aged or older. They are remote

Introduction

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from adolescent angst surrounding identity, they have had the chance to work through any institutionally imposed narratives, accepting or rejecting them, they are able to understand their parents’ motives in immigrating and have witnessed and participated in the difficulties of ‘setting up home’ in a ‘foreign’ country. These factors and others enable mature reflection on the experience of ‘living through language maintenance and shift’. Recollections were elicited in the course of extended, informal and semi-scheduled interviews which aimed to be ‘conversational’ in nature. This is fully discussed in Chapter 4.

1.3 Defining the perspective: Taking an interdisciplinary view Crossing disciplinary boundaries is quite the norm in applied linguistics – all those hyphenated subspecializations, socio-, psycho-, neuro- and so on, to the point where definition of the field becomes problematic. Christopher Brumfit’s definition, ‘the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue’ (Brumfit, 1997, p. 93), leaves plenty of scope; language is often a central, but rarely the only, issue in ‘realworld problems’. Investigation of language attrition cannot afford to ignore the category ‘extra-linguistic factors’; however, it will become necessary to take into account the perspectives on such factors developed in subdisciplines of applied linguistics and in related disciplines associated with them. Taking different disciplinary perspectives into account in a systematic manner poses many problems; there is little agreement on the definition of ‘cross’ or ‘interdisciplinary’ work. Patrick Charaudeau considers this situation in the paper, Pour une interdisciplinarité ‘focalisée’ dans les sciences humaines et sociales (Charaudeau, 2010), from which the following taxonomy is paraphrased (my translation). ‘Pluridisciplinarité’: an addition of disciplines considering a particular question, without real interaction between them, in which each discipline remains autonomous – giving an analysis according to its own criteria without reference to others. The result would be a set of different points of view. Multidisciplinarity: the situation that arises when several disciplines give their views of a particular phenomenon, concerning health, security, environment

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and so on. It is distinguished from the above by being a more open consideration of more general areas of concern – not necessarily confined to questions of direct concern to the disciplines. Transdisciplinarity: here the focus is on the meaning of ‘trans’ – disciplines actively cooperate in contributing their expertise. The result would be an entirely new, discrete, basis for the consideration of a question/problem area. Interdisciplinarity: this is characterized by a greater integration of concepts, methodologies and interpretations. It requires a close analysis of points of convergence/divergence between disciplines with the aim of examining what is common to both natural and social sciences. The current work aims for interdisciplinarity in the sense outlined earlier. However, it is recognized that the single researcher does not have in-depth knowledge of all the discipline areas involved and should not ‘trespass’ beyond her expertise. This is particularly the case with psychology, where care has been taken not to interpret data on psychological terms. With this caveat in mind, the following comprise the main disciplinary perspectives taken into account.

1.3.1 Language attrition studies Recent work in language attrition and language contact studies indicates recognition of the need to widen the perspective in order to take into account the complex factors involved. Schmid, Köpke and de Bot acknowledge that there is still disagreement among language attrition researchers on some fairly basic questions; for example, whether L1/early childhood language acquisition is qualitatively different, using different neural mechanisms, from second language acquisition (SLA) also on whether there are significant changes in language acquisition processes around the age of puberty (Schmid et al., in press). At the same time, they argue strongly for the uniquely important status of L1: However, one thing can be said with certainty: the language that was used in parent–child interactions, that is linked with the earliest memories, and that was acquired at the same time that other important early cognitive developments took place, is unique in that it is irrevocably tied into

Introduction

5

fundamental aspects of a speaker’s personality and memory in complex ways. (Schmid et al., in press)

Clear identification of a first language is, however, not necessarily unproblematic, leaving aside questions around the possibility of completely balanced bilingualism. Anna Verschik details some conflicting criteria by which it is possible to designate a language as L1: by origin, the language one learned first, through self-identification or identification by others, according to competence – which may contradict the preceding category, and/or by function, the language most used (Verschik, 2002). She even suggests that, due to changing self-identifications, ‘at different points a person can have different mother tongues’ (Verschik, 2002, p. 38). If the term L1 is substituted for the emotive ‘mother tongue’, this idea becomes more acceptable, but does this affect the ‘unique’ status claimed for L1? Schmid et al. note that ‘The only external factor that has been shown to have an indisputable and comparatively straightforward impact on language attrition is age of onset’ (Schmid et al., in press). For individuals whose language environment changes at an early age, there would seem to be an undefinable, perhaps overlapping, area between incomplete acquisition and attrition, some point at which acquisition wanes and attrition begins. As different facets of language have been shown to be more or less susceptible to attrition (Köpke & Schmid, 2004; Schmid, 2010), it seems theoretically possible for both processes to be underway simultaneously for different language areas, where there is some exposure to both languages. It should be noted that the terms ‘first generation’ and ‘second generation’ are problematic in similar ways to L1 and L2. Although they are used here as if they had fixed meanings, a ‘first’ generation immigrant who arrives before the age of, say, five will have a qualitatively different experience from the person who arrives as an adult. Are the children of the former ‘second generation’ in the same way that those of the latter would be? Or, at another remove, there is surely a difference in one’s experience of grandparents who left a country at an early age and assimilated quickly, and those who were later immigrants who may remain steeped in the culture of their ‘native’ countries. It is, on grounds of practicality, impossible to specify in its totality the language environment that surrounded a given infant at the earliest stages of language acquisition, hence the prevalence of researchers using their

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own children as research subjects. It is also not possible to predict which individuals will either experience attrition or maintain L1 in a multilingual environment. When the impact of subjective factors, such as self-identification, is acknowledged, complexity increases exponentially. Language attrition studies turn to Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) in an attempt to control data, ‘though the complexity of language in use is such that we may never be able to model language as a complex system in all its details’ (de Bot, 2007, p. 66). DST, developed in mathematics, does demand quantifiable data. This is possible in the examination of discrete language elements such as units of vocabulary or instances of the use of a given grammatical construction, but devising empirical tests can be extremely difficult. Schmid et al., pointing to methodological difficulties in revealing the extent of retained L1 capability, recommend that ‘The best-suited data for the analysis of language attrition and incomplete acquisition, … may … be free spoken data, which allow every speaker to employ the full range of her language knowledge’ (Schmid et al., in press). These ‘free-spoken data’ are then transcribed and the elements under scrutiny coded for analysis. Clearly, this type of methodology is inapplicable where the data are not capable of reduction to quantitative expression.

1.3.2 Sociology and sociolinguistics Much work on language shift has been done from sociological or sociolinguistic perspectives concerned with the degree and nature of social group affiliation defined by ethnicity and/or language, which frequently coincide. A=A’ (Fishman, 1986, p. 57): this well-known formulation represents ‘B Joshua Fishman at his least emotive. It describes one resolution to the situation that arises when two monolingual communities, A and B, come into contact, ‘from a perspective of more than three generations of time depth’ (Fishman, 1986, p. 57), and is the pattern found most frequently in countries, such as the United States, that experienced repeated waves of immigration over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and beyond. Some re-evaluation of the value of language A after the shift to B is complete may lead to the appearance of efforts towards community relinguification at this stage (Fishman, 1986). These three generations are and have for many years been the focus of intense study and attention from perspectives of understanding

Introduction

7

the processes involved, in order to manage some of the wider social issues of migration. The rise of rapid communications technology and spread of lingua franca notwithstanding, politics and economics frame a migration context that is typified by patterns of resentment between host and incoming groups and attempts to amend, or manipulate, these through education in general and language instruction in particular. Language acquisition has, in a large section of public opinion, become a proxy for the ‘fitness’ of a migrant to be accepted into a community. In recent years, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, concepts subsumed under the heading ‘multiculturalism’ have formed a dominant discourse and a paradigm that seems apt to the description of globally mobile and increasingly inter-communicating populations. It is a term, however, whose vagueness, supposed to be elastic, has often in fact merely deferred dealing with profound differences. ‘Multi’ has been taken to mean anything from a plurality of ‘communities’ living side-by-side, but essentially separately, on the one hand, to an integration of facets of different ‘cultures’ in a harmonious mix, Gilroy’s ‘conviviality’ (Gilroy, 2005) on the other. Little wonder that David Cameron’s 2011 pronouncement to the Munich conference, ‘Multiculturalism doesn’t work’, was so well received. At the time of writing, Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband is making headlines with a speech that urges ‘integration’, frequently taken to be the opposite of multiculturalism, with English language instruction as a prime mechanism by which this can be achieved. Political uses of language competence will be discussed in Chapter 6. These larger societal factors, together with a subtext of racism that is never entirely absent, have formed a background to the life experience of my informants, and to my own. Although all consider themselves to be citizen members of their larger communities, none of them is as far removed in time as ‘more than three generations’; language A has, however, in the words of Jonathan Edwards, ‘lost most … of its communicative value … [but] retained something of its symbolic value’ (Edwards, 2009, p. 4) for them.

1.3.3 Psychology and psychosocial studies In order to move from a view of the individual as group member to one concentrated on individual experience, a psychological perspective seems

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necessary. The non-expert finds aspects of this field difficult to approach; however, the implications of findings in psychology and psychiatry have always been of wider interest. Edward Sapir, for example, argued for the wider relevance of psychological insights as early as 1917, a time when psychology had hardly emerged as a separate department of medicine and linguistics had not yet been defined as a field of study, and even here Sapir feels the need to caution against ‘half-baked doctors’ – the problem Freud recognized as ‘wild diagnosis’ (Freud, 1912), which became central to considerations of empirical validity on the one hand, and a ‘not altogether healthy over popularity’ on the other (Sapir, 1963 (1917), p. 522). While insights and perspectives developed in psychology and psychosocial studies will be considered here, particularly the concept of self and the function of language in the formation of subjectivity, the analysis is not undertaken on a psychological level. Methodologies developed in some areas of psychology and cross-cultural psychology have, however, proved useful, particularly the application of phenomenological perspectives on the nature of experience and the relation of the individual to his environment. These points are discussed next.

1.3.4 Cultural memory studies My research actually found its inception in a consideration of language as cultural memory. Language forms part of the fabric of culture, and, like other aspects of culture, is built up over historical time and also throughout an individual lifetime, undergoing modification in response to myriad stimuli. Could people who had lost the ability to use their parents’ or grandparents’ first languages fluently, but nevertheless felt a strong connection to them, be said to possess a cultural memory of that language? Could ‘the cultural memory of language’ be, to borrow a phrase from Susannah Radstone, ‘a useful category for thinking with’?1 This will be discussed in detail later; however, as a starting point, it encouraged a wide-ranging survey of the disciplinary areas that could be brought to bear on the issue of lived experience of language shift. The memories related by participants are not so much of the language itself as of things that happened because the language situation shaped them. For example, Aurelio, a Mexican-American informant, recalls that school friends’

Introduction

9

parents were not very welcoming to the Mexican-looking little boy until they recognized that he was well-mannered, a good example for their own children. He attributes his good manners, and his confidence in using them, to having learned to ‘correctly’ address his elders in Spanish. He transferred the attitude of respect into exchanges – in English – with other adults whose homes he entered, taking pride in politeness as a positive ‘Mexican’ trait that he values as such to this day. Phenomena of this kind, in which language is imbricate in a complex pattern of cultural factors, I wish to term the ‘cultural memory of language’. Astrid Erll, a leading scholar in the area, declares that cultural memory studies is concerned with, ‘the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts’ (Erll, 2008, p. 2). Erll divides the definition of culture into private and public categories, the first ‘a subjective category of meanings contained in people’s minds’, the second, ‘patterns of publically available symbols objectified in society’ (p. 5). These could well feature in a definition of language and immediately introduce a problem that is central for all the social sciences: that of the relation of the individual to the collective. ‘Meanings contained in people’s minds’, points to the individual, even the neurological, ‘patterns of publically available symbols’ brings in ‘the media, institutions and practices by which social groups construct a shared past’ while ‘much of what is done to reconstruct a shared past bears some resemblance to the processes of individual memory’ (Erll, 2008, p. 2). Cultural memory studies also provides an example of how a perspective can be applied across disciplines. The definitive collection Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (2008) includes contributions from more than ten disciplinary areas, ranging from history and literature to psychology and neurology. The perspective is grounded in everyday, individual experience; it recognizes, in the words of Michel de Certeau, ‘la rumeur océanique de l’ordinaire’ (de Certeau, 1990, p. 18).

1.3.5 Cognitive science: Distributed cognition/distributed language The situation of people such as the participants consulted here appears centred around two strong paradoxes: first, the basicness of language to cognition

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on the one hand, and its seeming fragility, evidenced in the rapid attrition observed in some young children and, second, that the closest of human relationships can be lived in the absence of a fully shared first language. Each of these paradoxes also participates in the wider themes of interiority and exteriority discussed by cultural memory and psychosocial studies. Another discipline area that has focussed on the relationship and on communication between individuals is the relatively new field of Distributed Cognition, which also carries the potential for research via more direct empirical observation. Briefly, researchers in distributed cognition recognize three basic areas over which cognition can be said to be ‘distributed’. Brain and body: Linell stresses the non-separation of brain/nervous system and other body systems. ‘ … the brain interacts with the rest of the body; the mind is embodied, not just embrained, and the body is mindful’ (Linell, 2007, p. 607). The brain connects with the body not only through the neural system (which could in some ways be seen as an extension of the brain). For example, pre-conceptual and pre-conscious meaning is bodily influenced, and feelings have a bodily basis to be found outside of the cerebrum, in the midbrain and indeed outside of the brain and the nervous system; feelings are induced not only by neural routes, but also by chemical routes. (Linell, 2007, p. 607)

Factors in the environment: ‘the mind is not contained in the individual brain; instead, it is “inextricably interwoven with body, world and action” (Clark, 1996). Clark and others therefore suggest that we could talk about an “extended” mind, distributed over self and others, body and environment (including artefacts)’ (Clark, 1996). According to Edwin Hutchens, coordinated activity can set up a shared cognition. All divisions of labor … require distributed cognition in order to coordinate the activities of the participants … When the labor … is cognitive labor the system involves two kinds of cognitive labor: the cognition that is the task and the cognition that governs the coordination of the elements of the task. In such a case, the group performing the cognitive task may have cognitive properties that differ from the ‘cognitive properties of the individual’. (Hutchins, 1995, p. 176)

Introduction

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Action and symbol: here, theories of distributed language differ radically from traditional linguistic theory. Distributed cognition rejects the Saussurean view of language as a verbal system in which encoded meanings are transferred from mind to mind (Kravchenko, 2007, p. 651; Cowley, 2011). Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar is also rejected. In place of these theories, a combination of ‘online’ action and learned symbol is posited: It is emphasized that, unlike Morse [code], language is embodied activity that is intrinsic to real-time coordination and cognition. However, given a history of similar expressive dynamics, language is also nonlocalizable or symbolic (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2009). Language is embodied and virtual or, more simply, it is distributed. (Cowley, 2011, p. 186)

Distributed language theory can thus encompass wider effects on thought and language as part of an ecosocial system, ‘which recognizes that language is a cultural organization of process that is naturalistically grounded in human biology’ (Thibault, 2011, p. 211). This close alignment of language, culture and biology may appear, ‘more Whorfian than Whorf ’ (Rączaszek-Leonardi, in press). Cutting across much ideological argument, Hutchins declares that Linguistic determinism is the idea that the structure of one’s native language determines properties of individual thought. [Is this true? The answer] seems to be, ‘Sometimes and sometimes not’. … When cognitive activities are distributed across social space, the language or languages used by task performers to communicate are almost certain to serve as structuring resources, and the structure of language will affect the cognitive properties of the group even if they do not affect the cognitive properties of individuals in the group. (Hutchins, 1995, p. 232)

This is a novel perspective. It seems possible to see the language abilities of my participants as retaining PL1 in a ‘patchy’ way across a distributive spectrum, in ecosocial environments that include material artefacts and place in combination with affect and gesture, all of which are culturally conditioned and which leave some trace in memory. Hutchins declares that ‘We are all cognitive bricoleurs-opportunistic assemblers of functional systems of internal and external structures’ (p. 172). The adult non/partial speaker of PL1 is loath to engage in a language bricolage

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that might leave him looking silly. Children are less cautious; Rampton’s teenagers also seem well disposed to linguistic bricolage (Rampton, 1995).

1.4 Research questions and the aims I began with the assumption that there are effects on the individual of migrant background when their parents’ first language is not/is no longer fully shared, and a concomitant expectation that these would be negative. My primary working research question was formulated as How do the defined individuals experience the effects of not fully sharing PL1?

This formulation seeks to put the main focus on lived experience, a phenomenological approach. It also avoids defining the extent of possible, minimal ability to use PL1, or casting the situation in overtly negative terms. Secondary questions include Are any of these experiences generalizable? Is it possible to describe effects as ‘typical’? How does the situation come about? Is it possible to generalize here?

A wider preoccupation and motivation concerns the ways in which cultural identity travels with the migrating individual, changing and being adapted over time, and the role of language as a central factor in the process. There is a notable absence in sociological, psychological and cultural memory studies literature of consideration of the role of language in these contexts. It is surprising to find, for example, that the well-known sociological study The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict (Dench et al., 2006) has only a passing reference to language despite its focus on one of the most densely multilingual areas anywhere in the world, or that a study entitled At Home In The Chinese Diaspora: Memories, Identities, and Belongings (Davidson, 2008) contains no discussion of language factors at all and On Not Speaking Chinese (Ang, 2001) is more about social attitudes to racial and cultural difference than about language. Speculation on reasons for this conspicuous absence might include, prosaically, the fact that most of the researchers are monolingual in a

Introduction

13

majority community language (usually English) and interpreters are expensive and difficult to use to advantage or, perhaps, that cultural, social or psychology researchers do not have a linguist’s appreciation of the importance of language. Institutional barriers to cross-disciplinary studies probably also play a role here. A secondary, though no less important, aim is to attempt to remove the negative self-image of being in some sense a failed bilingual that my informants, and many in the same position, often seem to labour under. Jack Kerouac put it well in a letter thanking a French-language American newspaper reviewer, he wrote: ‘Excuse me for writing in English … but I have no proficiency at all in my native language, and that is the lame truth’ (Kerouac, 1995, p. 227). In the episode already related, Aurelio describes positive traits that he feels he possessed as a child because of his language background. However, most of Aurelio’s recollections concern negative experiences of being challenged and embarrassed due to his inability to speak fluently the language his appearance suggests he should. The sense of anger and frustration lingers, and such incidents may be repeated at any time. This pattern was repeated with all the participants, negative experiences were remembered clearly and related first. Later in the interviews, after the participant had been dwelling on the past for some time, points of connection with PL1 and experiences of genuine participation were recalled. Recognition of these points of contact may shift the perception of being wanting: ‘lame’.

1.5 Disambiguation It is necessary at this point to disambiguate my aims. Although insights from sociolinguistics and wider sociology are useful in understanding background influences, the participants are not considered from the perspective of being representative members of language/ethnic groups. There is a search for commonalities among the participants that may be more widely applicable, but there is no ambition to identify linguistic, cultural or psychological universals. Discussion of findings of some negative outcomes of people not sharing their parents’ first languages are in no way intended to support any agenda that could be described as ‘separatist’, such as schools teaching in minority languages, following the example of some schools in the United States; neither

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do I think that immigrants to a country should not learn the language of the majority community: quite the opposite. Before beginning the research I had expected to find negative factors. This expectation was conditioned not so much by an elite assumption that bilingualism is in and of itself a good thing, although I do in fact share that assumption, as by awareness of the importance of language, even at the level of dialect or regional accent, as a marker of identity, and also of the importance that is currently placed on celebrating a vaguely defined ‘multiculturalism’. Another consideration is the importance of the dark opposite side of that coin: dealing with racism. The languages involved here are all in widespread current use; no consideration of ‘language death’ (Crystal, 2000) pertains.

1.6 Definition of terms This book crosses disciplines in areas that, perhaps more than most, suffer from poorly defined terminology and use of terms that may mean different things to different specialisms or in different contexts. For some terms, such as ‘first language’, it is essential to provide a definition, while the definition of others, the notoriously plastic ‘culture’ for example, will be allowed to develop in the context of their discussion. The following provide definitions of some key concepts involved. Shift, attrition, loss: as already mentioned, there is disagreement on the issue of language ‘loss’ that centres on the question of whether this can actually be said to take place. This book will, for the most part, avoid the term. Schmidt and Köpke, in speaking of this terminological difficulty point out that It is symptomatic that in 1998, Kees de Bot pointed out in exasperation – and doubtlessly not for the first time – that he and Bert Weltens were the two only ‘knights’ in pursuit of the shining goal of terminological distinction between Shift (intergenerational) and Attrition (intragenerational) as hyponyms of the more general Loss. (Köpke & Schmid, 2004, p. 3)

It is also important to distinguish between ‘loss’ used in this sense and the disappearance of an entire language. The theme of possible overlap between attrition and incomplete acquisition, introduced earlier, will be further explored.

Introduction

15

First language: I will take the categories ‘competence’ and ‘function’ from Verschik’s taxonomy of mother tongue definition (Verschik, 2002) in order to designate a ‘first’ language for participants: in fact, either English or French. PL1 is used as a convenient label; participants’ parents in fact came from a variety of linguistic backgrounds, with the intensely multilingual environment of Congolese Asians at one extreme and the monolingual rural Italians at the other, so ‘first’ is a notional label here, too, rather than an exact definition. Bi/multilingual: Expert opinion differs on the definition of this pair, with disagreement centring around both the degree of competence necessary to ‘claim’ bi/multilingualism and on how this competence is measured. For present purposes, a loose definition of a fairly high degree of practical spoken competence across a wide range of social situations will suffice; it specifically excludes such marginal competence as the participants may possess. Mother tongue: Too inexact to be used as a term of reference here, it is, however, in common usage and carries some powerful connotations. Literally the language in which your mother first spoke to you, whose cadences may have become familiar even before birth: the area has been the subject of intense scientific study. However, it is the emotional appeal of the term that is most commonly evoked. Joshua Fishman has frequently discussed this aspect. There is a link between language and kin; language is ‘perceived in kinship terms’ frequently the mother (Fishman, 1997b, p. 332). A more troubling, yet not uncommon, aspect of these kinship metaphors is exemplified in an anecdote related by an American graduate student whose grandparents were Finnish and who is now studying (in English) at a university in Finland. Finding her Finnish language classes very difficult, she was exasperated by people who expected the language to be easy for her, ‘because it’s in the blood’. These themes will be discussed at greater length next. Heritage language: a term that attempts to obviate some of the problems associated with ‘first/second’, or ‘mother’, it does not make a definite claim for competence, or make the assumption that the term ‘home language’ does. It is avoided here due to its inexactness, although it occurs in common usage and its proximity to ‘inheritance’ may promote the notion of PL1 being something that is acquired as a matter of course, or, conversely, taken up as an optional cultural lifestyle feature.

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Cultural Memory of Language

Identity, self and subject: ‘identity’ is a term often used in a rather unexamined way in applied linguistics. Edwards, for example, can declare that ‘the single most important aspect of human language – beyond its obvious instrumental and communicative function – lies in its relationship to group identity’ (Edwards, 2010, p. 3) without further clarification of what group identity, or individual identity, actually means. Claire Kramsch attempts a closer examination of terms; identity is a sedimentation of all the different ‘subject positions’ the individual takes up. ‘The many subject positions we take up during our lives sediment to form historical, recognizable patterns that we call “identities” ’. The subject/subjectivity is constructed in the context of proximal cultural forces through the use of symbolic forms. This is contrasted with the ‘ “self ”, an innate property of the human which may be discovered’ (Kramsch, 2009, p. 17). Yet, perhaps it is necessary to look more closely into the term ‘self ’. In the course of researching background for this book, I became aware of facts well known to any psychology student; there is deep disagreement among psychologists and psychiatrists on the nature of ‘the self ’ and how, or even if, we come to have one. The socially constructed subject is a much-discussed feature of postmodernist psychology that is widely accepted across a wide range of disciplines; the symbolic role of language in this construction would seem to put it firmly within the remit of applied linguistics. However, pursuing psychological constructivism to its extreme, or its logical, conclusion – depending on the point of view – leaves no place for a ‘self ’ that is more than the sum of its constantly changing reactions to social surroundings. The other main strand of opinion within psychology is the Freudian/Kleinian positing of the unconscious, formed in earliest infancy; the unique self, identical with itself. The non-expert may, on account of the ubiquity of discussion of concepts such as ‘ego’ and ‘super-ego’ in popular culture, assume that they are generally accepted by specialists; but this is not the case. It is neither possible nor necessary to argue here for either of these positions, the unique, enduring self or the wholly constructed, everchanging self, but an awareness of current thinking in this area is needed. The modern migrant, a term which may perhaps subsume such categories as the ‘virtual migrant’ who spends a large proportion of his time relating to others across a far-flung online ‘community’, the ‘serial’ economic migrant

Introduction

17

and the member of a constantly changing urban multicultural community, as well as the refugee and the ‘traditional’ emigrant, are ‘seen as seismographs of postmodern living conditions’ (Zielke & Straub, 2008, p. 62) for whom the postmodern constructionist paradigm of self seems particularly accurate as they reinvent themselves to engage with the changing contexts of their lives. However, even the well-prepared migrant, the elite company employee on a well-defined overseas posting, can find the challenges of life in a new environment disorienting; the majority of migrants leave their countries of origin under far less controlled circumstances, and, without the support of social networks that they had perhaps hardly been aware of at home, often struggle to maintain a sense of who they are. In a study of use of psychotherapeutical health services by ‘migrants and those from migrant backgrounds’, Zielke and Straub claim that It becomes ever clearer that particularly the reconstructive description of experiencing difference calls for a reference to a formal unity of the self not only at a conceptual level but that the wish – after all – for personal identity is also indispensable for articulating the difference experienced … . (p. 64)

Regardless of the implications for psychological theories of self, this statement, which I find persuasive, brings into focus a central feature of the migrant experience: the inescapable awareness of difference on a personal level. This difference obtains not only for the ‘first generation’ migrant, but also for, ‘those from migrant backgrounds’. The question of how long it is reasonable to claim a migrant background is not definitively possible to answer. We might hark back to Edwards’ claim that the symbolic value of PL1 can be, ‘retained … for a long time’ (Edwards, 2009, p. 4). Ien Ang, mentioned earlier, finds herself still in the midst of dealing with differences (not only visible ethnicity) that have accrued over centuries of family experience of serial migrations. A study of language contact and change in the context of migration that aims to examine aspects of these phenomena through an analysis of the experience of individuals requires, at the very least, an awareness of psychological theory in this area in order to attempt to obviate some of the problems that may arise from an inaccurate use of inadequately understood psychological terms. These points will be taken up in Chapters 2 and 4.

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Cultural Memory of Language

1.7 Horizons of comparison In order to manage the interdisciplinary approach taken, principles have been adapted from a framework developed by cross-cultural psychologist Jürgen Straub, the aims of which are to support the claims of a qualitative analysis by taking systematic account of the factors that may have influenced its interpretation. This is an attempt to mitigate what Alon Confino has described for cultural memory studies as ‘the unbearable lightness of interpretation [in which] lies the risk of memory and mentality as methods of inquiry’ (Confino, 2010, p. 83). Straub (Straub, 2006, p. 190) identifies four ‘horizons of comparison’ (HoC) that guide/influence interpretation of qualitative data: 1. The interpreter’s empirical HoC; the research data, or results, presented here as ‘findings’. 2. Further scientific knowledge as HoC, the discipline-specific background presented in Chapter 2. 3. Imaginative, fictional, utopian HoC; these will be considered as a separate review of secondary literature dealing with background literature which does not, strictly speaking, fall under the general headings of (applied) linguistics, cultural/collective memory studies or psychology and will include fictional, biographical and more generally philosophical background material (Straub, 2006, p. 190). 4. The interpreter’s everyday knowledge as HoC; this allows the systematic inclusion of reflexive consideration of the researcher’s own experience as it may effect interpretation. Here this is divided into the author’s ‘public’ experience as a teacher of English as a foreign language, and ‘private’ experience as a migrant and a mother. The term ‘horizon of comparison’ indicates the scheme’s background in phenomenological philosophy via Gadamer. This phenomenological bent also links Straub with other psychologists working with qualitative analysis, for example Smith et al. (2009), and Hollway (2008), to be discussed in Chapter 4. Straub’s scheme also bears a resemblance to Geertz’ ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 2000 (1973)), which elaborated information on anthropological observations with the same end of supporting qualitative data and was taken up by cultural

Introduction

19

memory scholars working in the oral history tradition, such as Alessandro Portelli (1998), but accounts for observations in a more systematic fashion and with the additional provision for reflexivity.

1.8 Reflexivity and motivation: Horizon of comparison 4 Many, if not most, projects such as this one find some of their impetus in the personal experience of the investigator. In my own case there is no primary experience of L1 attrition; involvement has been more tangential. However, since my own children might, in other circumstances, have grown up bilingual, I have been an emotionally involved observer on a personal level of some of the processes and effects of PL1 attrition. ‘No researcher can abandon or suppress his experience of life – in fact no one can – while interpreting texts or text analogs for scientific purposes’ (Straub, 2006, p. 191). Straub calls for life experience to be integrated into other empirical horizons of comparison, while recognizing that this form of knowledge ‘is all but arbitrary’ (p. 192). There are obvious dangers in this, including that of seeking to align others’ experience to familiar facets of one’s own in an egocentric or nostrifying manner. One way to guard against this is for the researcher to explicitly state the factors of his/her own background that may influence both data gathering and interpretation. Another factor taken into consideration in this regard is that raised by several of the contributors to the 2012 UK National Centre for Research Methods Review Paper, How many qualitative interviews is enough? Expert voices and early career reflections on sampling and cases in qualitative research (…), which is discussed at some length in Chapter 4; the question of how many interviews may be considered adequate is influenced by the prior knowledge and experience of the researcher. This section presents factors in my own life experience that I feel influenced my choice of methodology, data gathering and interpretations.

1.8.1 The influence of professional, or ‘public’, experience I have been a teacher of English as a foreign language since 1979; this experience has been divided almost equally between work with adolescents

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Cultural Memory of Language

and young adults and older adults who required English as a ‘service subject’ to further academic or career purposes, and non-elite economic migrants and refugees across the same age groups. The former groups viewed the language largely as a tool the mastery of which might give a certain satisfaction, but which did not require much personal investment. The majority had (have) no more than a passing interest in cultural topics. Any language teacher knows that ‘arm’s-length’ involvement of this type will not result in ‘real’ mastery, and, particularly with advanced students in academic writing, it becomes evident, to the student and the teacher, that understanding the underlying cultural assumptions of the target language, or idiom, is necessary to its full exploitation. The latter group, economic migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, experience an entirely different relation to the language. Many students in these categories know no English at all when they begin classes, further, being surrounded by an incomprehensible language forms part of a larger alienating confusion. My students have been plucked, near death, from boats off Vietnam or thrown from the backs of lorries in East Anglia – having been told it was Canada – with little more than the clothes on their backs. ‘Identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty’ (Mercer, 1990, p. 43. In Block, 2007, pp. 20, 21). The intensity of the crisis is affected by factors such as the degree of cultural difference, the norms and beliefs of the Middle East or Central Asia being more radically different from those of the United Kingdom or United States than those typical of Middle Europe; distance from ‘home’ and the possibility of returning or revisiting, remote for many asylum seekers; age at emigration; travelling alone, with family members or friends, or with companions met in transit and their ages; motivation and background to the decision to migrate, was it undertaken willingly or not; was there experience of war and violence, the economic considerations involved; is the migrant expected to send money to support relatives back home or establish a base for family members to join him (usually ‘him’); are there people smugglers to be paid-off. Upon arrival in a country, an asylum-seeking migrant is also likely to have been processed through immigration and social services authorities that further alienate, and the individual becomes a case number in a Kafkaesque pavane

Introduction

21

of incomprehensible legal procedure. When migrants with background experience of this kind find themselves sitting in an English language classroom they often seem, unsurprisingly, to be in a state of shock. People with previous experience of schooling may find the situation reassuring, although, when cultural expectations of the classroom are contradicted, this may become an additional frustration. People with no previous formal education often find the classroom to be a threatening environment. In any case, the English teacher is frequently the member of the host community with whom the migrant now has the most extensive contact, perhaps three to four hours per day over three to five days per week. As communication and trust are established, the teacher may also become the first point for information of all kinds and the classroom a refuge from other problems. Teaching in such situations, it is possible to become quite familiar with individual students and also with families travelling together or reassembled, sometimes seeing them through several years of study and acculturation. For two years, I acted as pastoral support tutor at a college of further education in a city designated by the Home Office for the reception of asylum seekers. In this capacity I attempted to direct students to sources of help and information and to help them understand official correspondence. Not infrequently, it became evident that individuals were getting contradictory advice, not only from the various official agencies and legitimate ethnic community organizations, but also from more shadowy agencies associated with peoplesmuggling. The latter seemed most concerned with getting access to funds for their ‘clients’ to repay debt claimed by them. For many in my classroom, the first months in the United Kingdom were fraught by the possibility of forced repatriation and threatened by the people-smuggling agencies just mentioned and the competing demands for allegiance from different community/ religious organizations. The ESOL teaching materials offered an optimistic, but vague, vision of ‘multicultural Britain’ aimed to reduce the possibility of social unrest through instruction in English language and British social norms. Of course, ‘indefinite leave to remain’ status, or actual citizenship, provides real protection from whatever circumstances necessitate flight from a home country, and many – if not most – asylum seekers and other migrants do work out some sustainable modus vivendi that accommodates at least short- to medium-term social and cultural needs. However, it is difficult

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to overestimate the initial shocks and stresses of a forced relocation and the unlooked for challenges it can throw up. For example, I recall a very heated exchange between a newly arrived Afghan man and an unmarried Pakistani woman whose family had been established for some years in the United Kingdom; she insisted on wearing a headscarf at all times (hardly a free choice as this was indeed enforced by her family/community). The Afghan, a Soviettrained engineer accompanied by his unveiled wife (also an engineer), was incensed that he had fought and suffered under the Taliban in order to free people from the type of religious repression he felt the wearing of a headscarf represented. He was appalled to find this sort of practice actually protected in his place of asylum. My point, here, is that experience of teaching, advising and observing, often over extended periods of time, individuals who were undergoing tremendous stressful processes of cultural and language change, whether they were asylum seekers in desperate straits or overseas graduate students all too aware of the financial burdens assumed by their families, provided me with a unique window on reactions to and coping with strategies for dealing with cultural change and challenges to individual identity. A graduate student can suffer the personal disaster of expulsion from a UK university for committing plagiarism, whereas a similar practice had actually built academic success at home. The adolescent refugee can be imprisoned for carrying the knife he had always assumed would be his right on ‘coming of age’; these are not merely theoretical considerations, the ‘fixed, coherent and stable’ assumption can be acutely challenged in these environments that have using language and understanding cultural difference at their core. On a minor, methodological note I wish to add that part of my teaching work has involved the administration of tests of spoken language under the auspices of four major testing regimes.2 Procedures for the fair administration of such tests have been refined over the past twenty or so years, particularly insofar as providing a candidate with a reasonable opportunity to demonstrate ability, without ‘leading’ or influencing the outcome. I found that many of the practices adopted in spoken language testing matched, or exceeded, guidelines for conducting qualitative interviews in anthropological or psychosocial contexts. I feel that my experience helped to avoid pitfalls such as the imposition of preconceived frameworks onto elicited information.

Introduction

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1.8.2 The influence of ‘private’ experience When I was sixteen, my family emigrated from England to the United States. We were ‘elite’ migrants; my father was a skilled craftsman who had been recruited in England. He had left the previous year to test the environment (or, as my mother hoped, to come to his senses). He found life in America to be very much to his liking so my mother gradually sold off our furniture and said goodbye to our relatives. There were murmurings of schadenfreude; 1967 was a year of violent racial confrontation in many states, and also hearty ‘jokes’ about ‘rats leaving the sinking ship’. Devaluation of the pound was in the offing. A low point was reached when, hearing a noise outside after dark, we peered through the curtains to discover an uncle fishing the goldfish out of our garden pond. I found the first years in America difficult. My clothes were somehow wrong for my New Jersey high school and my accent, like nails on a blackboard. Assumptions made about me were bewildering. The school put me into the ‘college prep’ program because I ‘looked intelligent’. It was only much later that I realized that this had been a huge stroke of luck as I did indeed continue on to university, an outcome that would have been highly unlikely for me in England, due to my working-class family background. Meanwhile, relatives at home assumed that we were now very rich (we had two bathrooms) and that we would surely think ourselves ‘too good’ to associate with them; even in jest, it increased our sense of isolation. I was drawn to other foreigners at my large urban high school, no British but some Europeans in similar circumstances to myself, various Hispanic migrants, Armenian refugees from the fighting in Beirut and Jewish escapees from the coming revolution in Iran. Unable to quickly assimilate with our American classmates, we formed a small community of international ex-pats; I was the only native English speaker; my future career was likely set at this point. After completing an MA in Linguistics, I went to teach English in Japan. There I met and married my Japanese husband, a widower with an eight-yearold son. I spoke very little Japanese when I was thus precipitated into the life of a salaryman’s wife, living in a company apartment complex and being a mother for the child, who had been living with his grandmother after being orphaned at the age of six. It was chiefly for the sake of my stepson that I took on a whole new persona; it was necessary to share the communal tasks

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of maintaining the apartment complex, sweeping the grounds, reading the water meters and setting up for the weekly visit by the food co-op delivery van, as well as the many tasks expected of the mothers of primary school children – which included cleaning the school and the local park. I was a great curiosity in my neighbourhood and, although I made some good friends, as a foreigner I was generally viewed with suspicion. Plunging into this challenging environment I became exhausted and disoriented. I had planned to continue teaching but discovered that employers were not interested in hiring married women, unless they were foreigners married to other foreigners; indeed, the demands on the salaryman’s wife left little time for anything else. The Japanese language began to subtly shape my self-image, too. I lost my given name; outside I was Mrs Samata or ‘Daisuke’s mother’, at home I was ‘o-mae’ or ‘anatta’–forms of ‘you’ typically used between spouses. My stepson, encouraged by his father to call me mother, tried not to call me anything. However, as my husband was obliged to spend very long hours, six days per week, away from home – the typical ‘salaryman’ lifestyle – the child and I were much thrown together and slowly began to form a positive relationship. I attempted to learn the language rapidly, no classes were available and I learned most by speaking with my stepson. As a result I tended to pick up the grammar and vocabulary of a small boy, often embarrassingly incongruent for an adult female speaker. I tried to make up for blunders by emulating the posture, gestures and intonations expected of a polite woman of my age. My husband was ten years older than me and his parents were elderly and conservative people; these factors also influenced the style of Japanese that I eventually acquired. Within a certain range, Japanese has marked difference in syntax and lexis according to register and gender, I achieved a near native pronunciation and idiomatic vocabulary (attrition has since set in). I have been taken for native over the telephone, but in person my appearance always sets up the strong expectation that I will not be able to speak Japanese, or that my interlocutor will have trouble understanding my Japanese. Some anomalous incidents have occurred; on a busy street, a very elderly lady asks me for directions, and following old-fashioned manners – affected also perhaps by stooped posture and poor eyesight – she does not look directly at my face while speaking. I give the directions, making sure she has understood by check questions, ‘Do you see that cross-walk?’ and so on. She thanks me, bowing

Introduction

25

low, then as a final gesture, looks me straight in the face; I have to put out a hand to prevent her from tumbling into the gutter. Very recently, I asked two small Japanese children in a public garden, who seemed distressed and whom I had overheard saying, ‘Father is not here’, if they were lost. At first they froze, and then the elder whispered ‘not lost’. My son, who had witnessed the brief exchange, was dumbfounded; ‘They looked at you as if you had dropped from Mars!’ I share the uncanny properties of ventriloquism, a voice issuing from a disorienting place; it is sometimes amusing, but also very alienating. It is occasionally bizarre, such as the times when I have had one of my children beside me at a train ticket window and have carried out an entire transaction while the ticket agent spoke only to the person with the oriental face. I have heard of many similar incidents. For many years it was not possible for me to visit home and I rarely spoke English. My stepson was twelve when my own first son was born; anxious not to alienate him or upset the relationship we had established, I spoke to the baby almost entirely in Japanese. Thinking about this from a distance, now, of twenty-eight years, I find it odd that I, as someone with an MA in linguistics, I had so little concern for the implications of early exposure to more than one language. However, my training had been in General Linguistics, which for an American university in the 1970s meant Chomsky and structuralism, and my specialism was teaching English as a foreign language; in those pre-Internet times, too, specialist information was near impossible to access for someone as remote from library or bookshop in English as I was at that time. As time passed, my marriage came under increasing strain and, three years after the birth of my first child, broke down. I went to my mother’s house in Rhode Island where I discovered that I was pregnant with my second child. Reconciliation with my husband was eventually worked out, but we agreed that I should remain in America for the duration of the pregnancy. Over this time my first son was, of course, exposed to English on a daily basis and seemed to ‘pick it up’ quite readily; although something of the linguistic strain this put on him was revealed when, at an international playgroup we attended, a Korean mother asked him what his drawing was of. He told her, in Japanese, that it was a fish. When she said she could not understand Japanese, he turned on her angrily saying, ‘You do!’, then refused to say ‘fish’ in English at all; people who looked Japanese had no business putting him to the bother of finding English words.

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By the time my second son was born I had decided to maintain a bilingual regime of some kind. As part of our reconciliation, my husband had agreed to allow me to send my elder son to an English speaking kindergarten and then on to an English-based international elementary school. The kindergarten was supported by a large English language church in Tokyo, where we had by this time moved, but there were fees to be found for the elementary school and I went back to work part time at a college near our home. In order to do this, I enrolled my second son, now two years old, in the local Japanese public kindergarten. This involved a typically regimented regime but the teachers were very kind and he settled in with few problems; this meant that he was exposed to more Japanese than English. I became aware of ways that my own behaviour towards my elder and younger children had been different in culturally specific ways. For example, I used to kiss my younger son goodbye when I delivered him to kindergarten. On one occasion, perhaps we were a little late; he had turned to run into the classroom when a three-year-old friend who had been waiting for him called him back because we had not kissed. She had to gesture this as she lacked a word for our small ritual. As I leant down to kiss my son she watched our faces approach, intently. It struck me quite forcefully that not only was it rather un-Japanese to kiss in this way, I had also not done so with my first son to whom I had spoken almost entirely in Japanese. Subsequent maternal anxieties about his ability to display affection or relate to the opposite sex have been proved unfounded. Unfortunately our marriage continued to deteriorate and when my elder son was seven, his brother five, we separated officially and I took the children to England to live. There were practical as well as legal reasons which prevented us from going to my family in America. Once again alone and under enormous strain, I concentrated on introducing my sons to their new school. My elder son was a ‘balanced’ bilingual at this point and engaged rapidly with his new classmates; his brother understood English but rarely initiated speech. The school allowed me to remain in the classroom as a general ‘helper’ and to interpret. My younger son made the switch very rapidly and, like many ex-pat parents I was shocked to discover, after about a year, that he had almost entirely forgotten how to speak Japanese. Feeling guilty about this, I attempted to go back to speaking Japanese at home; however, the language was too bound up

Introduction

27

with negative experiences for me and I found this very difficult to maintain, although we made visits to Japan and their father regularly visited us in England. As a result, my younger son became virtually monolingual in English; his brother, however, retained a certain ability in Japanese of a rather childish kind. As they grew older and more aware of their linguistic position vis-à-vis Japanese they felt this as a loss and blamed me for it; it was not until they were adults themselves that they came to appreciate more fully the circumstances that had led to our move to England. Both boys have made attempts to re-learn, or improve, their Japanese language ability, the younger enrolling in Japanese language classes and making an effort to acquire a reading knowledge as well. While I did not maintain a bilingual household, I did consciously attempt to retain cultural elements of their Japanese background for my children: food, customs such as decorating the house with Japanese-style flower arrangements and leaving shoes at the entrance – the word for this ‘shoe-off place’– being retained by us in Japanese. After their father arrived with complete sets of armour and bamboo swords for them, I found a kendo club. They both found great satisfaction in following the rituals of the sport. Dealing with racism had always been a factor; Japanese youngsters had taunted them with cries of ‘Oi, America-boy!’ As they reached the ages of ten and seven, they had to deal with mercifully low levels of harassment. The limited vocabularies of local little bullies mystified them: ‘Oy, Paki!’ His older brother, always bigger and stronger, protected the younger, and seemingly also hid some of this aggravation from me. A slight American accent and a few vocabulary items my elder son had picked up from me and from his international school soon faded and he studiously took on dialect heard from local boys. I was amused to hear him applying new rules systematically but sometimes getting things wrong; for example, changing an intervocalic /t/ to glottal stop between words so that ‘me too’ became /mi:ʔu:/. Told that if he wanted to talk ‘rough’ then it was ‘me-n-all’, he immediately turned to his friend/native speaker informant for confirmation. It showed that he was very aware of this type of language factor. Now, I speak English with my grownup sons, occasionally dropping in a few items in Japanese, such as names of foods. On the infrequent occasions when their father or step-brother is also present, we switch to a mix of mainly Japanese with translations where required.

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Cultural Memory of Language

1.8.3 Conclusions It will be seen that my life experience, both professional and private, is close but tangential to the main concern of the current research. I understand what it feels like to be a migrant, a foreigner. I have observed at close hand people struggling with challenges to personal identity in the face of significant cultural upheaval. I have attempted and also helped others in the attempt to rapidly take on a foreign language and culture in stressful circumstances. I have observed the effect of language attrition and regaining on my own children, but I have not been in their position or the position of participants in this research, myself. I found that I was personally more attuned to that of my participants’ parents; I was sympathetic to Marie’s mother, who was ordered not to speak her language to her children; I could understand the sudden panic and futile efforts of Habeeba’s mother when she realized that her daughter was growing up unaware of cultural expectations that would be loaded on her. I understand their protectiveness, concern and self-sacrifice. I have not taken up feminist arguments; however, the foreign wife, or stay-at-home mother, who does not speak a majority language as L1, typically finds that it is her L1 that is subsumed. This perspective is examined by Toshie Okita (2002) in her book entitled Invisible Work – the ‘work’ of mothers who often feel they are themselves becoming invisible.

1.9 Summary This research was undertaken as an enquiry into a language phenomenon: the conundrum of non-speakers of a language (PL1) nevertheless feeling that they have a personally important connection with it that goes beyond a nostalgic wishful thinking or fashionable, multicultural lifestyle choice. As neither the degree of ability to use PL1, its relative acquisition and attrition, nor the mechanisms and processes by which shift to a majority community language took place is the focus here, a qualitative analysis from the perspective of cultural memory studies was adopted in order to explore the wider and more subtle ‘interplay of present and past’ operative in the participants’ family histories via interpretation of data gathered in the course of informal interviews. I hold that

Introduction

29

the ‘private’ memory of unique individuals, submitted to the close reading of a systematic qualitative analysis, is capable of providing, or at least facilitating, more generalizable insight into the migrant experience of language shift. Over the course of the interviews it was found that, alongside negative experiences of inability to use PL1, participants reported some points at which they experienced, and/or still experience, genuine contact with PL1. It is suggested that such phenomena demonstrate language as imbricate with other factors in communication, part of the ‘ecosocial system’ proposed by researchers in the field of distributed cognition. Recognition of this wider psychosocial inclusion is felt to be a factor that may help to counterbalance negative perceptions and self-perceptions, and to aid in understanding the lived experience of language shift. The quotation that began this introduction was selected to illustrate an attitude that seems common among people with migrant backgrounds. ‘I myself was never any good at languages’, has something of an excuse about it. It recalls an attitude frequently met with in the United Kingdom, where it carries the unattractive connotation that ‘being good at languages’ is something typical of ‘foreigners’ – by definition inferior beings. Lieberson’s elaboration, the risible attempts of the latest wave of immigrants to Brooklyn to speak English, reveals aspects of the stark severity of the immigrant experience. Effectively losing the PL1 language link between parent and child is one of these aspects.

2

Exploring the Background 2.1 Introduction As noted in the introduction, this book aims at an interdisciplinary perspective. HoC 2, discipline-specific knowledge, consults literature from six main interrelated and occasionally overlapping areas. As none of these, to my current knowledge, have directly addressed the specific question of the effect on the second, or subsequent, immigrant generations of not speaking their parents’ first languages, the interdisciplinarity adopted here is, as it were, at one remove from that envisioned by Charaudeau outlined in Chapter 1. However, there is identifiable common ground among them on areas that form the context for this book. In order to restrict the project to a manageable size, this review concentrates only on points of direct concern to the research question. The six disciplinary areas elected are language attrition studies, sociology, sociolinguistics, psychology and psychosocial studies, cultural memory studies and distributed cognition/language. Section 2.1 briefly considers some of the background to this relatively new study area, and the type of methodology it prefers. In this section, notionally related areas, language contact and bilingualism are discussed, and the section ends with a look at recent work on linguistic relativity. Section 2.2 concentrates on language and the identity of the group. Joshua Fishman is, of course, the most prominent scholar from a linguistics point of view; the section also draws on works of sociologists such as Paul Gilroy to examine political aspects and racist overtones. Section 2.3, psychology and psychosocial studies, attempts to gain insight on language as a factor in personal identity. Essentially, this section gives an overview of recent thinking in these areas from a non-expert perspective and defines points that may be applicable here. Section 2.4 outlines cultural memory studies and defines it as an umbrella category, a perspective

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from which to make connections between apparently disparate areas of social sciences, life sciences and the humanities. Section 2.5 attempts to define the rapidly evolving area of distributed cognition and explains its application to aspects of my own work. Sections 2.3 and 2.4 are provided with their own brief summaries, the chapter ends with a general summary.

2.1.1 Language attrition studies, language contact and bilingualism Initial interest in language attrition, as reflected in the 1982 volume of collected essays The Loss of Language Skills (Lambert & Freed, 1982), seems to have been focussed on L2 attrition and practical issues surrounding the time and money wasted when hard-won skills are forgotten; also, on supposed mechanisms by which this takes place and methods for their research. In the 1990s, with the work of Kees de Bot, and 2000s, with that of Monika Schmid and others, attention turned to L1 attrition in contexts of migration, language contact and second language acquisition. Disambiguation of processes of acquisition and attrition for first and second languages proved difficult. Schmid acknowledges that there is still disagreement on some basic questions; whether a first language can indeed be forgotten, whether L1, or early childhood, acquisition is qualitatively different from later language acquisition, subject to different brain processes or whether there is a change in processes of acquisition around puberty (Pallier, 2007; Schmid et al., in press). Questions remain around all of these issues; however, as quoted earlier, the co-occurrence of language acquisition and other important cognitive developments stands out as a uniquely important factor (Schmid et al., in press). Also, ‘The only external factor that has been shown to have an indisputable and comparatively straightforward impact on language attrition is age of onset’ (Schmid et al., in press). Language attrition researchers have long been aware of the complexities of studying this phenomenon: (Andersen, 1982; Schmid, 2002, 2004). Problems, from agreeing on definitions, research design, data collection instruments and selection of participants, through to the interpretation of results, continue to complicate research. Schmid, writing in 2004, captured the tone of debate over fundamental issues: It is symptomatic that in 1998, Kees de Bot pointed out in exasperation – and doubtlessly not for the first time – that he and Bert Weltens were the two only

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‘knights’ in pursuit of the shining goal of terminological distinction between Shift (intergenerational) and Attrition (intragenerational) as hyponyms of the more general Loss. (Schmid, 2004, pp. 3, 4)

Disagreement over the appropriateness and scope of meaning of the word ‘loss’ has continued; see for example, David Block ‘On the appropriateness of the metaphor of LOSS’ (Block, 2008), which is discussed under the heading of sociolinguistics, later in the chapter. Since Monika Schmid’s 2004 outline of a ‘new blueprint’ for research, which called for the development of a common research design, taking in theoretical positions and societal relevance, the field has continued to expand, particularly in the direction of language and the biomechanics and socio-mechanics of cognition (Köpke, 2007; Schmid et al., in press). Language attrition studies have also examined the phenomenon of L1 attrition from the perspective of the language features retained. Schmid notes that changes to a well-established L1 are surprisingly ‘minimal and localized’ (Schmid, 2010, p. 2), with grammatical structure being a particularly stable element and vocabulary more vulnerable (Schmid, 2010, p. 2). The potential recovery of attrited language skills has also attracted attention. Rosalie Footnick identifies three types of attrition: abnormal, due to pathological causes; forgotten, or in the process of being forgotten; and ‘hidden’, where an L1 seems to have been erased, under conditions of stress, but is in fact only ‘inaccessible’ and potentially susceptible to recovery via hypnotherapy (Footnick, 2007). Results of this pilot study, involving a single participant, were equivocal; the individual who had had regular passive exposure to PL1 quickly regained normal comprehension. However, Footnick suggests that The results of this study indicate that it is possible for memory traces of a lost language to remain in the brain although that language can be inaccessible to the speaker. Perhaps for the neural connections to still remain in the brain, a necessary condition is that there is some passive exposure to the HL [hidden language] during the time when that language is not spoken, which was the case with our participant. (Footnick, 2007, p. 180)

On the topic of passive exposure to PL1, an extensive study by Au et al. compared people who had ‘overheard’ a language in childhood with native

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speakers and L2 learners. This study found that when the subjects attempted to (re)learn the ‘overheard’ language, while there was little or no difference between ‘childhood overhearers’ and L2 learners in areas of grammar and vocabulary, there was significant positive impact on the ability to produce a native-like pronunciation (Au et al., 2002). Attempts have been made to observe effects of L1 acquisition, attrition and retention at the level of neurological function, in order to prove or disprove the theory that first language acquisition produces visible/measurable changes in neurophysiology not duplicated by later L2 acquisition. Pallier (2007) cites his 2003 study of Koreans who had been adopted into French families at an early age. Individuals who had been adopted ‘between ages of 3+10 showed absolutely no signs (fMRI) of having retained any ability in L1’. So the fixed neural connections theory is challenged here. Or, possibly irreversible changes can occur after ten years of age or ‘the paradigms used by Pallier et al. (2003) lacked sensitivity’ (Pallier, 2007, p. 162). Pallier’s two caveats indicate the order of complexity involved in this type of research. Barbara Köpke’s ‘Language attrition at the crossroads of brain, mind and society’ (2007) distinguishes ‘biological’ from ‘cognitive’ aspects of acquisition/attrition. The former includes ‘emotional implications’, the latter, memory functions; these are contrasted with ‘external factors’ such as cultural attitudes. Köpke acknowledges that these may be overlapping categories; the point is taken up in the discussion of distributed cognition, later in the chapter. It seems to be the case that ‘biological’ functions are taken, here, to be more reliably, empirically observable than others, yet the problems inherent in devising tests that can be administered to a subject in an MRI scanner and then interpreting the results remain significant. Schmid et al., pointing to methodological difficulties in testing for the extent of retained L1 capability, recommend that ‘The best-suited data for the analysis of language attrition and incomplete acquisition … may … be free spoken data, which allow every speaker to employ the full range of her language knowledge’ (Schmid et al., in press). This ‘free-spoken data’, which in Schmid’s research is gathered via interview (i.e. Schmid, 2002), is then transcribed and the elements under scrutiny identified, isolated and coded for submission to quantitative analysis. Schmid et al. acknowledge the complexity of factors, the many possible elements of life experience that may be operative

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in processes of language attrition and the need to account theoretically for them; they declare Dynamic Systems Theory, developed in mathematics, to be the most capable of doing so (Schmid et al., in press). Kees de Bot (2007, p. 59) notes that language is a dynamic system in which multiple variables change over time, and that in this they are similar to weather systems, for which DST is also employed. From a wider perspective, de Bot identifies two main questions to be addressed in language attrition research; the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ (de Bot, 2007). He answers the latter by appealing to the concept of ‘major life events’ defined by lifespan developmental psychology, positing a category of ‘language-related major life events’, which includes, but is by no means limited to, migration. The question of how language abilities change is far more difficult to answer; De Bot identifies eight major language systems in this context, which include sensitive dependence on initial conditions, complete interconnectedness, change and development through internal reorganization and interaction with environment – a ‘self-reorganizing’ system which contains an element of ‘chaos’ in its technical definition of being unpredictable from previous states, and at the same time ‘iterative’; the present state depends on the previous one (de Bot, 2007, pp. 59, 60). Here de Bot, and language attrition research more generally, is concerned with aspects of language as a system, analysable in terms familiar to general linguistics and more abstract systems theory. He admits that ‘the complexity of language in use is such that we may never be able to model it in all its details’ (de Bot, 2007,p. 66). Clearly, this type of methodology is inapplicable where the data are not capable of reduction to quantitative expression. For example, data involved in the definition of what constitutes an L1; at what point, both in terms of extent of language acquired and age, does the early childhood acquisition become complete enough to be described as the L1? Or, conversely, remain incomplete enough to require some language other than the parents’ L1 to be considered the individual’s first language? Could the ‘overhearers’ in the Au et al. (2002) study be regarded as incomplete L1 acquirers? Anna Verschik, in a study of the use of Yiddish in Estonia, identifies multiple possible ways by which the term ‘mother tongue’ may be delineated; by origin, the language one learned first; through self-identification or identification by others; according to competence, which may contradict the preceding

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category; and/or by function, the language most used. She even suggests that, due to changing self-identifications, ‘at different points a person can have different mother tongues’ (Verschik, 2002, p. 38). If, perhaps, the term L1 is substituted for the emotive ‘mother tongue’, this may be a useful way to look at extremely complex situations of language contact and change. In contrast to the turn to complex mathematics (DST) as an analytic framework, Verschik, working with language contact more generally rather than specific attrition, suggests a descriptive definition: the ‘linguistic biography’. This would be an analogous concept to a project run by the Estonian Literary Museum, in which members of the public can write in to contribute their personal biographies. These will then build up a picture of the recent history of Estonia; this is reminiscent of oral history, or ‘history from below’ projects elsewhere. The linguistic biography would trace lifelong changes in language use, ‘where multiple language choice is possible’ (Verschik, 2002, p. 38). It is evident that only Verschik’s first category for definition, by ‘origin’, would fit the ‘language that was used in parent-child interactions’ (Schmid et al.) quoted earlier; then again, this would not of absolute necessity constitute the parents’ actual L1 (See Fishman, below). Verschik’s choice of definition via ‘linguistic biography’, a narrative definition, foregrounds the influence of lived experience; made up, perhaps, of more chaotic and more dynamic variables even than the weather. In summary, L1 attrition studies concentrate, although not exclusively, on language change in individuals who had an established L1 but who, due to some ‘major life event’ that probably occurred before age ten to twelve, have lost the ability to use the language to a greater or lesser extent and subsequently gained ‘native’, or near native, fluency in another language. The multiplicity of possible influencing factors and variety of individual experience make the subject difficult to approach from both theoretical and methodological standpoints. Language, in its acquisition and attrition, is regarded from the perspective of being a system and, as such, analysable in quantitative terms that may be framed by DST.

2.1.2 Studies in bilingualism The real-world contexts in which language attrition may occur can also give rise to bilingualism,1 and studies inevitably overlap. Literature in this area is

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voluminous; however, three main areas may be identified – description of the use and distribution of languages among given populations or by individuals; fostering and maintaining bilingualism in children, and disproving still surprisingly prevalent notions that being bilingual might be harmful to the child in some way; and the examination of ways in which bilingual language use can reveal something of cognitive processes more generally. Families that decide to bring their children up speaking more than one language do so with a variety of motives. Pavlenko cites promotion of academic and economic success as well as transmission of heritage and crossgenerational communication as common themes. Bringing up children as bilinguals in order to maintain a minority community language is, according to Pavlenko, more a concern for lower-middle and working-class immigrant families. ‘Those who decide against or fail to transmit their native language, talk about the challenges involved … These parents may also display negative attitudes towards the country of origin and/or its child-rearing traditions’ (Pavlenko, 2003, p. 181, emphasis added). Immigrant parents often turn to supplementary language schools to help maintain L1. The children often find this to be a stultifying experience (Block, 2008; Li, 2011). Of course, the decision to admit the child into a language school comes from the parents. Anne-Marie Fortier, in her study of Italian communities in London, claims that ‘[such] classes are presented as having as important symbolic function for the parents themselves … by offering a substitute to the fading dream of returning’ (Fortier, 2000, p. 84). Other parents can become persuaded that their L1 will not be advantageous to their school-aged child. Toshie Okita reports on her research with Japanese women married to Anglophone men; when children started school, ‘it became clear that they [Japanese mothers] were afraid of, and sought to avoid, disadvantages that the child might have as a result of them speaking Japanese to their child’ (Okita, 2002, p. 163). As a result, processes of attrition set in. A similar view is expressed by a British-Pakistani mother in Jean Mills’ 2004 study. This mother, anxious to prepare her children for school, had begun to speak English to them at home; ‘And then what happened was they did go into school, came back, knew they could speak to mum [and dad] … in English and our language started to … it’s like … it’s bits’ (Mills, 2004, p. 185). It is significant that the Okita and Mills studies concerned non-European languages and physically identifiable

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ethnic minority families resident in England; such people often feel themselves to be at a disadvantage and subject to a level of racist discrimination. There is also a possible feminist angle here. It is frequently the case that immigrant wives and mothers hold traditionally subaltern positions within the family, interact less with the host community and either do not work outside the home or take low-status part-time jobs. As a result, their L2 language skills tend to be less expert than those of their husbands, and Okita’s mothers were ‘foreign wives’ whose husbands were not fluent in Japanese. It is quite easy for children anxious to establish themselves with majority community classmates to see mother and her language as unimportant, or at worst an embarrassment. Studies have determined that multilingualism can confer wide-ranging benefits on the individual, from superior performance in education to diminishing the effects of dementia. Edwards maintains that ‘Bilingual competence is not an impossibility for anyone of normal intelligence’ (Edwards, 2010, p. 25). When positive effects of multilingualism are recognized, and multiculturalism is seen as desirable, or fashionable, the negative connotations for the individual who feels he/she had failed to become bilingual deepen. As already mentioned, bilingual language use and also patterns of language acquisition and attrition, for either L1 or L2, can reveal something of cognitive processes more generally. Bilingualism is tantalizing for behavioural and social scientists because of the close relation between human experience and the language we use to negotiate, interpret, and direct it. (Schrauf et al., 2003, pp. 221, 222)

2.1.3 Linguistic relativity The interactions of language, thought and culture, which are highlighted both in bilingual individuals and in cases where L1 attrition, or effective shift, has taken place, introduce considerations concerning linguistic relativity. Rejected in the mid-twentieth century, Sapir’s basic statement of his theory The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. (Sapir, 1963 (1929), p. 162)

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is well known and has since been re-examined from several perspectives that seek to put it on a secure empirical footing. Paul Friedrich also draws our attention to Sapir’s neglected following paragraph: The understanding of a simple poem, for instance, involves not merely an understanding of single words in their average significance, but a full comprehension of the whole life of the community as it is mirrored in the words, or as it is suggested by their overtones. (Sapir, 1963 (1929), p. 162)

‘Here and elsewhere the author suggests that poems and poetic language provide the strongest case for linguistic relativity’ (Friedrich, 1986, p. 43). Sapir’s reference to ‘the whole life of the community’ resonates with calls from language attrition studies to take the widest possible range of context into account and forms the basis of justification for the current study to consider as relevant those works reviewed below as forming the third horizon of comparison. John Lucy, in a cool reappraisal of the field, noted that issues of historical interest in ‘the relevance of language to human sociality and intellect’ are still current (Lucy, 1997, p. 293). Among barriers to further research, Lucy lists the interdisciplinary nature of the problem, a key theme, and the unpalatability of anything that smacks of determinism for issues surrounding ethics and individual freedom of thought. He warns that ‘Anyone working on the relativity problem must be prepared to face these complicated issues and the passions and prejudices they arouse’ (Lucy, 1997, p. 294), considerations which also arise in the psychological definitions of self, discussed later. Research carried out by Marian and Neisser (2000), Pavlenko (2003) and Slobin (2003) is of particular interest here. The first two studies concern episodic memory in bilinguals, the third looks at ‘the cognitive processes that are brought to bear, online, in the course of using language’ (Slobin, 2003, p. 1). Marian and Neisser explored autobiographical memories of Russian/ English bilinguals who had immigrated to the United States as young teenagers and who at the time of the study were in their early twenties. It was shown that participants recalled more autobiographical details when interviewed in the language that corresponded to that used when events had taken place. A subsidiary finding showed that participants recalled fewer memories from

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the time around immigration. Marian and Neisser speculate that this may demonstrate Bartlett’s 1932 framework or schemata theory of establishing and recalling memory; the upheavals of immigration interrupted the process of forming memories. They conclude that ‘In general, information that is acquired in a certain linguistic ambience is likely to become more accessible when recall takes place in that same ambience. Moreover, changes in the linguistic environment may also lead to an altered self-concept and other changes in cognitive structure’ (Marian & Neisser, 2000, p. 367). Pavlenko’s 2003 paper, ‘Eyewitness Memory in Late Bilinguals’, notes previous experiments carried out with monolinguals which demonstrate the effects of different question forms in eliciting varying accounts of witnessed events, and explores the suggestion ‘that speakers of different languages may draw on different, language and culture specific interpretive frames in recalling the same visual stimuli’ (Pavlenko, 2003, p. 261). Two groups of Russian/English bilinguals who had acquired English in their early teens were described; one group had been exposed to the English language but not to the cultures of English-speaking countries, the other group had lived in America for an extended period. The concept of privacy, or private space, is not lexically encoded in Russian. Pavlenko observed clear differences in the ways the two groups described a short film sequence depicting what could be interpreted as violation of a woman’s personal space by a man in a public setting. None of the first group spontaneously commented on the man’s proximity to the woman. ‘The findings of the study suggest then that eyewitness accounts by different categories of bilinguals may be significantly different, depending on the context of [language] acquisition and degree of exposure to the second culture’ (Pavlenko, 2003, p. 277). The Marian and Neisser study focuses on language as a variable in auto biographical recall; in the Pavlenko study, language as bearer of cultural concepts is demonstrated. Both deal with memory: recall after the fact. Slobin examines pragmatic factors which must be noticed as an event happens in order then to verbalize it: ‘I wish to argue that serious study of language in use points to pervasive effects of language on selective attention and memory for particular event characteristics’ (Slobin, 2003, p. 2). Slobin terms this ‘thinking for speaking’. His main example concerns description of motion events. He observes that otherwise dissimilar languages fall into

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two categories: those that describe manner of motion via the main verb (s-languages) and those that encode manner in some other way (v-languages): The dog ran into the house. [s] Le chien est entré dans la maison en courant. [v] The dog entered the house by running. (Slobin, 2003, p. 4)

Slobin goes on to define ‘ripple effects’ expanding from these factors, including the fact that s-languages will have more verbs that encode manner of motion, they will be acquired at earlier stages and associated with rich mental imagery. In order to make use of these language resources, a speaker must pay attention to this particular feature of reality, a sort of habitual mental posture. To demonstrate this, Spanish and English speakers read a passage from a novel – the English a direct translation from Spanish – and were then asked to describe the protagonist’s manner of movement. English speaking informants added significant detail to the account which had been implied, but not stated, in the original (Slobin, 2003). These effects operate ‘online’ while producing an utterance, and also later, when reporting. When you report an encounter with a friend in a language with gender pronouns, you must have remembered the sex of the friend. But, of course, you would remember that aspect regardless of your language. However, when reporting an encounter in English, you may not remember if your friend approached you from the south, or in the direction of a distant landmark …, as you would if you spoke a language that required this sort of absolute orientation … . Here we have evidence for the classical Whorfian quest for covert effects of language on nonverbal cognition. (Slobin, 2003, p. 15)

I cite these three studies in the first place as indications of relevant areas of research now current in linguistic relativity, and also to point out that these studies rely on empirical observation as ‘hard’ as is possible in the social sciences. Any would be repeatable, yet they point to subtle effects at both individual and societal levels. Questions of linguistic relativity will be taken up in the review of literature in the fields of distributed cognition and distributed language, later. Research approaches that Lucy (1997) terms ‘behaviour centred’ can overlap different linguistic subfields. For example, the subjects of Pavlenko’s

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2003 study react to observed social behaviour; her 2004 paper ‘Stop doing that! Ia komu skazala: Language choice and emotions in parent-child relations’ which is based on her own experience as a mother, could be termed an autoethnography of language behaviour. Li (2011) takes a pragmatic approach to language behaviour observed in authentic (i.e. not experimentally contrived) settings, among three Chinese/ British university students living in London. The focus here is particularly on positive aspects of bilingualism and its possibilities for constructing not only individual identity but also a sociocultural ‘space’, a ‘sense of connectedness rather than actual ties’ within which the students lived and interacted, switching, and mixing, languages with great freedom and creativity’ (Li, 2011, p. 1222). The subjects of this study did not see their basic identity as an either/ or proposition, but as something of a continuum in which they behaved and felt more Chinese, or more British, according to the frames of reference of their interlocutors. Or, indeed, that there was no need to identify at all, ‘When I’m in a club or something I don’t care if I look Chinese. I just want to have a good time’ (Li, 2011, p. 1231). Asked to identify one or the other country as ‘home’, the boundless optimism of youth was evident in their replies; ‘Wherever we are, we belong to that place. But only for now’ (Li, 2011, p. 1233). This research approach, which combines observation with informal questioning, invests a confidence in the informants’ understanding of their own behaviour reminiscent of that necessary to put Verschik’s proposal of ‘language biography’ into practice. These are qualitative approaches that require the researcher to relinquish some control in data gathering and exercise caution in interpretation.

2.2 Sociolinguistics and sociology Mapping the processes of language shift, defined as intergenerational, and describing the effects of minority language use are major themes in Sociolinguistics that are imbricate with wider themes in Sociology; migration, racism and community relations, group identity and individual identity. Issues surrounding the latter merge with psychological concerns, which will be considered separately.

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2.2.1 Joshua Fishman Joshua Fishman has been a major contributor to scholarship in this area over many years. In 1986 he outlined this typology of interactions between ‘two separate monolingual ethnolinguistic collectivities … viewed from a perspective of more than three generations’, where A equals an indigenous and B an intrusive language: Resolution 1: B Resolution 2: B Resolution 3: B

A=A A=B A= B + A (Fishman, 1986, p. 57)

This arid schematic does not describe the variety of complex social circumstances that always surround issues of language shift; for example, the relative power and influence of language B as either the language of conquest and colonialism or of a relatively powerless migrant group and the degree of entrenchment, prestige or legal protection enjoyed by language A or that Resolution 2 is typically accompanied by ‘extremely great dislocation: the dislocation of conquest, of genocide, of massive population resettlement’ (Fishman, 1986, p. 66). Fishman also points out that Resolution 1 is the pattern seen in nineteenth-century immigration to North America, the centre of much of the research done in this area during the latter half of the twentieth century. The informants consulted in the present research, too, find themselves at some point in the process of Resolution 1. In this process, newly arrived speakers of language B acquire language A in order to access the rewards of education and employment within the A-speaking community. Speakers of B who master A also acquire status as leaders within the B-speaking community and B becomes a marker of dependency. This leads to increased use of A not only outside but also within the B community and then the home. ‘Finally Bs learn A as a mother tongue from B-mother-tongue parents who have become A speakers’ (Fishman, 1986, p. 60). At this stage, the ability to speak language B is no longer a necessity as a marker of belonging to the B community, ‘rather than merely as a metaphorical, dispensible, negligible, quaint, humorous outdated indicator of B-ness’ (Fishman, 1986, p. 61). The terms in this list that could be considered pejorative may be powerful factors in the day-to-day experience of a member of a minority group, as illustrated in Stanley Lieberson’s recollection

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of ‘Brooklyn and English spoken there’ (Lieberson, 1981, p. 378) referred to in Chapter 1. This view from the 1980s is, arguably, complicated by twenty-first century developments in economic migration and Internet communications; a member of a B community today has greatly increased opportunities for contact with the country/language of origin. Also, appreciation for the advantages to society at large of cultural and language diversity has developed in the intervening years. Language is, of course, far from the only possible marker of difference between a minority and a majority community; religious, cultural and visible physical markers of difference can also be major factors that identify membership of a minority group and affect the success, or lack of it, of the group and/or individual in the majority community environment. The immigrant’s quest for success is frequently undertaken in the face of great resistance from the established or majority community, to the point of violent opposition. Current laws in many Western countries banning discrimination on the grounds of race or ethnic origin bear testimony to the ongoing severity of the immigrant experience.

2.2.2 Language and racism Language and racism have a long-standing relationship. Writing in 1934, Walter Benjamin quipped, ‘Racial fanatics are rarely found among mathematicians’ (Benjamin, 2005 (1934), p. 80). The connection is hardly new; William Dwight Witney, who as a professor at Yale University exerted a strong influence on language studies in America throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, provides the classic example. As, here in America, a single cultivated nation, of homogenous speech, is taking the place of congeries of wild tribes, with their host of discordant tongues, so, on a smaller scale, is it everywhere else: civilization and the conditions it makes are gaining upon barbarism and its isolating influences. (Seuren, 1998, p. 180)

This attitude, of course, did much to form the background against which scholars like Boas and Sapir first worked. Linguistic racism probably found its most extreme expression in Nazism: ‘The Nordic race alone can emit sounds of

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untroubled clearness, whereas among non-Nordics the pronunciation is … like noises made by animals’ (Herman Gauch, quoted in Fishman, 1986, p. 11). Lest such puerile claims from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seem very distant from our modern multicultural society, Kwame Kwei Armah, the British actor and playwright, provides a salutary corrective to complacency. During his appearance on the BBC Radio 4 program Desert Island Discs, 15 May 2011,2 he reported how, when he was a child in school in 1970s London, teachers commonly told him he could not speak ‘properly’ because the black mouth was not fashioned to speak English – the tongue too thick and so on. Witney’s view of multiple tribal languages as ‘isolating’ finds, in my opinion, an echo in recent demands that immigrants be required to become fluent in their host countries’ languages in the name of integration and community cohesion. Community cohesion is, quite obviously, no more a bad thing than celebration of ethnic identity, yet the positive and negative aspects seem always to be held in tension: two sides of the same coin. Edwards excoriates the attitude of Anglophone communities in general towards minority community languages; they ‘have often adopted a posture characterised by a noisome mixture of arrogance, fear and distain … Not only do languages other than English appear unnecessary, their use can be seen as downright unpatriotic!’ (Edwards, 2010, p. 22). This was certainly a theme in 2012 US presidential electioneering and is promoted by the group behind the Web site englishfirst.org. Fishman finds discrimination in terms of ethnicity to be on the same scale as racism but less extreme and more amenable to ‘a kind of self-correction’ racism the more grandiose, requiring ‘the constructs of superior races, dominant stocks, and master peoples’ (Fishman, 1986, p. 11). He observes that for many, the word ‘ethnicity’ carries connotations of ‘the unwashed (and unwanted) of the world, to phenomena that are really not fully civilised’ (Fishman, 1986, p. 8).

2.2.3 Politics and identity An example of that hopeless entanglement of language, race and ethnicity, and broader issues that Lieberson referred to is provided by responses to the 2001 ‘Oldham Riots’ in England. M.P. Ann Cryer’s speech to Parliament,

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forensically examined by Adrian Blackledge (2004), pointed to insufficient English language ability among the British-Asian population as a key cause of the disturbances. Paul Gilroy excoriates the ‘fantasy that obligatory language training will somehow solve their problems of belonging’ (Gilroy, 2005, p. 23). Personal responses to racism are many and varied, from attempts to assimilate into the dominant group to militant promotion of the group under attack. Perhaps questions of permanence and impermanence are the most salient here. Visible physical racial features are permanent, while literature and other cultural artefacts arguably may be lost, then recovered. Where primary enculturation has been effected through L1, links between language and culture are brought to the fore. Maintenance and promotion of minority community languages may serve to bolster group and individual identity and self-respect in the face of discriminatory attitudes. John Edwards declares that ‘the single most important aspect of human language – beyond its … instrumental and communicative function, lies in its relationship to group identity’ (Edwards, 2010, p. 3). Although language difference is not necessarily a factor in the identity of an ethnic group, Lieberson cites black/white race relations in the United States (Lieberson, 1981), where it is a factor it tends to be a deep-seated issue. Michael Clyne connects cultural background more generally to non-verbal aspects of L1 and the possible carry-over of these into communication in L2. While, in a multicultural society, there will be convergence towards the communication patterns of the dominant language, there will be people of vastly different cultural backgrounds communicating in that [majority community] language as a lingua franca. Their discourse structures – length of turns in conversation, ways of maintaining and appropriating turns, tendencies toward overlapping speech, choice of complex interaction sequences … are all strongly influenced by their cultural value systems. (Clyne, 1997, p. 314)

These discourse structures are likely to remain somatic, subconscious components unless the language user’s attention is specifically drawn to them. Tabouret-Keller stresses the corporality of language-sound production, due to its close physical associations with the essential bodily functions of breathing and eating ‘easily confused with life itself ’ (Tabouret-Keller, 1997, p. 317); here one source for the emotive force of language becomes apparent.

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Fishman identifies another, the quasi-religious status often afforded a language, in which ‘the language itself is recognized as having a spirit or soul of its own’ (Fishman, 1997b, p. 13) and points out that once a language has been identified as ‘good and holy’, its loss or ‘abandonment’ becomes associated with ‘all that is base and reprehensible’ (Fishman, 1997b, p. 20). Thus, language can become a potent political factor felt as a physical and religious reality. Such attitudes cannot but impinge strongly upon the identifiable, or self-identified, member of a group who is not able to speak the language and may be productive of extreme reaction. Paul Gilroy notes that inability to speak Arabic was a factor in the decision of Zacarias Moussaoui to join the terrorist group behind the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington (Gilroy, 2004), (Moussaoui &Bouquillat, 2003). Such antipathetic feelings and situations of violent confrontation, while all too common, are not the norm. Edwards points out that a degree of bi/ multilingualism, Fishman’s Resolution 3, is a fact for ‘the majority of the world’s population’(Edwards, 2010, p. 25). Paul Gilroy uses the term ‘conviviality’ to describe ‘the process of cohabitation that has made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s urban areas and in postcolonial cities elsewhere’ (Gilroy, 2004, p. xv). Avtar Brah rejects the notion that young, second generation, British Asians suffer stress, identity conflict and disorientation due to an existence between two cultures or to culture clash. ‘There is no a priori reason to suppose that cultural encounters will invariably entail conflict … cultural symbiosis, improvisation, and innovation may emerge as a far more probable scenario’ (Brah, 1996, p. 41). This is the context in which the teenagers in Ben Rampton’s study experimented with crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries (Rampton, 1995), and against which David Block questions the use of the metaphor of loss to describe language shift (Block, 2008). It may be argued that public attitudes changed post September 2001. Maintenance of an L1 minority language and/or promotion of multilingualism from childhood may occur in the context of a general positive perception of multiculturalism/multilingualism. On the other hand, negative experiences or perceptions, a reaction against racism in the host community or the disappointment of thwarted hopes of social mobility, seem to be operative in attempts to reverse processes of language shift. ‘A disappointed proto-elite turns inward and in finding its own roots it revives them’ (Fishman, 1986,

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p. 64). According to Fishman, revival of a language associated with an ethnic identity holds a ‘promise to comfort the alienated and the twice-alienated’ (Fishman, 1986, p. 65). Edwards, in stressing the importance of taking the role of language as a factor in group identity into consideration, warns that ‘work here will take us into heavily mined territories of emotion’ (Edwards, 2010, p. 72), but points out that ‘Language maintenance is usually a parlous enterprise’ (Edwards, 2010, p. 33), given that associated social pressures have usually completed a de facto shift by the time need for effort to maintain a language is generally noticed. Edwards mainly considers the status of minority languages in their native geopolitical circumstances, whereas Fishman is more concerned with the languages of immigrant groups; it is important to recognize this distinction. David Block asks if language is the most important marker of identity, implying that the answer is ‘no’ (Block, 2008). Edwards states that marking group identity is the most important function of language after communication (Edwards, 2010). These two positions are not necessarily incompatible. In his essay ‘On the Appropriateness of the Metaphor of LOSS’, David Block seems to conflate a natural science metaphor that identifies the process of language shift, and language maintenance movements, with current concerns over loss of biological diversity, together with the highly emotive campaigning that usually accompanies both, with the experiences of four distinct categories language user. These are as follows: 1. The first generation (adult) immigrant who literally loses contact with ‘home’ and all that it implies, although he does not refer to first language attrition as such, 2. The member of a minority geopolitical group, such as Catalans or Bretons, whose more politically powerful neighbours exert strong influence to conform to the majority language, 3. Speakers of languages that are literally disappearing as only a handful of native speakers exist, and 4. Second generation immigrants who do not speak their parents’ first language. One can deplore, with Block, emotive terms such as ‘language death’, and agree, as Block does, with Pennycook that ‘Languages are not organisms … or static

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systems, but rather shifting changing cultural artefacts’ (Block, 2008, p. 192), while at the same time recognize that feelings of personal loss, melancholy or nostalgia, directed toward L1, may well be present at times in the response of the four categories of experience detailed earlier, and furthermore, these feelings can arise spontaneously, not necessarily in response to political or ideological urging. Block concentrates on the experience of the second generation immigrant, citing studies of secondary school students and slightly older teens of S. E. Asian extraction, who did not display either strong emotional attachment or feelings of loss towards their parents’ first languages; languages that they could hardly use, even though the British educational establishment deemed them to be bilingual. These young people apparently frequently associated their parents’ first languages with irksome experiences of enforced attendance at ‘extra’ language classes or other cultural institutions, and with critical attitudes of older relatives: English, on the other hand, was the language of free communication among their peers. Block sees an academic elite misguidedly applying discourses surrounding concern for ecological diversity to language planning policies, and ascribing to young people feelings of investment in ‘mother tongue’, ‘home’ or ‘heritage’ languages that are simply not present. He closes by suggesting that ‘the view of languages as cultural repositories … was never representative of the feelings of the masses of people it was purported to be representative of ’ (Block, 2008, p. 202). This would seem to be the opposite of what Fishman and Edwards maintain, but perhaps confusion in the popular conception of what constitutes ‘culture’ comes into play, here. Returning to Block’s assertion that young, second generation immigrants do not experience feelings of loss with regard to their parents’ first languages. I not flatly contradict the finding; however, feelings often change over time, especially over the period from adolescence to middle age, encompassing completion of education, entering the workforce, marriage and children and the old age and death of one’s parents. The fact that the teenagers in the studies cited by Block mention language and religious classes and the unwelcome critical attitudes of older relatives alongside statements indicating a nonattachment to their parents’ first languages, may say more about the natural processes of adolescent maturation in general than the role of language use in identity formation. University students in the study by Li Wei cited earlier

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(Li, 2011), while only slightly older, having left the stage of obligatory language class attendance, are able to bring their later positive experience of using their ‘other’ languages, at varying levels of expertise, to bear in evaluating the reasons for the failure of the language classes to engender enthusiasm. Paul Gilroy, himself the mixed-race child of English and Guyanese – but English-speaking parents, speaks in strong terms of the pressures particular to the second generation experience. Writing about popular responses to the 2001 terrorist attacks and to the earlier Oldham riots, Gilroy identifies a ‘Powellite folk analysis’ (Gilroy, 2004, p. 122) in which terrorist action is held to be proof of a reversion to ‘alien cultural type’ and immigrants are seen as being in a ‘tragic and marginal position. Irrespective of where they were born, even their children and grandchildren will never really belong’ (Gilroy, 2004, p. 122). He describes an invidious double-bind for the second and third generations whose, ‘local sense of entitlement leaves them reluctant to make common cause against racism and xenophobia with more recently arrived refugees and asylum seekers. To do so would be to accede to the secondariness and marginality with which racism associates them’ (Gilroy, 2004, p. 123). This attenuated identity is present even in ordinary circumstances when no acute event puts it under scrutiny. The current study suggests that feelings of lost attachment to the first immigrant generation’s language may be similarly complex and attenuated. Ien Ang provides another example of the complex and far-reaching effects that ethnic and/or language background may have on the individual migrant. Her book, On Not Speaking Chinese (Ang, 2001) could be (less snappily) entitled ‘On how it feels not to be what you think I am – or am I?’ Ang is a quartermillennium removed from the ancestor who left China for Indonesia. A Chinese-heritage Indonesian community, called peranakan Chinese, retained its identity through physical appearance and family names but also through the attitudes of other communities, native Indonesian and Dutch colonialist, towards them. To an extent, this community was ‘imagined’ (Anderson, 2006) by others. Now, having been harried out of Indonesia in the upheavals that followed independence, some are re-imagining themselves in the context of the modern China. Ang, who now works in Australia, describes the involvement in this project of her own parents, resident in The Netherlands, who study China via films and television. ‘Whenever I visit them these days … I am assured of a new dose of audio-visual education in Chineseness’ (Ang, 2001, p. 31). Ang’s

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family left Indonesia when she was twelve and she likens the experience of learning a new language and taking on a new identity to that of Eva Hoffman (1989); something was lost in translation. Ang moved to Australia at the beginning of the 1990s, to pursue a distinguished academic career. On Not Speaking Chinese takes as a starting point Ang’s feelings on being invited to address (in English) a conference in Taiwan: ‘I couldn’t open my mouth in front of them without explaining’ (Ang, 2001, p. vii). She goes further, saying she felt ‘compelled to apologise’ (Ang, 2001, p. 30). Ang seems surprised by the strength and suddenness of these emotions. She also describes a one-day group visit to (mainland) China. The guide, Lan-lan, is confident in her identity as Chinese, ‘My pain [emphasis added] stemmed from my ambivalence; I refused to be lumped together with the [other] Westerners, but I couldn’t fully identify with Lan-lan either … . I said goodbye to Lan-lan and was hoping that she would say something personal to me, an acknowledgement of affinity of some sort, but she didn’t’ (Ang, 2001, p. 22). Ang recounts another experience of being negatively defined, when a Dutch leftist on asking if she spoke Chinese and receiving the negative answer, declared, ‘What a fake Chinese you are!’ (Ang, 2001, p. 30). The perceptions and expectations of these others not only impinge on Ang from without, they also affect and disrupt her sense of self. A description of cultural memory for any peranakan Chinese-heritage Indonesian diasporic community would necessarily feature lack of Chinese language, a ‘haunting’ presence (Gordon, 1997) as a central feature.

2.3 Psychology and psychosocial studies Focus on the language user as an individual, and on how the individual feels about language, demands attention to specialist insight into psychological factors. The non-specialist researcher faces two major difficulties. Firstly, ideas and terminology first developed in psychology and psychiatry have entered the popular lexicon to such an extent that we may feel ourselves familiar with the basic tenets of, say, Freudianism; however, popular notions are frequently misleading. Secondly, and more importantly, psychology is a dense and complex branch of medicine that is characterized by opposing schools of thought and strongly held opinion. It should, then, be approached

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with caution. Fortunately, there have been some notable attempts to explicate psychology and its insights for the non-specialist reader. Stephen Frosh’ book Feelings (Frosh, 2011), and Michael Billig’s historical review The Hidden Roots of Critical Psychology (Billig, 2008) were found useful in this respect. Billig outlines the divergent histories of modern cognitive and critical psychology, finding the roots of the former in the work of Locke, and those of the latter in that of Shaftesbury and Reid. Shaftesbury is characterized by Billig as a ‘pre-post-modern’ figure whose ideas on dialogicality – language as conversation – and the role of the social in forming the individual prefigure those developed in social constructionism and discursive psychology. As Billig puts it, ‘cognitive psychologists tend to look towards the functioning of the individual brain or mind’, whereas critical psychologists maintain that ‘We receive ideas from others. Thus, our ideas, even before they enter our minds … are constructed by the social processes of history’ (Billig, 2008, p. 2). Billig also traces the influence of Shaftesbury’s ideas, via the writing of Ernst Cassirer, on Bakhtin and then Vygotsky. Thus, elements of a common history and common ground of ideas across the social sciences can be established.

2.3.1 The self: The subject A factor of major interest to my research concerns notions of selfhood, how subjectivity is constructed and the relation of individual to collective in this respect; literature that addresses these topics has been selected, but this review cannot pretend to be comprehensive. Psychology concentrates on the individual and debate within psychology takes the nature of the individual self as a starting point. It is far beyond the scope of this book, and the expertise of this researcher, to go into any depth of consideration here, but some notion of the theoretical landscape is necessary. Two main schools of thought on what makes up the ‘self ’ are discernible: the Kleinian and the Lacanian. Klein accepts the existence an ‘unconscious’, unique to each individual, formed in infancy, and that is productive of subjectivity – a sense of self. The feature of the Lacanian view that is salient here is that it does not recognize such a Freudian-style individual possessed of an unconscious. The Lacanian conceives the individual’s sense of self as a dynamic construction of his/her reactions to factors that impinge upon him/

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her from without. In this, ‘constructivist’ conception, a narrative ‘story of a subject’s unconscious life’ cannot be told because, ‘there is no such subject’ (Frosh, 2008, p. 349). Claire Kramsch, summarizing some widely used vocabulary in this area, contrasts the subject, ‘consciously constructed against the backdrop of social and cultural forces’, with the self, ‘a psychological entity that is given to each human being at birth and is to be discovered, respected and maintained’ (Kramsch, 2009, p. 17). The ‘subject’ evolves over a lifetime, constructing serial ‘subject positions’ (Kramsch, 2009, p. 17). The element of consciousness in this construction provides for a degree of agentivity, or free will, which is eliminated in more radically constructivist schemes. Elsewhere, Kramsch summarizes the role assigned to language by Lacan, with reference to the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ of infant development. The realization of the split between self and other at the mirror stage occurs roughly at the same time as language emerges in the child. Language, Lacan argues, is as deceptive as the image in the mirror. It reflects reality but is not reality … Language belongs to the child who acquires it, and yet it was never hers to start with … Our mother tongue, says Lacan, is the language of the Other. (Kramsch, 1998, p. 95)

Theories of the given, imposed or constructed self/subject hold in common the possibility they ‘might offer convincing explanations of how the “out-there” gets “in-here” and vice versa’ (Frosh, 2008, p. 347). How, then, to conceive of a relation of individual to collective? Hollway contends that ‘The Lacanians’ celebration of permanent deconstruction does not sit well with the purposes of empirical research’ (Hollway, 2008, p. 390). It is hard to disagree; how does this extent of negation of one side of the individual/collective equation further investigation of ‘real-world’ situations? Further, ‘the current debate around postmodernism – including the Humanities – suggests that theoretical critique as a single strategy for knowledge production has exhausted its potential’ (p. 391).

2.3.2 Affect and narrative Theories labelled the ‘affective turn’ seek to admit something that the arid constructivist model excludes. ‘Affect’, or feelings, evidence of feelings and sympathy with the perceived feelings of others, are seen here as extra-linguistic

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and therefore not captured by ‘narrative’. Frosh quotes Clare Hemmings: ‘Theorists of affect […] argue that constructivist models leave out the residue or excess that is not socially produced, and that constitutes the very fabric of our being’ (Frosh, 2011, p. 26). Frosh imagines ‘the unhyphenated psychosocial’ using the metaphor of, ‘the Möbius strip: underside and topside, inside and out, flow together as one, and the choice of how to see them is purely tactical’ (Frosh, 2008, p. 349), seeking to avoid opposing individual and collective. Yet, in removing the opposition this would seem to remove any possibility of interaction or productive dialectic.3 Studies conducted from a linguistics perspective could be said to work with manifestations of the dynamics between individual and collective, inside and outside. It is axiomatic that any individual speaker of a language, to be defined as a speaker, must be able to communicate with any other speaker; individual and collective seem to be operating in the same space, here. Therefore, any study of language in use may also be meaningful for the wider project of explaining the dynamics of interaction between individual and collective. 4 Chronologically backtracking, the model favoured before the ‘affective turn’ is known as ‘the turn to language’, or ‘narrative turn’. In 1989, Julia Kristeva, a student of Lacan, examined the role of language in psychoanalysis; ‘As a signifying system in which the speaking subject makes and unmakes himself, language is at the center of psychological studies’ (Kristeva, 1989, p. 265), noting that ‘psychoanalysis sees the patient’s speech as its object’ (p. 266), and that, in fact, speech is the analyst’s only access to the patient’s mind. The later ‘affective turn’ would find this inadequate, and recent advances in neurology would also become operative in this respect. Stephen Crites details some implications for narration; ‘Language is tensed because the present in which we exist … is the point of tension that both joins past and future and also places us in fundamentally different relations to them’ (Crites, 1986, p. 155). According to Crites, the narrating subject constructs a sense of self from past recollection and future projection, and that in doing so the self becomes, ‘provisionally disassociated from the organic immediacies of life that are always in the present … [and thus]reified as a purely immaterial or soulish thing’ (p. 162). This intensifies the need for context; ‘The poignant search for roots that is such a feature of our rootless age testifies to the acute unease a human being can feel without a coherent story of a personal past’

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(Crites, 1986, p. 155). Thus, we invest time in constructing this narrative in order to make a provisional projection of the self into the future. ‘Soulish things’ seem to be a recurring motif for language, not only in the psychological search for ‘self ’, but also in contexts such as attempts to figure language as the ‘soul’ of a people, discussed by Fishman.

2.3.3 Social constructivism and migration I am aware of two studies from broadly psychosocial perspectives that discuss the topic of ways in which individual identity (sense of self/subjectivity) may be affected by migration: ‘Migration and Threat to Identity’ by Timotijevic and Breakwell (2000), and ‘Culture, Psychotherapy, and the Diasporic Self as Transitoric Identity: A Reply to Social Constructionist and Postmodern Concepts of Narrative Psychotherapy’ by Zielke and Straub (2008). Timotijevic and Breakwell use Identity Process Theory (IPT) that construes identity as ‘a dynamic social product’ (Timotijevic & Breakwell, 2000, p. 355) but allows for some individual freedom of choice among alternatives thrown up by social contexts. This means that ‘Changes in identity are therefore normally purposive. The person has agency in creating identity’ (op cit., p. 357). Timotijevic and Breakwell studied refugees from the war in Yugoslavia, using the Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis methodology developed by Jonathan Smith, which is discussed in Chapter 4 (Smith et al., 2009). They found that their participants changed subject position as a coping strategy to deal with their experience of forced migration, escape from armed conflict, negative reaction from host communities and low social status of refugee communities. Participants typically ‘reject personal responsibility for the conflicts that have exiled them [as a] form of self-protection’ (p. 362) and sought to identify with various conceptions of the former Yugoslavia that would allow some continuity of experience of themselves in their former and present lives, which would permit self-esteem in the face of negative perception of emigration, ‘associated with feelings of guilt for deserting the strongly salient identity’ (p. 366). Changing languages was not considered as a factor in this research: interviews were conducted in L1. The relationship between subjectivity and context continue to be explored. Zielke and Straub describe a Social Constructionist Theory, which, in the

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1990s, proposed a model of the self as a ‘patchwork identity’ (Zielke & Straub, 2008, p. 54) that evolves in response to the rapidly changing circumstances of contemporary society. According to Zielke and Straub, social constructivism criticizes cognitivist stress on the individual and ‘regards mental, especially cognitive, processes, feelings and actions, as elements of social discourses and cultural practices’ (Zielke & Straub, 2008, p. 54). This means that narrative accounts will depend on available sociocultural schema. ‘They are laced with the relationships to others and the “voices” of these others. This has consequences for the authenticity attributed [by the therapist] to these narratives, their claim to veracity’ (Zielke & Straub, 2008, p. 54). Zielke and Straub claim that the construction of an autobiographical narrative, arguably of the type demanded of their participants by Timotijevic and Breakwell, follows ‘a typically modern compulsion’ to appear as a self-determined, self-reflexive individual ‘capable of squeezing an identity out of the chaos in his or her life in a retrospective narrative’ (Zielke & Straub, 2008, p. 55). A notable difference between Timotijevic and Breakwell, and Zielke and Straub, here, is that the latter observed a more general migrant population not necessarily subject to the traumatic forced emigration of participants in the former study. Zielke and Straub find that attempts at retrospective narrative are perhaps undermined by the fact that ‘Memories change, and not least through a narrative integration in a continuously “updated” [life] story’ (Straub, 2008, p. 218). Zielke and Straub (2008) examined this evolving, narrative account of the self in the context of migration and diaspora, from the point of view of the psychotherapist. They observe that ‘Migrants or persons with a migration background (emphasis in original) often do not want to be treated as if they were members of the majority culture … . Correspondingly, therapeutic and advisory work is being conceptualized and practiced as intercultural communication’ (Zielke & Straub, 2008, p. 50). For present purposes, the inclusion here not only of migrants but also of ‘persons with a migration background’, while this is not further elaborated, is of interest in that these are people observed at a point at which they seek professional counselling in dealing with issues in which their difference, or perceived difference, from a majority community is evidently an important feature. How does psychology theorize these differentials in the subject as it evolves over time and place? According to Zielke and Straub, ‘The constructionist perception also breaks with the traditional perception that

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there is something such as … [an] enduring, decontextualized definition of the normal, healthy or stable personality. This perception becomes a matter of cultural and social, purely conventional consideration’ (Zielke & Straub, 2008, pp. 50, 54). So, does the modern migrant, agent in a globalized world, naturally operate in accordance with this postmodern concept of self as contingent, multiple and variable? Social constructivism sees the multiethnic/multicultural community as ‘seismographs of postmodern living conditions … Migrant experiences are given paradigm status’ in which individuals develop ‘a polyphonous, fragmented, “hybrid” identity’ (Zielke & Straub, 2008, p. 62). But does this viewpoint fully take into account the actual pace and scope of change in contemporary experience? Crites ‘soulish thing’ seems in danger of becoming a lost soul, the ‘provisional disassociation from the organic immediacies of life’ in fact becoming more permanent. This theme is taken up by Paul Connerton, who discerns a tendency for material objects to lose their materiality due to the ubiquity of the ‘virtual’ reality of computer screens (Connerton, 2009). This will be discussed in more detail under the heading ‘Cultural memory studies’ later in the chapter. Zielke and Straub wish to moderate constructivist theory. They find that migrants who are experiencing some personal crisis need a more stable point of reference: It becomes ever clearer that particularly the reconstructive description of experiencing difference calls for a reference to a formal unity of the self not only at a conceptual level but that the wish-after all-for personal identity is also indispensable for articulating the difference experienced and for the positive inclusion in the patient’s own, hybrid self-attempt. (Zielke & Straub, 2008, p. 64)

Thus, making sense of the experience of difference is at the centre of a migrant subjectivity. Zielke and Straub perceive a danger in the sense of self, or identity, being invested in and dependent on rapidly changing contingent contexts, in that this leaves the individual no point from which to resist unwelcome demands. They end with a sort of psycho-political statement; psychotherapy must avoid ‘becoming the handmaiden of the globalized and glocalized “achievement-oriented society” (p. 67) and,

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… avoid teaching its patients certain postmodern “norms” of affirmed non-identity to be good, life-long mobile and completely flexible “selfpresenters” (who then function smoothly in the socially and culturally highly differentiated globalized and glocalized, liberal-capitalist “world society”)’. (Zielke & Straub, 2008, p. 64)

Strong words gain force from having come out of face-to-face work with ‘migrants and persons with a migrant background’ who present with the type of problems that, perhaps, stem from the coerced mobility that Paul Connerton identifies in the modern labour market, from migration for bare survival to more elite levels where ‘mobility acquires the meaning of mental as well as physical fitness; willingness for professional mobility is regarded as a prerequisite for even remaining in the labour market, and, adroitly managed, mobility is a precondition for advancement in a successful career’ (Connerton, 2009, p. 89).

2.3.4 Language in/and psychology As with the Timotijevic and Breakwell study, the Zielke and Straub study did not address the question of language. This omission is taken to be representative of the type of methodological and theoretical problems that surround study of phenomena that extend over different academic disciplinary areas. While psychoanalysis may see ‘the patient’s speech as its object’ (Kristeva, 1989, p. 366), language (rather than dialogue), other than its theorized roles in the formation of notions of self/subjectivity, does not feature largely in psychological literature. Where cross-cultural psychology researchers communicate outside their own L1, they tend to rely on translators and interpreters. Psychology researchers seem frequently to use the terms ‘language’ and ‘narrative’ interchangeably. This seems a curious blind spot to researchers from a linguistics background, as Claire Kramsch declares: Although there is no one-to-one relationship between anyone’s language and his or her cultural identity, language is the most sensitive indicator of the relationship between an individual and a given social group. Any harmony or disharmony between the two is registered on this most sensitive of Richter scales. Language is an integral part of ourselves – it permeates our thinking and way of viewing the world. (Kramsch, 1998, p. 77)

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Judith Butler’s observations on language effects, in Excitable Speech (1997), are a notable exception to this blind spot and, while not focussed on the multilingual or migrant subject, may provide a useful language perspective, here. Extending J. L. Austin’s (1962) work on the illocutionary force of language, Butler maintains that ‘Language sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible’ (Butler, 1997, p. 5). Thus, being addressed as x constitutes one as x, in an almost Adamic naming, ‘One comes to “exist” by virtue of this fundamental dependency on the address of the Other’ (Butler, 1997, p. 5). When the type of person defined in the current study is addressed in a language that interpellates him/her as something he/she cannot be, because the language is inaccessible, this can constitute a challenge to his/her integrity as a subject. The address fails to interpellate a fellow speaker and instead exposes the felt lack.

2.3.5 Summary of psychology literature Some useful parameters may be drawn from this admittedly selective survey of psychological theory. There is some consensus that the people and their social and material surroundings play a vital role in enabling us to construct a subject position, a sense of who and what we are, and that language is essential at a fundamental level to the process. Subjectivity evolves; it can be supported and threatened from without by social context and interaction, and from within as recalling and recounting events can alter our perception of them and of ourselves as actors. The demands for rapid change encountered in contemporary life have the potential to overwhelm the subject’s ability to assimilate conflicting interpellations. Change in the language environment one is obliged to interact with, while not addressed directly by most psychological studies, is clearly a major factor in the experience of migration.

2.4 Cultural memory studies The term ‘collective memory’ is most associated with French Durkheimian sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs, who emphasized the social function of

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memory in maintaining group identity and stated that ‘individuals always use social frameworks when they remember. It is necessary to place oneself in the perspective of the group’ (Halbwachs, 1992 (1925), p. 52). Lewis A. Coser, Halbwachs’ translator, also points out that Halbwachs’ approach to sociology, unlike the Mannheim approach preferred by American Structuralist School, focuses more on symbol and ritualism as keys to understanding the past than document-based historiography and biography (Coser, 1992, pp. 2, 3). Cultural memory as a separate field of study has post– World War II foundations in Holocaust studies and is closely associated with the Oral History movement, the ‘history from below’ described by Paul Thompson (Thompson, 2000 (1978)) and with the psychological study of the effects of trauma. Oral history and psychoanalysis both centre on spoken reminiscence and thus on language as their medium, but do not focus on language as such. More recently, cultural memory studies has moved away from trauma narratives and is being used as a perspective from which to examine problems across a broader range of fields. Pierre Nora’s extensive survey of French cultural identity, Les Lieux de Mémoire (Nora, c1997) ‘located’ cultural memory in a range of bearers from historical events to places and artefacts. In L’invention du Quotidien, Michel de Certeau, echoing the earlier oral history traditions and their left-leaning tendencies, defined experiences of everyday life as bearing cultural information: L’approche de la culture commence quand l’homme ordinaire devient le narrateur, quand il définit le lieu (commun) du discours et l’espace (anonyme) de son developpement. (de Certeau, 1990, p. 18)5

Astrid Erll, a leading scholar in this area, defines cultural memory studies as an umbrella category dealing with ‘the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts’ (Erll, 2008, p. 2). She deals with the question of the relation of individual memory to Halbwachs’ collective memory, a subject of heated debate for some years (see Sontag, 2004), by suggesting that concepts of cultural or collective memory ‘proceed from an operative metaphor’ whereby individual cognition is ‘transferred to the level of culture’, culture being conceived as both ‘a subjective category of meanings contained in people’s minds’ and ‘patterns of publically available symbols objectified in society’(Erll, 2008, p. 5). The first is individual, even neurological; the second

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is broadly symbolic, including ‘the media, institutions and practices by which social groups construct a shared past’ and further that ‘much of what is done to reconstruct a shared past bears some resemblance to the processes of individual memory’ (Erll, 2008, p. 5). Essentially interdisciplinary, CM is a perspective that a widening range of disciplines find productive. Perhaps the most comprehensive survey of the field to date, Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (2008), contains contributions from scholars in over a dozen different fields, including linguistics, literature, sociology, psychology, and neurology, all taking as their point of departure, memory of the past in individuals and collectives. Manier and Hirst, in ‘A Cognitive Taxonomy of Collective6 Memory’ (2008), describe three categories of collective memory: first, collective episodic memory – events in the personal past of members of a ‘mnemonic community’ such as a group of friends or a family; second, collective semantic memory – all the historical facts that members of a group learn, which is further divided into lived memory, facts learned as the events actually happened, and distant memory, facts from a more distant past that consequently have less current resonance; and third, collective procedural or implicit memory, which includes public ceremonial behaviours such as those described by Paul Connerton (Connerton, 1989).

2.4.1 Cultural memory and linguistics Linguistics, an area little studied from the cultural memories perspective, is presented in the handbook by Gerald Echterhof, who maintains that as language is a product of culture and a tool to shape it, ‘language effects on memory also reflect the cultural dimension of memory’ (Echterhof, 2008, p. 262). Echterhof also questions whether cognition and language are in fact separable. Citing Semin and Fiedler on the effect of verbal labels in activating cognitive schemata, which in turn organize perception and recollection, Echterhof observes that ‘To the extent that … linguistic biases or preferences both depend on and affect cultural environments, they may also be regarded as signs and carriers of cultural memory’ (Echterhof, 2008, 270). He also discusses ‘audience tuning’, in which a speaker’s choice of language/words is motivated and enabled by knowledge of a group’s social assumptions and

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further acts to reinforce and mould those assumptions, thereby cementing group membership and identity. Echterhof briefly mentions recent work in linguistic relativity and situates language as an active component of collective or cultural identity, constitutive of cultural memory.

2.4.2 Cultural memory and neuroscience At the most empirical end of the cultural memory spectrum, Hans J. Markowitz, in his contribution to the handbook, outlines recent approaches in neuroscience that attempt to locate functions of encoding, storage and retrieval of information within the brain. He describes five basic systems of long-term memory: 1. Procedural, concerned with memory for mechanical or motor skills. 2. Priming, in which there is a higher probability of recognizing previously perceived information. 3. Perceptual, recognition of stimulus related to familiarity. 4. Semantic, oriented to the present. It represents memory for general, context-free facts. 5. Episodic, past-oriented. It allows mental time-travel through autonoetic awareness. (Markowitsch, 2008)

In this taxonomy, systems 1 and 2 are mainly anoetic or unconscious. System 3 is noetic but pre-semantic, systems 4 and 5 build on previous systems and system 5, the ‘highest’ system, is fully autonoetic and therefore relates the self to the social environment. This is, of course, similar to systems described by other cognitive scientists, and to that used by Kees de Bot (de Bot, 2007). Markowitsch makes explicit the relationship between individual and collective and also the interdependence of natural and social sciences: Neuroscience recognises that it needs to expand its focus from the perspective of the individual to that of the social world, as individuals are embedded in a social environment that shapes their brain and makes consciousness possible. (Markowitsch, 2008, p. 279)

Elsewhere, Markowitsch has speculated on the reasons for current interest in memory studies, citing pressures on the individual to perform adequately in a highly industrialized society, late twentieth century social and demographic

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changes alongside the fact that medical technology now allows direct observation of brain activity (Markowitsch, 2010). Work on distinguishing false memory has pointed out that it may be ‘grafted onto true memory because a framework has been built up’ (Markowitsch, 2010, p. 23) and that this can be affected by collective retelling. He issues a particular caveat to ‘studies that tend to lump together “diasporic experience” ’ in this context (p. 22). Natural and social sciences clearly reach a point of convergence here, that Markowitsch finds hold advantages for the former in providing wider context in which to evaluate empirical observations. ‘Reflecting “meaning” is not something that nature dispenses; instead it is fashioned by social and cultural means’ (p. 24).

2.4.3 Cultural memory and cross-cultural psychology The role of cultural contexts in subjectivity is a major focus for cross-cultural psychology. Jürgen Straub, quoted with Barbara Zielke earlier, is a leading scholar in this field. His framework for interpretation of qualitative data, outlined in Chapter 1, forms the basis of that developed for the current study; this is detailed in Chapter 4. He is another contributor to cultural memory studies. He points out that the rise of modern interest in ‘ “memory and recollection” accompanied an equally successful psychologization of human life, and vice versa’ (Straub, 2008, p. 215). This became more marked with the ‘narrative turn’ in social sciences in general, which he describes as ‘fruitful’. Recollection and analysis of the personal past is essential to a rational ‘life management’, which also projects a future trajectory and ‘this holds equally true for groups of people as well as for individuals’ (p. 219). Memory does not, however, simply record; in the process of sense-making and the formation of coherent narratives, ‘It works and interferes with its “contents”, arranging and organizing them’ (p. 221). The work of oral historian Alessandro Portelli on memories of Italy around the war years is an illustration of this interfering and arranging. To the traditional historian, when popular memory for events differs from recorded fact, popular memory is held to be unreliable evidence of what actually occurred. Portelli demonstrates (Portelli, 1998) that ‘history from below’, by examining popular memory of an event, can reveal how people felt about

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what happened, how this affected their subsequent behaviour and how both are now interpreted.

2.4.4 Cultural memory and material culture Turning to the opposite end of the cultural memory spectrum, and picking up once more themes of ‘lieux de mémoire’, we find studies of material culture that may have a bearing on attempts to preserve culture, and attitudes to ‘lost’ factors. Jean-Sébastien Marcoux examines the role of objects that people bring with them when they move from one home to another, objects which, ‘while [they] … move in relation to a place, … represent stability in relation to the people’ (Marcoux, 2001, p. 71). His elderly informants stressed the importance of ‘remaining with their things’ when they moved into a care home. ‘This reminds us that “loved objects” do not come alive in a person … On the contrary, as Walter Benjamin puts it, it is the person who lives in them’(Marcoux, 2001, p. 71). Themes of ‘haunting’ and ‘soulish things’ mentioned earlier are again evident. Here we have what might be termed an element of ergativity, in which we invest possessions with connotations of their owners’ identities (but compare Connerton, 2009). Here the work of Daniel Miller is apposite; in describing the effect of domestic objects in museum settings he observes that ‘the haunted house is a mythic form that constructs – at the level of myth – a resolution to a problem. The problem … is the discrepancy between the longevity of homes and the relative transience of their occupants’ (Miller, 2001, p. 107). The narratives of literature and other media can also be viewed from a cultural memory perspective; these will be considered in Chapter 3, as Horizon of Comparison 3.

2.4.5 Body memory Finally, and most significantly for my argument, there is the issue of memory sedimented in the body or ‘body memory’: day-to-day routine, interaction with familiar implements and gestures. This would come under the ‘procedural’ category in the Markowitsch taxonomy detailed earlier, but is expanded and reappraised in the work of two scholars; the philosopher Edward S. Casey and social anthropologist Paul Connerton.

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Casey, who traces interest in body memory to Bergson, notes that such memory goes largely unnoticed until interrupted in some way. An unexpected absence or change in a physical routine reminds us ‘of how pivotal and presupposed body memory is in our lives. These lives depend massively on the continued deployment of such memory’ (Casey, 2000, p. 146). The memory that Casey terms ‘habitual’, and that resonates with Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1977), is built up over time, a sedimented history of actions that is not in fact a thing of the past, but ‘an active immanence of the past in the body that informs present bodily actions … In such memory the past is embodied in actions. Rather than being contained separately somewhere in mind or brain’ (Casey, 2000, p. 149). Remembering, or becoming consciously aware of this immanence, ‘is characteristically sudden and precipitate and yet quite complete’ (Casey, 2000, p. 153).7 Susan Sontag’s pronouncement alluded to above ‘All memory is individual, unreproducible – it dies with each person’ (Sontag, 2004, p. 76) is most obviously true in the case of body memory. Yet Sontag’s following phrase ‘there is collective instruction’ (Sontag, 2004, p. 76) can also be applied. Paul Connerton points this out: [T]here are the ways that working at a machine or at a desk imposes and reinforces a set of postural behaviours which we come to regard as ‘belonging’ to the factory worker or the sedentary white collar worker. Postures and movements which are habitual memories become sedimented into bodily conformation. Actors can mimic them, doctors can examine the results. (Connerton, 1989, p. 94)

This brings the ‘private’ into the public domain. Connerton 1989, How Societies Remember, looked at the mnemonic functions of enacted public ceremony and the symbolism of action in interpersonal relations: Power and rank are commonly expressed through certain postures relative to others … We know what it means when … one person stands and everyone else sits; when everyone in a room gets up as someone comes in; when someone bows or curtseys … in all cultures, much of the choreography of authority is expressed through the body. (Connerton, 1989, pp. 73, 74)

Twenty years later, in How Modernity Forgets (2009) it is the loss of memory that concerns Connerton. He describes a ‘concatenation of ruptures’

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(Connerton, 2009, p. 132) as characterizing the globalized twenty-first century society, among which economic migration is prominent. This produces ‘new demographic mappings: borderland ethnicities unevenly assimilated to dominant nation-states’ (p. 89). This is exactly the type of population from which participants in the current study have emerged. Connerton also discerns a more insidious, and perhaps sinister, trend. At the upper end of the labour market, mobility acquires the meaning of mental as well as physical fitness; willingness for professional mobility is regarded as a prerequisite for even remaining in the labour market, and, adroitly managed, mobility is a precondition for advancement in a successful career. (Connerton, 2009, p. 132)

This virtual coercion, while differing in degree from the traumatic experience of the refugees in the Timotijevic and Breakwell study cited earlier, is suggestive of a similar loss of control over life choices; thus, similar outcomes might be expected. Zielke and Straub’s observations, cited earlier, are also apposite, here. In the rapid obsolescence of consumer goods and pace of replacement in the built environment, Connerton sees another threat to the preservation of cultural memory; material culture also becomes immaterial in the proliferation of information technology. In the fast, journalistic, changing screen image, things, defined as ‘something that can be held in the hand’ (Connerton, 2009, p. 124), become ‘non-things’ and ‘all that is solid melts into information’ (Connerton, 2009, p. 132). There are, in this, complex implications for the role of ICT; usually portrayed as a positive aid to continuity for the modern migrant, could there be an undertow of attrition having the opposite effect? – interesting, but outside the scope of the current study.

2.4.6 Summary of cultural memory It was mentioned in Chapter 1 that my interest in language and culture had its inception in cultural memory studies; in fact in a conversation with Astrid Erll, who found that language had not been much explored from the perspective of cultural memory. My starting point for this study was observation of a felt absence of language; language that the participants had probably never fully ‘possessed’.

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Language attrition studies usually start by assuming an established ‘first’ language, then observe the attrition rates of quantifiable elements of these and look for commonalities of experience that might account for this data. As has been shown, this last is a vastly complex task. The epistemic community associated with cultural memory studies has developed perspectives that enable the approach of something that, while it may have ‘disappeared’ at a time in the past, has an immanence in the present. As an ‘umbrella’ category, or Radstone’s ‘useful category for thinking with’, cultural memory studies provides a space for exchange of ideas between the liberal arts and the natural and social sciences. Common themes include the effects of fast-paced change in contemporary life, the formation of identity, the relation of individual to collective and the implications of different theoretical positions, structuralism for example, across disciplines. Under this umbrella, scholars in different disciplines can alert each other to potential problems, or identify points of wider significance in dense intradisciplinary argument, as do Markowitsch and Straub. Or, serve as a corrective for overreliance on a single approach; Markowitsch, the neurologist, pointing out that nature does not dispense meaning; Portelli, demonstrating that the ‘wrong’ information can also provide valuable insight. The perspective of cultural memory studies can, in effect, provide space to step back from a single disciplinary viewpoint or over-specialized community of practice to compare and re-evaluate it, perhaps to perceive what was invisible because too obvious. In the words of de Certeau, to hear ‘la rumeur océanique de l’ordinaire’ (de Certeau, 1990, p. 18).

2.5 Distributed cognition and distributed language This relatively recent field of enquiry emerged from work in cognitive science ((Clark, 1997; Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Hutchens, 1995)) and studies in artificial intelligence (Hofstadter, 1980). In terms of academic disciplinary boundaries, distributed language is a world away from the more liberal arts or sociological side of linguistics, yet encompasses studies in communication that include these. There are parallels and points of convergence with developments in linguistics that examine pragmatics and multimodal communication, such

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as those initiated in the work of Erving Goffman (Goffman, 1981), and which form the expanding subfields of applied linguistics. Resonance may also be found with the ideas of Casey, Connerton on ‘body memory’ and Bourdieu on ‘habitus’ cited earlier. The connection may be coincidental, or perhaps part of a more general trend towards ‘ecological’ or social models. A detailed mapping of developments in distributed cognition is beyond the scope of this book. Perhaps a useful entry point to understanding something of the field would be to pose the question, what is distributed cognition/language distributed amongst? It is possible to describe three main, and overlapping, areas: distribution of cognitive function between brain and body, between brain/body and factors in the environment – which includes other people – and between ‘real-time’ action and symbol.

2.5.1 Brain and body The brain, which is usually thought of as just an organ in our head, in fact extends throughout the nervous system and its connections. The mind is embodied, in the full sense of the term, not just embrained … it needs information about the viscera, muscles and joints, and it needs endocrine and chemical signals reaching the nervous system via the blood and other routes. With Damasio (1994, p. 229), we should see the ‘mind [as] aris[ing] out of an organism rather than out of a disembodied brain’. (Linell, 2007, p. 607)

The body, furthermore, is integral with its larger environment. Previously, human cognition has been conceived of as forming an inner life in reaction to stimuli from without or as having the lager environment as a sort of ‘backdrop’. ‘This is connected with the idea that man and nature stand against each other: man as a thinking subject, inhabitant of culture and user of knowledge, and nature as something rudimentary and vulgar’ (Järvilehto, 1998, p. 321), an essentially Cartesian dualism. Järvilehto describes a radical re-imagining, which he terms the organism-environment system’ whose theory, starts with the proposition that in any functional sense organism and environment are inseparable and form only one unitary system. The organism cannot exist without

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the environment, and the environment has descriptive properties only if it is connected to the organism … therefore, separation of organism and environment cannot be the basis of any scientific explanation of human behaviour. (Järvilehto, 1998, p. 321)

2.5.2 The individual and the environment Linell, quoting Clark, provides a slightly more individual-centred interpretation: the mind is not contained in the individual brain; instead, it is ‘inextricably interwoven with body, world and action’ Clark and others therefore suggest that we could talk about an ‘extended’ mind, distributed over self and others, body and environment (including artefacts). (Linell, 2007, p. 607)

This close integration of mind, body and environment perhaps holds implications for the online processing of grammatical forms discussed by Slobin (cited earlier). The conscious, or subconscious, awareness of physical orientation to surroundings required for the speaker who must grammatically encode cardinal direction, for example, seems to point to a dimension of essential integration in these areas. Edwin Hutchins’ study of cognitive processes involved in navigation illustrates these concepts. He describes action, verbal and other communication, and use of tools (instruments) and aspects of the larger environment among the team of navigators required to manoeuver a large naval vessel. He speaks of ‘a cognitive ecology’ (Hutchins, 1995, p. 168) that includes the history of each development in navigational practice/science, each one being a precondition for the next. Such collaboration is productive of extended cognitive properties: All divisions of labor … require distributed cognition in order to coordinate the activities of the participants … When the labor … is cognitive labor the system involves two kinds of cognitive labor: the cognition that is the task and the cognition that governs the coordination of the elements of the task. In such a case, the group performing the cognitive task may have cognitive properties that differ from the cognitive properties of the individual. (Hutchens, 1995, p. 176)

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Furthermore, Linguistic determinism is the idea that the structure of one’s native language determines properties of individual thought. [Is this true? The answer] seems to be, ‘Sometimes and sometimes not’. … When cognitive activities are distributed across social space, the language or languages used by task performers to communicate are almost certain to serve as structuring resources, and the structure of language will affect the cognitive properties of the group even if they do not affect the cognitive properties of individuals in the group. (p. 232)

This is an insight not, to my knowledge, previously encountered in the linguistic relativity literature. It is also notable that Hutchins does not temper ‘determined’ with ‘relative’; part, perhaps, of the more hard-edged natural science mind-set that also banishes ‘soulish things’. Hutchens also introduces a cross-cultural comparison of cognitive ecologies in his description of the Micronesian process of navigation, which is utterly different in all respects bar the outcome: successful landfall. Fascinatingly, the navigator of a Micronesian ocean-going canoe imagines his vessel as stationary with the world moving beneath it: a great antidote to Eurocentric thinking.

2.5.3 Distributed language: Action and symbol This review has, so far, focussed on the more ‘online’ or ‘real-time’ aspects of distributed cognition; distributed language introduces a symbolic element. Drawing on work in biosemiotics by Howard H. Pattee, Joanna RączaszekLeonardi forms a theory of brain function for language that is neither reliant on formal, code-like symbols nor on interaction, as in the bleakly behaviourist models. Instead, elements of both are retained in a complementary relationship. First, ‘symbol’ is redefined: In a biological organism, what we call a symbol is always a physical structure that obeys the laws of physics and interacts with the dynamics of a particular system according to those laws. (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2012)

Symbols are not ‘formal entities substituting for something else’ but ‘replicable [transferable] constraints in a particular dynamical system’ (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2012). For natural language, symbols are built up via

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physical stimuli as memory in the brain, and shaped by experience. Thus, what makes a natural language symbol a message, that is what makes it different from any other sound wave produced by a human, is that it has been selected and stabilized in the process of cultural evolution (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2012). This process is dynamic; ‘effectiveness in inter-individual coordination’ is an important criterion for selection (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2012). ‘Meaning is what an expression does in a situation’ (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2012). In this model, structural/structuralist mapping of surface forms is still possible, but a specialized generative function in the brain is obviated; although the brain brings all of its resources and constraints to the language enterprise. The model has far-reaching implications, particularly for research into language use. According to Rączaszek-Leonardi, ‘Such a perspective connects the studies of language structure and function with both the study of embodied cognition and studies of joint action’ (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2012). Paul J. Thibault notes that Advances in the theory of dynamical systems grounded in our understandings of neurobiology; dynamic systems thinking; embodied, embedded cognitive science; and ecosocial systems have opened up the possibility of a different approach – an approach which recognizes that language is a cultural organization of process that is naturalistically grounded in human biology. (Thibault, 2011, p. 211)

The sheer complexity of the ecosocial system does, however, pose its own challenges, as was noted in the language attrition research described earlier. A system in which the individual is so closely associated with his environment does open the possibility that ‘a researcher in language becomes more Whorfian than Whorf himself ’ (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2012). In mitigation, Rączaszek-Leonardi suggests that the distributed cognition/ language explanation offers greater subtlety and complexity than previous ‘mind as computing machine’ models of 1950s cognitive science (RączaszekLeonardi, 2012). There would, in addition, seem to be implications here for the cultural memory model of collective memory as an ‘operative metaphor’ arising from individual memory; following the distributed cognition/language scheme, no metaphor is necessary. Further implications concern existing traditions

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in psychology to explain the relationship between self and other; distributed cognition/language explains in a more intuitively satisfying way ‘how the “out there” gets “in here” and vice versa’ (Frosh, 2008, p. 347), avoiding the bleakness of extreme constructivist paradigms. An example of the application of the distributed cognition/language perspective to interpretation of research findings is provided by Stephen Cowley. In primary research into infant/care-giver interactions among speakers of isiZulu in Natal, where the enforced separations of the apartheid regime preserved different cultural traditions even in close geographical proximity, Cowley observed culture-specific behaviour in babies as young as three months. Cultural demand for silence, or respect, in response to mild distress is communicated to the infant via whole-body movement and stylized gesture and in the absence of held gaze. In contrast to observed European and American influenced, English-speaking care-givers who engaged in a turn-taking, proto-conversational use of utterances, the isiZulu speakers coordinated their utterances, frequently singing, with the baby’s vocalizations in a chorus-like manner. The routine quickly produced the required silence. This was then rewarded with engagement of gaze and big smiles, but also playful threats that ‘father is coming’, the traditional disciplinarian (Cowley, 2004). It was concluded that the isiZulu three-month-olds were responding to the complete visual, kinetic and auditory, culturally ordered environment. Detailed discussion of language acquisition in infants is beyond the scope of this book; however, Cowley’s research may have implications for the unique and irrevocable status of L1 claimed by Schmid et al., quoted earlier (Schmid et al., in press). Does Cowley’s claim for evidence of very early acculturation, and particularly acculturation via the complete physical environment of the baby rather than the language element alone, strengthen the association? Is it possible to evaluate the relative impacts of the components of the environment, kinetic, visual and auditory, are any more quickly assimilated, and would their possible rates of attrition differ? Language plus gesture is the subject of an extensive study among speakers of Lao by Nick Enfield, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. As with the distributed cognition/language orientations described earlier, Enfield argues against concentration on desomatized ‘linguistic signs’ isolated from broader and more basic features of a cognitive environment. Language is

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not the starting point for meaning, rather ‘There is meaning in language for the same reason there is meaning elsewhere in our social lives: because we take signs to be public elements of cognitive processes, evidence of others’ communicative intentions’ (Enfield, 2009, p. 2). Enfield acknowledges Pierce and Grice in the preceding statement. Enfield takes the ‘expressive hand movements’ that co-occur with speech, Goffman’s ‘communicative move’ (Goffman, 1981) as basic to communication. They order the ‘richly multimodal flux’ of communication (Enfield, 2009, p. 11) by focussing joint attention. Enfield examines the interrelation of gesture and speech, finding that effects operate on a pico-scale ‘of moment-by-moment’ cause and effect for which he coins the term ‘enchronic perspective’ (p. 10). The speech-plus-gesture ‘move’ is ‘a single, complete pushing forward of an interactional sequence by means of making some relevant social action recognizable’ (p. 11). This ‘pushing forward’ may deploy any of the resources, prosodic, syntactic and so on of multimodal communication. Evidence for the move’s basic status is, Enfield suggests, found in the fact that infant language acquisition is typically preceded by use of the pointing gesture. The move’s repertoire is expanded to include all kinds of intentional co-speech gesture and it is claimed that these constitute the body itself as a ‘cognitive artefact’ (Enfield, 2009, p. 11). Furthermore, speech-with-gesture patterns among Lao speakers were also observed to vary from region to region (p. 191). This opens the door to considerations of a kind of gestural determinism to correspond with linguistic determinism. Enfield, like Hutchens, sees no reason to use the weaker (or more nuanced) ‘relativity’. However, he observes that little cross-cultural research has been done.

2.6 Summary: Horizon of comparison 2 There is much common ground among the social sciences; however, rather than promoting coherence, the themes that cross-cut the fields and subfields selected for this review often seem to become diffuse and difficult to identify. Terms are given slightly different interpretations in each discipline; also, the influence of the primary aim of a given discipline can be difficult to evaluate from the stand-point of another. For example, the mental health role of

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psychology research may not be appreciated by linguists seeking to adopt broadly psychological perspectives. The compatibility of differing methodological approaches is a point of contention. Discussion often centres on the question of the relative reliability and utility of broadly quantitative versus a range of qualitative methodologies, with many practitioners preferring the perceived certainties of ‘hard figures’. Others explore alternatives to a desomatized structuralism, often citing latenineteenth and early twentieth-century works that predate it. These topics will be taken up in Chapters 3 and 4. The central theme addressed in this review, and which serves to link the various disciplines, is that of how the individual and the collective, however designated, act to shape each other: how, as Frosh puts it, ‘the “out-there” gets “in-here” and vice versa’. Routes of possible interaction are traced by the various disciplines over various life stages. In earliest life, the disciplines examine mother/infant interaction as seen from Freudian/Kleinian, Lacanian or ecological psychology perspectives, and also through the cultural paradigms inherent in the mother/carer. Later, the acquisition of L1, its possible attrition, contact with other languages, and L2 form the ground of enquiry for language attrition studies and figure prominently in distributed cognition/language research and studies in linguistic relativity. Ongoing, life-long processes of cognitive development, or self-realization, in the context of myriad life experiences are studied from varying psychosocial perspectives, via the mechanisms identified in distributed cognition, and the action of private and public memory as it selects elements of the past with which to explain the present and shape a trajectory for the future. A feature of attempts to include and account for social, real-life, factors in scientific ways, noted in all the fields discussed earlier, is the daunting scope of complexity at all levels that is necessarily involved. A quotation from the Erving Goffman book that had a strong influence on subsequent development of sociolinguistics, Forms of Talk, will serve to close this section and open the next. ‘The box that conversation stuffs us into is Pandora’s’ (Goffman, 1981, p. 74).

3

A Category Marked Miscellaneous 3.1 Introduction The validity of a laboratory study depends on the control of the variables involved: difficult even under lab conditions. The result must then be interpreted and the interpretation justified. Stepping outside the lab to observe and interpret the uncontrolled variables that make up lived experience opens, as Goffman said, Pandora’s Box. The social sciences have always struggled with the problems of delimiting observation and justifying interpretation. As mentioned in Chapter 1, some researchers attempt to produce certainty via quantitative approaches, which are less useful where the observed behaviour is less susceptible to control; other researchers turn to forms of Geertz’ (2000 (1973)) thick description techniques to validate interpretation. Straub’s concept of designating horizons of comparison aims to justify the interpretation by systematically examining the factors that might influence it; the primary data, subject-specific knowledge, the life experience of the researcher and the category designated ‘imaginative, fictional and utopian’. I take ‘utopian’ to mean freer philosophical ideas. The category might be called ‘miscellaneous’. While subject-specific sources are chosen for their relevance to the primary data, inclusion in the ‘miscellaneous’ category is subjective and has an element of serendipity. Criteria for inclusion in consideration here are that the work has effected, confirmed or challenged my own thinking in the areas under consideration: that they are meaningful to me. There is some overlap with topics considered under HoC 2 headings. For example, Sapir and Friedrich’s observations on poetics were included in HoC 2, and HoC 3 introduces two poems. Likewise, the work of Jacques Derrida, ranging as it does across areas considered in linguistics and psychology, might have been addressed as

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HoC 2; however, it is a more generally philosophical involvement of Derrida with Walter Benjamin that influenced me, and therefore is considered as part of HoC 3. This is not an exhaustive survey, which would be a practical impossibility, and other interpretations of the works presented are certainly possible. Also, the discussion is limited by my own knowledge and understanding; I have not read widely in British-Asian fiction, art criticism or Derridian studies. However, the selected works have had significant influence on the approach and interpretations adopted here.

3.2 Fiction Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Kureishi’s first novel, marked the start of a successful career at a time when British Asian writers, writing in English, were gaining popularity. It is semiautobiographical and its hero Karim, like Kureishi himself, is of mixed parentage with a Pakistani father and English mother. The novel explores issues of self-perception versus a casually racist public perception of the ‘Indian-looking’ young man from a workingclass family, who is essentially monolingual in English and has had a British upbringing and education. Karim, an aspiring actor, is offered a part in a stage play under a director of some reputation. The drawback is that he must play Mowgli, the lead character of Kipling’s The Jungle Book. This device enables Kureishi to include all the most patronizing popular prejudices and British misperceptions of India/Pakistan. This excerpt is from Karim’s first meeting with Shadwell, the director. –It’s The Jungle Book. Kipling. You know it of course. –Yeah, I’ve seen the film. –I’m sure. He could be a snooty bastard, old Shadwell that was for sure. But I was going to keep myself under control whatever he said. Then his attitude changed completely. Instead of talking about the job he said some words to me in Punjabi or Urdu and looked as if he wanted to get into a big conversation about Ray or Tagore or something. To tell the truth, when he spoke it sounded like he was gargling.

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–Well? He said. He rattled off some more words. You don’t understand? –No, not really. –Your own language! –Yeah, well, I get a bit. The dirty words. I know when I’m being called a camel’s rectum. –Of course. But your father speaks, doesn’t he? He must do. Of course he speaks, I felt like saying. He speaks out of his mouth, unlike you, you fucking cunt bastard shithead. Yes, but not to me, I said. It would be stupid. We wouldn’t know what he was on about. Things are difficult enough as it is. –You’ve never been there, I suppose. –Where? –You know where. Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Trivandrum, Goa, the Punjab. You’ve never had that dust in your nostrils? –Not in my nostrils, no. –You must go, he said, as if nobody had ever been there but him. –I will, OK? … –Everyone looks at you, I’m sure, and thinks: an Indian boy, how exotic, how interesting … And you’re from Orpington. (Kureishi, 1990, pp. 140, 141)

Nothing of Karim’s real persona is required, he is mocked for not being someone he cannot be, patronized and preached to. He fails to fulfil the only quality the director might admire in him, exoticness; looking the way he does but being from ordinary Orpington is almost regarded as the perpetration of a fraud on expectation: an impostor. Karim meets this torrent of insult with understandable anger, which he supresses, forced to accept the criticism: apologize for himself. There is yet worse to come. In this extract, Karim is costumed in a loin-cloth as Mowgli and covered in brown body paint, it having been decided he is not dark enough when seminaked for the part. –A word about the accent, Karim. I think it should be an authentic accent. –What do you mean authentic? –Where was our Mowgli born? –India. –Yes. Not Orpington. What accents do they have in India? –Indian accents.

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–Ten out of ten. –No, Jeremy. Please, no. (p. 147) He is, at last, forced to put on the ‘authentic’ accent. ‘I wanted to run out of the room, back to South London, where I belonged … ’. (p. 148) After a performance, Karim faces the reactions of his family. –Wasn’t I good, eh, Mum? –You weren’t in a loin-cloth as usual, she said. At least they let you wear your own clothes. But you’re not an Indian. You’ve never been to India. You’d get diarrhoea the minute you stepped off that plane, I know you would. –Why don’t you say it a bit louder, I said. Aren’t I part Indian? –What about me? Mum said. Who gave birth to you? You’re an Englishman, I’m glad to say. –I don’t care, I said. I’m an actor. It’s a job. –Don’t say that, she said. Be what you are. –Oh yeah. (p. 232)

The irony is underlined here. Karim’s fragile sense of self has been violently challenged by acting what he is not, he is then enjoined to ‘Be what you are’ by one half of the physical source of his origin. In Brick Lane (2003), Monica Ali takes the perspective of the first generation immigrant. The main focus of this novel is the emerging self-empowerment of its female main character, Nazneen. In this extract, Nazneen realizes that another character is far from fully bilingual and that he feels diminished by this fact. It was a strange thing, and it took her some time to realize it. When he spoke Bengali he stammered. In English, he found his voice and it gave him no trouble. [A physical description of the young man] No. There was nothing there. No clue to the glitches in his Bengali voice … When his phone rang he took it out into the hallway. She only caught fragments. A word, a phrase, a word repeated, a word struggling for release. The caller would not let him speak. So it seemed. It took some time to work out that it was his voice, not his listener, that had failed him. ‘My husband had a mobile phone’, she told him. ‘But he gave it up. Said it was too expensive’. ‘Y-y-your husband is right’. She switched to English. ‘Very useful thing’. ‘Y-y-yes, but t-t-too expensive’.

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She saw at once that she had made a mistake. She had drawn attention to the very thing she had thought to hide. He would not speak English now. He would not disown himself. (Ali, 2004, p. 210)

‘He would not disown himself.’ This brief phrase illustrates the extent to which the character, also named Karim, has identified with the language he cannot speak fluently. Later, he is using the heroine’s husband’s computer. –What are you looking at? –Day in the life of a typical Bangladeshi village. … –When was the last time you went there? –N-no, he said, and his stammer grew worse than ever. Never been there. ‘She went out to the kitchen and made tea. Somehow she felt sorry, as if she had asked casually after a relative, not knowing that he had died’ (p. 347).

The reaction of the ‘authentic’ character to the alienated young man is pity: death enters the equation. Later, Karim joins a local fundamentalist group. Nazneen decides, ‘Karim was born a foreigner. When he spoke in Bengali, he stammered … Karim did not have his place in the world. That was why he defended it’ (pp. 448, 449). This evaluation is chillingly echoed by Abd Moussaoui in his evaluation of his brother, a member of the 9/11 terrorist squad, detailed later in the chapter. Nazneen, secure in her nationality and language, sees Karim as ‘a foreigner’. The mother of Kureishi’s hero, likewise secure in her national affiliation, cannot understand her son’s insecurity. There is little of Gilroy’s ‘conviviality’ here, more the sense of hybridity meaning neither, not both. These two novels each enjoyed great popularity, won literary prizes and were made into films: Kureishi’s for television, Ali’s for cinema. They also inspired subsequent novelists and received critical acclaim. This, I feel, testifies to their resonance with authentic experience of the problems of migrant identity, of which language is a prominent feature.

3.3 Poetry Two poems have been selected for inclusion, here; the selection is both personal and serendipitous.

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The sentiments of Bob Dylan’s I Pity the Poor Immigrant, from the 1967 John Wesley Harding album, suggest Nazneen’s reaction to Karim’s psychological homelessness, and also features a turn to violence. I pity the poor immigrant Who wishes he would’ve stayed home Who uses all his power to do evil But in the end is always left so alone That man whom with his fingers cheats And who lies with every breath Who passionately hates his life And likewise, fears his death. … I pity the poor immigrant Who tramples through the mud Who fills his mouth with laughing And who builds his town with blood Whose visions in the final end Must shatter like the glass I pity the poor immigrant When his gladness comes to pass. (Dylan, 1967)

It is not, perhaps, an original sentiment, but gains authenticity through Dylan being the grandson of Jewish immigrants who struggled to establish themselves in the American Mid-West (Dylan, 2004). When I first heard it, I was an unhappy immigrant myself, and the possibility of growing into the role frightened me. There is much anger in Dean Atta’s Mother Tongue. It is a lengthy poem; following are some selected lines from the poem: Our mother has swallowed her tongue … To make it worse, our family holidays are always to her motherland She forgets to translate even though she knows we don’t understand … Stubborn, she refuses to see that she has wronged us not to teach To give us the option, the basic right, of freedom of speech With our grandparents, our aunts, uncles and our cousins … Made in England, we’re half this and half that But they could more easily overlook that fact If we could speak with our mother’s tongue … But she has swallowed it And we are struck dumb Our mother has swallowed her tongue. (Atta, 2013, p. 36)

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Atta, a third generation immigrant with Jamaican and Greek Cypriot grandparents, feels his basic human rights have been violated. His mother, bilingual in Greek and English, and his Cypriot grandparents used only English in speaking to the grandchildren. The grandparents eventually moved back to Cyprus and Atta would visit them there. The poem suggests that his hybridity might be charitably overlooked were it not for the language problem; ‘Even with younger family members who speak English our sense of otherness is highlighted by our inability to speak Greek. I have always felt at a loss by not speaking my “mother tongue” and I wrote this poem about it’ (Atta, 2012). There are several versions of Atta reciting this poem available online; some sound more accusatory than others. This poem has personal meaning for me in that I did not maintain my children’s ability to speak Japanese when we moved to England. Although Japanese is not my L1, I could have made more effort to continue speaking what had been the main language at home. They were angry with me about this; I am not sure if they still are.

3.4 Non-fiction These are all autobiographical comments and, apart from the Eva Hoffman, are ‘asides’ from writers whose work does not have language as its main focus.

3.4.1 Alex Karpovsky Karpovsky is a film maker whose parents emigrated from Russia to America when he was two years old. He was an only child. The comment comes from an interview in the New Yorker magazine. ‘The person I’m closest to in the world is my mom’ – a retired dental assistant – ‘but we have a language and cultural divide’, he said. ‘We speak in Russian at a seven-year-old level, so I can’t get into the details of what I really feel. And when I tell her, “The show won a Golden Globe”, she’ll say, “When are they sending the trophy?” I often end conversations with her in a hissy fit at myself for not being able to communicate, and at her for not learning English’. (Friend, 2013, p. 20)

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This, like the Atta poem, also illustrates the way in which processes of language attrition can happen so gradually that the parent fails to notice until some indefinable tipping point has been reached. Unlike Atta, Karpovsky blames his mother for not learning English rather than for not maintaining his Russian; either way mother does not escape blame.

3.4.2 Jack Kerouac Kerouac was born in America to a French-Canadian family, learning English at school age. The letter to a French-language newspaper reviewer quoted in Chapter 1, ‘Excuse me for writing in English … but I have no proficiency at all in my native language, and that is the lame truth’ (Kerouac, 1995, p. 227), continues What amazed me about your review … is the beautiful and elegant French tone … Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness all FrenchCanadians abroad in America have – well, well, I was moved. The English language is a tool lately found … so late (I never spoke English before I was six or seven). At twenty-one I was still somewhat awkward and illiteratesounding in my speech and writings. What a mix-up. The reason I handle English words so easily is because it is not my own language. I refashion it to fit French images. Do you see that? … Isn’t it true that French-Canadians everywhere tend to hide their real sources. They can do it because they look Anglo-Saxon … Believe me, I’ll never do it again; as I once did, say in high school, when I first began ‘Englishizing myself ’ to coin a term (Me-faire un Anglais). (pp. 228, 229)

It is beyond the scope of this book to trace the influence of French in Kerouac’s English writing. The points of interest here concern not the extent of actual language ability, but the depth of the feeling expressed over the perceived lack. His inability to write good French is ‘a lame truth’. As a writer, this alienation from his first language produces a ‘horrible homelessness’. This recalls Fishman’s statement that ‘language is … the primordial home for those who may have no other that they can call their own’ (Fishman, 1997a, p. 332). Kerouac can treat English in any way that suits his purpose; it does not hold the special status of French, for him. French-Canadian immigrants in New England did not enjoy

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a high social status. Anglo-Saxon in appearance but catholic in a strongly protestant area and taking low-paid work, they had motivation to conceal their origins, but Kerouac regrets ‘Englishizing’ himself as a kind of betrayal.

3.4.3 Salman Rushdie Rushdie has considered the political uses of language/languages, for example the role of language-defined identities in the upheavals surrounding the partition of India (Rushdie, 1995). In an essay in which he imagines Günter Grass as ‘a migrant from his past’ (Rushdie, 1992, p. 279), Rushdie, himself a migrant, details what he terms the migrant’s traditional ‘triple dislocation’ from place, language and familiar social norms, but finds that this may in fact prove to be productive. And this is what makes migrants such important figures; because roots, language and social norms have been three of the most important parts of the definition of what it is to be a human being. The migrant, denied all three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human. (p. 277)

Two of my informants, Habeeba and Julietta, mention choosing aspects from their background and current cultures to forge an idiosyncratic outlook.

3.4.4 Abd Moussaoui Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to have been charged in connection with the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, it could be said, finds a new way of being human: a peculiarly destructive way. In The Making of a Terrorist (2002), a biography, his brother Abd attempts to understand and explain what led, or drove, Zacarias Moussaoui to join the group that carried them out. The Moussaouis, a poor immigrant family from Morocco, have experienced serious, but not unusual discrimination living in the South of France. In the North African community, Zacarias and I had a special status, or, rather, no status at all. At home, Aïcha [mother] never talked to us in Arabic. So we felt discriminated against even among the North African

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community … The result: when we met Moroccan families, people would feel sorry for us. ‘Oh, they don’t speak Arabic? Meskine! Poor things!’ […] We felt ridiculous in the company of others. (Moussaoui & Bouquillat, 2002, p. 44)

Here the reaction of pity, felt as ridicule, directly echoes that of Monica Ali’s characters cited earlier. In his teens, and already in a poor state of mind, Zacarias became attracted to Wahhabism in his home town, Narbonne. He attempts to speak at the local, non-Wahhabi, mosque. ‘I’m going to give you a lesson’, he said to [young people at Friday services] … But those particular young folk, who had a religious education, rejected his nonsense. The discussion became heated. Just when Zacarias was reciting alleged verses of the Koran in French, the imam walked into the mosque. He listened to my brother for a few seconds and then asked him: ‘Can you speak Arabic?’ Zacarias answered him: ‘No’. ‘So how do you know what you are saying is the true meaning of what is said in the Koran? You haven’t been able to check it in the Book, because it is revealed in Arabic’. […] Zacarias lost his temper. He got to his feet and tried to hit the imam. The young people intervened and threw him out. (p. 112)

This is a story of almost operatic pathos; a young man who has been scorned, ridiculed and pitied all his life due to his ignorance of language and culture attempts to gain some standing as a serious person and is told that his inability to speak Arabic excludes him and then he is physically ejected. In 1991, Zacarias decides to try his luck in London. He finds life very lonely and difficult and drifts towards religious extremists who welcomed young people like him. For my brother, like all immigrants and visitors who passed through England, cultural uprooting played a major role in the dragooning recruiting process. Those young Muslims who headed for London knew nothing about the codes of British society. They found themselves in a foreign land not necessarily welcoming, a land where foreigners like them are tolerated as long as they don’t stray too far from their community. Zacarias, as we have seen, is a French man who is not at ease with being French, and a Moroccan who can’t speak Arabic. Which community does he belong to? His malaise would definitely foster a sense of belonging to the group that took him in. (p. 116)

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In the fiction of Ali, the poetry of Atta, Karpovsky’s remarks, and in the Moussaoui biography, lack of ability to speak a language is felt as a challenge to identity that leads to anger, ranging from petulant irritation on the part of Karpovsky to homicidal rage in Moussaoui’s case. The element of being an object of pity, most graphically depicted in the Dylan song, also figures prominently in inciting anger. A person in a pitiable state is diminished as a person by this demonstrated lack of power to help him/herself, a lack of agentivity. For Kureishi’s Karim it is public misperception of his supposed language ability that incites anger. Kerouac, the writer who could not write his first language, displays only melancholy and resolves on a more positive outlook.1 The Rushdie excerpt considers a wider set of challenges to a migrant’s personal identity, but suggests these can also prompt positive, productive coping strategies.

3.4.5 Eva Hoffman Hoffman’s autobiography takes the language element of Rushdie’s three dislocations as a central theme. Hoffman emigrated with her family from Poland at the age of thirteen, past that age period identified by language attrition research as rendering L1 attrition likely. She is bilingual, becoming completely fluent in English and pursuing a successful academic and publishing career. There is, however, a subtext of loss to her life experience. In an essay for Radstone and Schwartz’ comprehensive survey of memory studies, Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (2010), entitled ‘The Long Afterlife of Loss’, Hoffman, whose parents survived the holocaust, maintains that her generation feels its legacy: ‘[I]n its most intimate form … What we children of survivors knew, what we often received with great directness, were the emotional sequelae of our elders’ experiences’ (Hoffman, 2010, pp. 406, 407). One can speculate that this subtext must have had an effect on Hoffman’s sense of self, she relates (Hoffman, 1991) that she accompanied her parents in their migration very unwillingly. The title of Hoffman’s autobiography, Lost in Translation, immediately suggests that something is. She relates an incident that occurs in casual conversation when she is a student at Harvard; she contributes a comment but hesitates over the style and register to assume. Her contribution is readily accepted, but Hoffman is dissatisfied. ‘I sound like

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anybody else. But I can’t bear the artifice, and for a moment, I clutch. My throat tightens. Paralysis threatens’ (Hoffman, 1991, p. 219). Claire Kramsch picks up on this episode: Hoffman’s speechlessness … was brought about by the difficulty for a multilingual multicultural individual to find a legitimate, fitting subject position in a world in which you can supposedly be whatever you want to be, but in fact you are made to feel that you may only choose among stable, monocultural, promotional identities and idealized selves, that always leave something of you ‘lost in translation’. (Kramsch, 2011)

This, according to Kramsch, produces a sense of ‘imposture’, ‘a non-fixed or a wrong, false or illegitimate subject position … [which] presupposes a fixed norm of legitimacy against which individuals measure themselves or are measured by others’. Hoffman also has a sense of not speaking from the same general cultural assumptions as Polish friends. When attempting to explain (translate) American attitudes to them she realizes that ‘I may as well be talking Chinese’ (Hoffman, 1991, p. 263).

3.4.6 Richard Rodrigues Richard Rodriguez campaigned, in California in the 1980s, against what was called bilingual education in schools, which then meant, effectively, teaching in Spanish rather than English. In Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Rodriguez explains the basis for his opposition, which at the time and since has been extremely unpopular. Essentially, he sees the use of a ‘home’ language at school as an intrusion of the public into a private arena. Bringing the private language of family life into the public arena of school life, as much as forcing the ‘public’ language of the majority community onto family life, as Rodriguez’ teachers did when they advised his parents to speak English at home, undermined both. He recalls that ‘it was unsettling to hear my parents struggle with English. Hearing them, I’d grow nervous, my clutching trust in their protection and power weakened’ (Rodrigues, 1983, p. 13). He became angry that the safe haven of his home had been violated, ‘I had no place to escape to with Spanish’ (p. 21). It was this, he claims, that drove him to learn ‘classroom English’ and take on a public persona for classroom use (Rodrigues, 1983, p. 21). He and his older siblings became more fluent

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in English and impatient with the stumbling efforts made by their parents; a negative effect crept in: As I grew fluent in English, I no longer could speak Spanish with confidence. I continued to understand spoken Spanish. But for many years I could not pronounce it. A powerful guilt blocked my spoken words; an essential glue was missing whenever I’d try to connect words to form sentences. I would be unable to break a barrier of sound, to speak freely … Everything I said seemed to me horribly anglicised. (Rodriguez, 1983, p. 18)

Now it was their child’s inability to speak Spanish that was the problem. A visiting uncle upbraids his mother saying, ‘what a disgrace it was that I couldn’t speak Spanish, “su propria idioma” ’ (p. 29). As he developed, however, he begins to notice that family intimacy is maintained. He gives this example; while playing with a ‘gringo’ friend in his garden, My grandmother appeared at the window. Her face stern with suspicion … In Spanish she called out to me, sounding the whistle of her ancient breath … she lowered the window and moved, still visible, behind the curtain. [The friend demands a translation: Rodriguez falters.] I realized that any translation would distort the deepest meaning of her message: it had been directed only to me. (Rodriguez, 1983, p. 31)

The intimate message is evident ‘behind the curtain’ of the language. However, when, as a nine-year-old at his grandmother’s funeral, he views her face through the veil draped over her coffin, ‘It was not the face I remembered seeing most often. It was the face she made in public when the clerk at Safeway asked her something and I would have to respond. It was her public face that the mortician had designed with his dubious art’ (p. 41). A complex palimpsest of impressions of the public, the private and the way language traverses them. As adults we spend much of our time ‘in public’, Rodriguez takes a pragmatic attitude to variations in public speech addressed to him. ‘Accented versions of English make little impression on me … a Japanese tourist asks me a question, and I inch past his accent to concentrate on what he is saying’ (p. 33). The autobiographical essay that begins Hunger of Memory, and from which the above is drawn carries the authority of first-hand experience. One is reminded of Block’s injunction to pay attention to ‘individuals actually living

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through language maintenance and shift’ (Block, 2008, p. 200). ‘Those who pronounce on such matters’ (Block, 2008, p. 200), in California in this case, were in no mind to listen; hostility to Rodriguez’s views on bilingual education led to his abandoning academic life before completing his PhD. However, the reaction of the small child to having his parents address him in poor English, feelings of insecurity and isolation, is an important witness. What is of greatest interest here is the fact that intimacy and communication continued for the child even as he felt he was losing touch with the language of his parents and grandmother. Factors around distributed cognition and language discussed earlier, particularly in the work of Cowley and of Enfield, would seem to be candidates to explain this continuity.

3.5 Visual arts Developing a perspective from which to examine the effect of the unavailability or absence of a language is, as stated earlier, a challenge. The visual arts take words out of the equation and explore concepts differently. The concept of cultural memory proves to be ‘a useful category for thinking with’ and it was through this that I became aware of two of the works of visual art considered here; Zineb Sedira’s Mother Tongue, and Rachael Whiteread’s House.

3.5.1 Zineb Sedira (2002). Mother Tongue; Video triptych, Brooklyn Museum2 This is a series of five-minute video sequences; I have seen only a photographic reproduction of this work and, therefore respond to it as a still image. The first panel shows two women, grandmother to the left and mother to the right, in profile looking and smiling at each other across a blank, white central space. The younger woman’s arm is extended towards the older woman but we cannot see physical contact. The second frame shows the younger woman from the first to the left and a girl of around twelve years old, again in profile but a little closer, they appear to be speaking to each other. The third frame shows the older woman from the first and the girl from the second frame to the left and the older woman from the first frame to the right. There is more

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blank space between them, this is now dominant, and their gaze is broken. The images are each framed in black, widely spaced on a white wall with an electric cord leading from each one; these are for headphones, there is an audio component. There is no warmth in this framing. The characters seem least uncomfortable in the first frame but the progression of severe black rectangles strips them of context; Sedira’s Web page states that they were in fact filmed in three different countries. They look like ordinary, not very successful, snap shots and suggest to me the banal interstices of everyday life between which the language of generation one can be almost unwittingly lost to generation three.

3.5.2 Rachael Whiteread (1993). House; Inverted casting3 In the context of exploring lingering effects of things, and people, that have vanished, Anne E. Coombes cites Rachael Whiteread’s 1993 Turner Prize–winning sculpture, House – an inverted casting of an entire Victorian terraced house that was to be demolished to make way for the London Docklands development; the sculpture itself was demolished the following year. ‘Impenetrable and inviolable, presenting the inside of the house as its exterior and thus leaving the traces of once-inhabited domestic spaces visible but essentially redundant as occupiable spaces’ (Coombes, 2003, p. 137). The details of skirting boards and alcoves that the eye would have elided, or perhaps subconsciously registered, in the original space achieve a hyperreality in the casting; the familiar intimacy of home is at once presented and denied. The concrete is a massively static witness to dynamic past presence.

3.5.3 René Magritte (1937) La Reproduction Interdite; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen4 This well-known work employs the surrealist technique of de-familiarizing the familiar; the viewer stands behind a man as he looks into a mirror, yet the reflection is of the same view of the back of his head, his face denied to him and to us. The first time I saw this painting, I did not immediately realize what it was that is ‘wrong’, the realization bringing a shock of the unheimlich. I find it similar to House in that there is great detail here but what ought to be

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accessible is denied. I am also reminded that, looking at one’s face in a mirror, one does not see what others see, but a reversed image. In all three of these works, the familiar is traduced, expectations denied. This is, vaguely, analogous to the feeling induced when someone who looks as if they should, or should not, speak a given language violates expectation by not being able to or vice versa. Or the brain-wrenching effort needed for a parent to speak a foreign language to their child.

3.6 Derrida and Benjamin: A discursion into the philosophic imagination Here, I consider these two writers within the horizon of comparison which includes imaginative, fictional and utopian literature because the four essays included here contain much that is highly imaginative and this quality, this leap of imagination, provides yet another perspective from which to view the relation between language and cognition. This discussion is not intended as a formal analysis. Subsequent commentary on Benjamin by Bettine Menke (Menke, 2002) clarifies some points and provides a link to the discussion of body memory in the cultural memory section above. The writings of Jacques Derrida and of Walter Benjamin on issues surrounding language are, in both cases, widely considered to be amongst their most challenging works. Both authors addressed questions of language in many of their works; those considered here are Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin (Derrida, 1998) (abbreviated to Monolingualism of the Other), a brief, late monograph expanded from a conference address, the capital ‘O’ indicates a Lacanian link, and the earlier Des Tours de Babel (Derrida, 2002 (1980)).5 Neither of these is a considered major part of Derrida’s canon. Both reference Walter Benjamin’s Task of the Translator (Benjamin, 1996a (1923)), which was published as a foreword to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens, and On Language as Such and On the Language of Man (Benjamin, 1996b (1916)). Jacques Derrida was born in 1930 into an Algeria under French colonial administration. Maghrebian Jews had been granted French citizenship in 1870 and this had led to their wholesale adoption of French language and culture, to

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the extent that Judaism itself had become denatured as synagogues modelled themselves on churches. Derrida declares this to have resulted in ‘a strangely bottomless alienation of the soul […] a radical lack of culture from which I undoubtedly never completely emerged’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 53). By Derrida’s generation, only ‘some of their grandparents still spoke Arabic, at least a certain form of Arabic’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 52). Derrida grew up and was educated as a French monolingual amid an unquestioning racism towards the Arabicspeaking population, ‘a now grimacing, now “happy-go-lucky” xenophobia’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 37) that made Arabic the alien language in its own country. Derrida uses the German word unheimlich to describe this situation. The Nazi exclusion laws of 1940 stripped the Jews of the French Maghreb of their citizenship. Derrida insists that this ‘was the deed of the French alone. They decided that all by themselves, in their heads; they must have been dreaming about it all along; they implemented it all by themselves’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 16). Repetition here underlines the impact of this rejection. The Frenchman called into existence by fiat in 1870 is cancelled by fiat, with a wave of the bureaucratic pen: the ten-year-old Derrida was denied entry to his French school, but could not fit into Arabic or Berber schools; he spoke only French. After the war Derrida completed his education in Paris, where he continued to be acutely aware of his North African origins, developing conflicted, ambivalent feelings. He notes, with pride, that he did not lose all trace of his regional accent, but declares that this ‘indicates a hand-to-hand combat with language in general’, as he did not like to hear French spoken with any regional accent (Derrida, 1998, p. 46). He did not allow himself to be described as French-Algerian in any publication. As a reaction to this othering of himself, Derrida declares that he ‘exaggerates’ the dichotomies implicit in his situation, indulging in hyperbole he feels ‘more and less French but also more and less Jewish than all the French, all the Jews … all the Franco-Maghrebians’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 49, Emphasis in original). Derrida struggles with his regional accent and his identity as a speaker of French, yet recognizes some experience of language as less violent and conflicted. He cites the difference between his relationship with French and that of Abdelkebir Khatibi6 with Arabic. Khatibi speaks of his ‘mother tongue’; ‘He even asserts the possessive … He dares to … as if no hint of a doubt threatened him here. “My mother tongue”, he says’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 35). In contrast to this natural and uncomplicated

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relationship, Derrida’s French seems a mâratre mère. His descriptions of his own relationship to French make frequent use of hyperbolic violent and sexually violent images. He claims to feel ‘vindictive jealousy’ against the language. He is the ‘newcomer without assignable origin … [who] would make the said language come to him, forcing the language to speak itself … for him, on his terms, keeping in her body the ineffaceable archive of this event: not necessarily an infant but a tattoo … concealed under garments in which blood mixes with ink …’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 51). Retreating from this paroxysm, however, Derrida turns to another metaphor; he is ‘deprived of all language … in a way aphasic … thrown into absolute translation, a translation without a pole of reference, without an originary language’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 61). This, in contrast to the rape metaphor, becomes a productive dialectic; ‘this untranslatable translation, this new idiom makes things happen … sometimes unverifiable events: illegible events. Events that are always promised rather than given. Messianic events’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 66). This rather cryptic translation analogy points to the earlier essay, Des Tours de Babel, in which Derrida considers Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator. This essay, and others, was translated into French by Maurice de Gandillac in 1971; this translation was, apparently, Derrida’s main access to Benjamin’s thought. Des Tours de Babel begins with a brief background commentary on the biblical Babel as a proper noun, the place and a name of God, and also, ‘by a kind of associative confusion’ (Derrida, 2002 (1980), p. 105) as a common noun meaning ‘confusion’. Confusion here in more than one sense, the name of God and ‘father’, the confusion in the minds of the tower’s architects when their plans are confounded, and the confusion resulting when people attempted to speak to each other after the mixing of languages (Derrida, 2002 (1980)). The untranslatable is also held to be possessed of an illocutionary, or performative, force, which echoes the biblical concept of Adamic naming addressed by Benjamin in his 1916 essay On Language as Such and On the Language of Man. Derrida states that his discussion of biblical myth should introduce the earlier Benjamin essay which, with considerable understatement, he terms ‘overly enigmatic’. However, Derrida does reference the 1916 essay when he says, ‘… one would … be tempted to say first that a proper name, in the proper sense, does not properly belong to the language; it does not belong

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there, although and because its call makes the language possible’ (Derrida, 1985, p. 109). Compare this with Benjamin’s ‘God’s creation is completed when things receive their names from man … Man can name the language of language’ (Benjamin, 1996b (1916), p. 65). Yes, this is overly enigmatic, even obscure, but not obscurantist. It forms part of an attempt to take an empirical view of a poetic phenomenon and should not be seen as a retreat into mysticism. Benjamin, twenty-four in 1916, was later to move away from the theological perspective. Derrida maintains that the punishment of God ‘proclaiming his name, the proper name of “confusion” which will be his mark and seal’ (Derrida, 2002 (1980), p. 107) can be ascribed to the builders’ wish that the tower should identify and unify them ‘to give themselves the name, to construct for and by themselves their own name’ (Derrida, 2002 (1980), p. 107). The confusion of Babel makes translation at once ‘necessary and impossible’ (Derrida, 2002 (1980), p. 108). The biblical story explains that further motivation for constructing the tower concerned a desire to dominate their world. ‘The Semites wanted to bring the world to reason, and this reason can signify simultaneously a colonial violence (since they would thus universalize their idiom) and a peaceful transparency of the human community’ (Derrida, 1985, p. 111). This mirrors French colonial attitudes and policies that imposed the French language and focussed on the metropole as a single source of authority, negating local culture at the same time as it opened wider opportunities to the French-speaking colonial subject. God’s intervention at Babel both obviates the colonial violence and imposes the (impossible) task of the translator on mankind. An exhaustive discussion of this background is outside the scope of this book, but it may be useful in apprehending the type and level of subtlety Derrida deploys in Monolingualism of the Other, to examine some facets of the earlier work. For example, Benjamin’s concept of the ‘requirement’ of an original for translation; Derrida understands Benjamin to maintain that ‘for a poetic text or a sacred text, communication is not the essential’ (Derrida, 2002 (1980), p. 115). Quoting the English translation of Derrida’s French translation, ‘ “There is no content of language”, What language first communicates is its “communicability” ’ (Derrida, 2002 (1980), p. 115).7 Language is defined here as an underlying essential nature. Benjamin insists here, and elsewhere, that

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‘This use of the word “language” is in no way metaphorical’ (Benjamin, 1996b (1916), p. 62). This statement seems echoed by Derrida in speaking of the phrase that introduces Monolingualism of the Other, ‘I have only one language, it is not mine.’ ‘Do not believe that I am some allegorical figure’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 1). In speaking of the alienated language, Arabic, Derrida maintains that it has for him ‘a strange and confused proximity’ (p. 40) and that ‘I especially like to hear it outside of all “communication” in the poetic solemnity of chant or prayer’ (p. 41). If language has ‘no content’, the entity that ‘requires translation’ is the expression of that underlying essential nature. The language it is translated into must render this same essence (Derrida, 1985). This is far from clear. Benjamin offers several metaphors to further elucidate his ideas; one of these is the echo. Derrida does not refer to this directly in Des Tours de Babel, although he does use the image of echo in referring to Khatibi’s bilingualism in Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida, 1998, p. 36), but that seems a more gentle corresponding image to that quoted earlier from Monolingualism of the Other, of forcing himself, inscribing himself on the French language, and leaving something of himself; changing the ‘original’. The sentence from Task of the Translator: Unlike a work of literature, translation finds itself not in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one. (Benjamin, 1996a (1923), pp. 258, 259)

This passage is considered in the light of Benjamin’s The Origin of the German Trauerspiel (Benjamin, 1996c) by Bettine Menke, who begins by addressing the apparent contradiction in assuming that an echo could be anything other than repetition. Indeed, Menke points out that Benjamin highlights the contradiction by his choice of words, which are taken from a proverb that would have been familiar to his original German readers, ‘it is an ageold saying that however one calls into the forest, just so does it echo back’ (Menke, 2002, p. 218, note 5). According to Menke, Benjamin’s usage, rather than a nonsensical contradiction, is akin to the sort of riddle that has origins in Baroque echo poems or word games and in Ovid’s version of the story of the nymph, Echo. Echo cannot speak for herself directly to her beloved Narcissus,

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who in fact rejects her; she can only make use of the sound of Narcissus’ words. ‘She … awaits the sounds in order to re-turn these as words with meaning, to implant meanings in these sounds … her re-production has already traversed the words and laid a rupture through them’ (Menke, 2002, p. 85). The Baroque Trauerspiel, or mourning play, uses the same device. The example that Benjamin refers to is reproduced by Menke; Zytho represents the echo. QUIDO: ich mein den Orth, da meine Seele sicher liegt. I mean the place where my soul lies safely. ZYTHO: erliegtsuccumbs QUIDO: Wird mir Augusta herz, auch eine gunst erweisen? Will Augusta show me her heart, and also a favour? ZYTHO: Eiseniron QUIDO: und kombt doch eh noch ist der Abendglanz verschwunden. And will she come yet before the evening’s radiance has faded ZYTHO: wundenwounds QUIDO: ich heg ein keusche Flamm, die nicht in Purpur sticht. I tend a chaste flame tinged not by crimson. ZYTHO: ersticht. stabbed to death.

This ‘acoustic deception’ practised by the trickster figure introduces disturbing new significations. ‘The echo trope “speaks” of the relationship between sign and referent in that it lays bare their relationship as an “antithesis” ’ (Menke, 2002, p. 81). Menke points out that allegorical signification operates in the same way, and that ‘allegory … lays bare signification itself ’ (Menke, 2002, p. 81). In a translation, the reverberation, the original is both present and not present, thus arises a rupture by which deception and confusion can enter the equation. The Baroque stage also played on the audience perception of the various locations of sound, such that the original source, the hero, might seem to be expressing meaning interpolated by the trickster. ‘One’s own voice as an other, the other as one’s own – both sorts of consternation are enacted and may take on menacing traits … . the spectre of one’s “own” words … one’s “own”

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voice emanates from a different place’ (Menke, 2002, p. 93). Analogously, translation is an ‘other’ voice entering into the original. Derrida’s anguished ‘my language/not mine’ flashes up in these observations, duped by the tricksters of historical accident. The violence inherent in the trickster’s appropriation of one’s ‘own’ voice mirrors the colonial violence of imposing French on a local population and harks back again to the Semites’ project of Babel. In Benjamin’s metaphor, the translator’s alien voice calls into the forest to reverberate the source which, in the responding echo, is changed, becoming the half-alien ‘uncanny guest’. Is the origin then traceable? Not to someone who cannot speak the language of the origin; it requires the prosthesis of the translating echo. Of course, the translator is not a trickster; the aim of a translation is to truthfully convey meaning. The Francophone Derrida should need no translation; there is no question of source and target languages. Derrida ought to be inside the language forest but feels that the monolingual ‘other’ defines him as outside the lasting negative heritage. From a more concrete perspective, Menke points out that ‘Sound as such is not simply oscillation, but rather becomes hearable … only as echo, as a “breath” that meets resistance … and in being reverberated becomes present(ed)’ (Menke, 2002, p. 96). This theme of the other within suggests, perhaps, recent findings (Neal & Chartrand, 2011) concerning the role of mirror neurones in enabling us to understand the emotions of others. Observing an expression on another’s face, muscles minutely ‘mirror’ it; the brain then interprets the expression by analogy and ascribes the emotion to the person observed. The ‘alien’ is literally, physically internalized in order to be interpreted; perhaps for this reason the ‘poker-face’ inspires mistrust, we suspect the presence of the trickster as we grope for a corresponding ‘echo’ within ourselves. In Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida articulates strong feelings engendered by language and a sense of lack, or perhaps of inauthenticity, that he compensates for by exaggeration: more and less French than all the French. In doing so, he adds to our understanding of the relationship in which language stands to identity, to the feeling of a contained/embodied self. The relationship is obscure, the feelings often inchoate, Monolingualism of the Other, a meditation on them. Looking in more detail at the Benjamin essays that informed some of Derrida’s thinking in this area throws light on the

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second part of the title, The Prosthesis of Origin. Derrida does not expand on the echo trope; indeed it is not prominent in Task of the Translator, wrapped as it is in the forest image. Instead, Derrida introduces the image of arrival that lacks a point of departure and the search for a trace of such a point of departure that ought to be evident. This takes him back to Benjamin’s 1916 essay with its cabbalistic, mystical overtones. Derrida does not wish to go that far and perhaps distances himself in the self-deprecating warning which he puts into the mouth of an imagined critic at the beginning of Monolingualism of the Other; ‘Come on! You are a skeptic, a relativist, a nihilist; you are not a serious philosopher! If you continue, you will be placed in a department of rhetoric or literature’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 4). Menke’s explication of the echo trope opens up Benjamin’s reference for the contemporary reader and offers another view of the persona Derrida adopts in the imagined dialog already quoted; he appropriates, almost as a refuge,8 the powerful role of trickster, insisting in the face of anticipated criticism, on a literal interpretation of his conundrum ‘I have only one language, it is not mine.’ Steven Connor, in a study of ventriloquism (Connor, 2000), describes the human voice as paradoxical in that it is intimately within and simultaneously goes outside the body, effecting the world and extending the space a speaker commands; in this the voice is unique, ‘there is no other feature of my self whose nature it is thus to move from me to the world, and to move me into the world’ (Connor, 2000, p. 7). Yet, the sound as experienced from within by the speaker is not the same as that experienced by a listener; the voice is ‘a changeling’ (op cit., p. 9). There is something of the trickster, the unheimlich about it. The perceived sound qualities of the voice are also affected by body position, orientation and posture, which are ‘determined by historical and cultural orderings of space’ (p. 12). This is what Connerton refers to as ‘the choreography of authority’ (cited earlier). Connor suggests that the ‘fascination and menace’ of ventriloquism, in which the hearer is confused as to the origin of the sound, as in the tricks effected on the baroque stage, derive from ‘the fact that human beings do not hear at all well’ in judging position and distance, we supplement auditory powers with vision, yet mistrust our eyes before our ears (Connor, 2000, p. 21). This has some far-reaching connotations for what will be accepted as ‘real’.

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Connor states that ‘Phenomenologically, there is a close relationship between the voice and the face’ (Connor, 2000, p. 21). One is reminded of TabouretKeller’s association of the organs of speech and those of breathing and eating, but where Tabouret-Keller is concerned with body internal connections, for Connor the association is in relation with (vis-à-vis) the outside world; ‘both the voice and the face are parts of us that are turned outwards and by which the world knows us, but which we can ourselves only see or hear partially. They signify intimacy and vulnerability’ (Connor, 2000, p. 21). This vulnerability, of presenting our ‘self ’ to the world and yet not being entirely aware of or in control of that self, harks back to discussion in psychology of the need to form a coherent self-narrative, Crites’ ‘poignant search for roots’, and Connerton’s description of ‘a concatenation of ruptures’ in modern life. The imperative requirement for an origin, or for a ‘prosthesis’ of an everreceding origin that has become so obscure as to be irretrievable, can be seen as relevant to the increasingly fluid realities of modern life subsumed under the term ‘globalization’. Derrida, in describing the tenacity of his feelings of loss, frequently uses a word translated into English as ‘lasting/lastingly’. At these points his translator always supplies the original, ‘à demeure’, likewise, when Derrida feels himself ‘summoned’ by the lost language, the French ‘mise en demeure’ is given so that the English reader might have the possibility of recovering the connotations of the French ‘demeurer’ with the English ‘dwell’ or ‘abide’. Fishman’s observation that language is often perceived as ‘the primordial home for those who may have no other that they can call their own’ (Fishman, 1997a, p. 332) is apt in this regard. Exploration of the complex, and frankly obscure, concepts discussed in the Derrida and Benjamin essays can set up a wider perspective on language and subjectivity that may prepare the mind to examine the radical systems proposed in distributed cognition/language theories. Not that the former prefigure the latter or that Benjamin and Derrida can explain Rączaszek-Leonardi, or viceversa, but that they put us in the right conceptual space to make the creative leap of imagination. Problems of symbol and signification posed as allegory or metaphor, or the insistence on the empiricism of seemingly metaphoric statements, such as Benjamin’s on language as the essential nature of everything (animate and inanimate) and Derrida’s my language/not mine trope, resonate with Hutchens’ insistence on cognition being distributed among people, the

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tools they use and the larger environment and with Rączaszek-Leonardi’s concept symbol built up by dynamic interaction, which could make the search for an ‘origin’ less mysterious; make ‘soulish things’ more material without resorting to reductionism. It is in this spirit that the Derrida/Benjamin essays have been included here. From a more practical perspective, Tim McNamara discusses the possible relevance of ideas contained in Monolingualism of the Other on language and identity, to areas studied by applied linguistics. These include ‘rethinking assumptions about “mother tongue” ’ and its racist connotations (McNamara, 2010, p. 35), the role of language in identity formation in an increasingly mobile world and political considerations in aspects of language testing for citizenship. He suggests that a careful reading of Derrida can bring a muchneeded awareness of the subtlety, complexity and extent of the effects of language. McNamara points out that Derrida’s exploration of the vulnerability of the ‘hybrid’ subject is a useful counterpoint to a certain ‘celebratory emphasis’ (p. 36) that pervades much work on multilingualism; with all of which I am in agreement.

3.7 Summary The eclectic selection included in HoC 3 attempts to situate the research reported here in regard to wider environments. Firstly, the environment of the author’s own interests and influences, but also that of some ideas which are current across disciplines. The work of Benjamin, for example, is frequently cited, as are those of Hoffman and Rushdie. The works of fiction, and to a lesser extent those of poetry and visual art, considered here, also form part of a much wider environment of popular culture. As such, they may well have played some role in forming the attitudes of my informants, much as they have influenced the author. It is clearly impossible to account for all influences that might fit the HoC 3 criteria, so the works included here were selected on the grounds that they are known to the author and have influenced her interpretations of the findings. They are all also in the public domain, though some are more well known than others, and may influence anyone who considers the topic.

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The systematic inclusion of the element creative chaos that HoC 3 permits is productive. The imagination of a writer of fiction or poetry, or the radically different medium of the visual artist allow the researcher take on their perspectives, they are a reminder of a wider world. The non-fiction selections provide other first-hand experiences with a bearing on questions of language contact. The philosophical perspectives of Derrida and Benjamin license the imagination. Given that my object here is to identify, and if possible to account for, effects that stem from a felt lack of PL1, and that such effects can be subtle and extremely wide-ranging, their exact causation not clearly traceable, it has been found necessary to maintain an open-minded attitude towards the primary data. That is, to accept the testimony of the participants and forbear the attempt to fit this at an early stage of analysis into any pre-decided framework. The provision of HoC 3 as a category, outside of any particular inclusion within it, serves to aid the maintenance of a posture of acceptance while concurrently aiming to systematize the diverse findings of the study.

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Method and Practice 4.1 Common ground in the social sciences As the review of background as horizons of comparison shows, this study touches on themes, aspects of which have been treated by several disciplines and subdisciplines. I look to three disciplinary areas for my perspective and also for a methodology: cultural memory studies, applied linguistics, and (cross-cultural) psychology. None of these is amenable to neat definition; however, three very broad definitions have emerged from within these study areas: first, cultural memory studies investigates ‘the interplay of past & present’ (Erll, 2008, p. 2), second, applied linguistics is concerned with ‘the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue’ (Brumfit, 1997, p. 93) and, third, cross-cultural psychology with ‘the nature and scope of human diversity at the level of the individual’ (Lonner & Adamopoulos, 1997, p. 52). Although the last is in fact only marginally representative of the many definitions found in The Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology. All three can be viewed as ‘umbrella categories’ incorporating ranges of disciplines and subdisciplines. Describing such groupings could be seen as harking back to earlier, less specialized eras or as looking forward to a new fusion of C. P. Snow’s two cultures (Snow, 1956). In 1986, the linguist Paul Friedrich proposed that ‘The proliferation of sub-fields [in linguistics] … raises the heretical speculation that “language” (like “culture”) is an obsolete folk category, no more appropriate as a “field of enquiry” than is “nature” ’ (Friedrich, 1986, pp. 142, 143). Christopher Brumfit develops this ‘heresy’; ‘the boundaries of disciplines [are] metaphorical: what if we treat this group of phenomena as a set with shared properties? […] the usefulness for effective understanding of whatever delimitation is adopted remains paramount’ (Brumfit, 1997, p. 89).

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There are many identifiable commonalities across those fields termed ‘social sciences’: anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics. Indeed, even the subdisciplinary titles within these areas indicate their essential inter-relations: linguistic anthropology, socio/psycho-linguistics, cultural psychology. All point to the work of some of the same founding figures: names associated with them include von Humboldt, Boas, Mauss, Sapir and Saussure. In their development over the twentieth century, these disciplinary areas have been typified by an ever-increasing specialization that mirrors that of the natural sciences, and major commonality among the social or human sciences concerns challenges to the validity of their findings in terms of the kind of ‘provability’ possible for the natural sciences. Answers to these challenges have also looked to common strategies; the mid-twentieth century saw the adoption of structuralist types of analysis across the social sciences, and indeed beyond, with extreme positivist and behaviouralist positions achieving considerable influence. For psychology, at least, this problem was always present. Amedeo Giorgi, in his contribution to the reader Qualitative Psychology, traces the history of the bias towards the methods of natural science: When modern psychology was founded in the late nineteenth century, it began to seek secure knowledge according to the most prestigious criterion of that era, which was the experimental laboratory. (Giorgi, 2008, p. 27)

Psychoanalysis, sometimes referred to as applied or clinical psychology, developed in parallel. Freud himself began as a medical doctor specializing in neurology. Giorgi observes that for psychoanalysis, ‘the setting for psychological knowledge was the therapist’s room rather than the laboratory. [This] led to a different type of knowledge’ (Giorgi, 2008, p. 27), which did not share the prestige of ‘true’, laboratory-based science. Further, ‘Psychology is extremely conservative in its interpretation of science, and one departs from conventional criteria at great risk’ (Giorgi, 2008, p. 27). It could be argued that for the social/human/cultural ‘sciences’, defining themselves as science at all may have been problematic. Two commentaries widely spaced in time point this out; the misgivings implied by Edward Sapir that, writing in 1938 on assessing the relation of individual variation to group behaviour in research, ‘There has been so much talk of ideal objectivity in social science and such eager willingness to take the ideals of physical

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and chemical workmanship as translatable into the procedures of social research … ’ (Sapir, 1963 (1938), p. 570) are borne out fifty years later by Jahoda and Krewer, who, in 1997, declare that investigation of individual and group psychology has concentrated almost exclusively on the former because ‘mainstream psychology generally aimed at establishing itself as a natural scientific discipline, along the lines of the dominant ideology of the Enlightenment’ (Jahoda & Krewer, 1997, p. 14). Such concentration on natural science and its methods is evident across the social sciences. Problems of how to carry out research into areas that are not susceptible to laboratory scrutiny, how data may be validated and interpretations justified, continue to bedevil the social scientist and figure largely in, or are configured as, debate on the relative merits and uses of qualitative and quantitative research. Quantitative studies, which benefit, perhaps, from a sort of metaphorical association of ‘hard figures’ with ‘hard science’ and ‘hard-edged’ procedures such as the adversarial style of determining ‘truth’ in legal frameworks, are often perceived as having a more concrete validity than qualitative studies, which are often seen as suffering from a slippery relativism; answers to this criticism have proved difficult and complex. A radically different line of defence, which has been deployed across the social sciences, centres on the methodology described by Geertz (1973) for Social Anthropology as ‘thick description’. Lincoln and Guba (1985) describe this as a way of achieving a type of external validity; by describing a phenomenon in sufficient detail one can begin to evaluate the extent to which the conclusions drawn are valid and generalizable.

4.2 Inside and outside: The relationship between the individual and society The nature of the relationship between the individual and society, or the collective, is another area that the social sciences struggle to elucidate. For cross-cultural psychology, Jahoda and Krewer trace these concerns back to 1860 and the first issue of Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, where ‘Völkerpsychologie’ recalls the national spirit defined by Herder. ‘Their ambitious goal was to unravel the relationship

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between basic psychology and the mental processes linked to collective life in human societies’ (Jahoda & Krewer, 1997, p. 13). The attempt foundered on the preference for ‘scientific’ methodology alluded to in the earlier quotation (p. 14). Arguably, research in distributed cognition and ecological psychology (Cowley, 2011; Hutchins, 1995; Jarvilehto, 1998; Rączaszek-Leonardi, in press) is bringing a new perspective to this area; however, these theories do not bear directly on methodology in the current study. They will be discussed further in Chapter 6. This thread of the relation of individual to collective is picked up for cultural memory studies in the work of Maurice Halbwachs with his conception ‘collective memory’, and for Linguistics in that of his contemporary Edward Sapir, with the development of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, discussed in detail in Chapter 2. Both are the subject of renewed interest currently, after having been severely criticized in the mid-twentieth century for, among other things, their lack of empirical substantiation. Positions in psychology concerning the relation of individual to collective are, in Jahoda and Krewer’s words, ‘a perennial and unsolved’ problem relating to ‘the double nature of cultural meaning systems as part of individual psychic organization, and as a “superorganic” feature of collective life’ (p. 13). This formulation draws together aspects addressed by the three central discipline areas: language as part of cultural meaning systems and the individual in relation to those collectives defined by their languages.

4.3 The choice of a qualitative approach I take as a working hypothesis that gathering data through semiformal interviews with carefully selected individuals is, to paraphrase Brumfit, useful for effective understanding of issues surrounding the basic research question. Talmy and Richards caution that the research interview should be adequately theorized, recognizing the elements of co-construction implicit in the interaction. They term this the ‘active interview’. ‘[T]he active interview is a theory of interview that foregrounds not only the “content” drawn from the interviews … but also the linguistic and interactional resources used to (co) construct it’ (Talmy & Richards, 2011, p. 2).

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It is felt that the procedures outlined here meet Talmy and Richards’ requirements for the active interview and adequately address Mann’s four areas of dilemma for the qualitative interview: co-construction, a greater focus on the interviewer, interactional context and the ‘what’ and ‘how’ (Mann, 2011, pp. 10, 11). The area under consideration has language, rather than sociology or psychology, as its central focus. Further, the concentration here is on the lived experience of language in use, quantitative approaches prove impracticable when dealing with the range of possible influences here. It is for this reason that the DST theories applied in language attrition studies were rejected, as mentioned in Chapter 1. A qualitative methodology is therefore taken up not faute de mieux or as a complement to quantitative data, but as an essential, central, stand-alone approach. Language is also central in that it essentially traverses the entire spectrum of the study of human beings, from basic biology/neurology to complex cultural products, taking in aspects that are and are not susceptible to direct observation, and situating the individual within the collective. Brumfit declares that ‘the nature of language requires cross-disciplinary perspectives’ (Brumfit, 1997, p. 86) (emphasis in original), and that applied linguistics is entailed in a, ‘permanent tension with linguistics, psychology, anthropology, cultural theory and any other study’ (p. 93) (emphasis added) but that this tension is a productive one. Cultural memory studies, more concept than formal discipline, allows the analysis to include subtle factors influencing individuals when they attempt to evaluate the ways in which they relate to, or are products of, their families, and their families’ larger background of experience.

4.4 Interdisciplinarity and methodology At this point it is necessary to define more exactly the relation of this research to its different disciplines. As outlined in Chapter 1, I aim at interdisciplinarity as defined by Patrick Charaudeau, typified by an integration of concepts, methodologies and interpretations with the aim of examining what is common to both natural and social sciences (Charaudeau, 2010). This book uses concepts drawn from different disciplines and attempts to justify choices made

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in terms of convergent or divergent relevance to the research question; where successful, this may achieve independent or transdisciplinary insight. A major, and obvious, factor in this integration must be that it is being carried out by a single researcher, one who is, like many in the social sciences, aware of a plurality of background disciplines. The limits of this awareness must influence the degree to which the areas involved can be successfully, usefully, integrated. For example, the feelings of individuals aroused by inability to participate in social encounters conducted in PL1 occur at the interface of individual and collective. A psychologist might take factors concerning the individual unconscious into account, concentrating on the emotions. While this would be an area of interest in a broader context, the workings of the unconscious mind are the province of the clinical specialist and beyond the scope of this study: not within the plurality of disciplines in question. However, aspects of a concept developed within psychiatry as it elaborated notions of ‘transference’ and ‘counter-transference’, demanding that a psychoanalyst take full account of his/her personal effect on the analysand and the analytic process, have been elaborated in feminist studies and taken up more widely. This is generally termed ‘reflexivity’ or alternatively ‘reflectivity’ or ‘reflection’ and is considered an essential step for analysis in many fields. This is the justification for the inclusion in Straub’s horizons of comparison of the category, ‘interpreter’s everyday knowledge’. The problems of control of data collection, validity of interpretation and the possible influence of the researcher on both, discussed earlier as common to research in the social sciences, are also central to the current study. In developing a methodology for this project, I have taken into account different approaches to these central problems, while bearing in mind that these are necessarily influenced by the more specific aims of investigation within a given discipline. A non-expert researcher reading into even a closely related discipline area must remain acutely aware of the limits of her/his knowledge and there is danger in ‘picking and choosing’ among concepts that may be incidental rather than central, controversial rather than accepted within a ‘new’ discipline area. Brumfit offers this rule of thumb, ‘Impulses for investigation by individual researchers no doubt vary greatly, but the nature of individual research procedures must reflect the nature of the problem being investigated’ (Brumfit, 1997, p. 89). This book investigates a phenomenon that may better

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be characterized as a situation than a problem as such, although some aspects of the situation are problematic to the individuals involved. Although focussed on language, it cannot make use of strictly language-based methodology, such as Conversation Analysis or its cognates, since the ‘object’ of study is in fact the absence of a language. The starting point of the research is investigation of how the participants feel about their relation to PL1; this indicates a broadly psychological approach able to focus on the single (non-) speaker. The study is also, in some fashion, longitudinal in that it attempts to mine participants’ memory to evaluate reported changes over time and take account of facets of experience that have persisted in memory. The ‘nature of the problem’ is, then, disparate and sprawling; this calls for a methodological approach able to organize and prioritize, and flexible enough to allow for an interdisciplinary consideration of the data.

4.5 Interpretive sequential analysis (ISA) The methodology developed by cross-cultural psychologist Jürgen Straub seems to meet these requirements. Straub asserts that ‘Scientific interpretation … requires intentional and conscious realization … it is an explicit, methodologically controlled, transparency oriented effort’ (Straub, 2006, p. 185). Further, scientific interpretation can be seen as a self-reflectively structured process of meaning construction. Scientific also means that such interpretations include detailed descriptions of basic assumptions and theoretical backgrounds, arguments that serve to justify and explain such interpretation, as well as details regarding specific methods (Straub, 2006, p. 185). To situate the various assumptions and backgrounds alluded to the above, Straub employs the concept of ‘horizons of comparison’ described by Hans Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (Gadamer, 2004 (1960)). Straub terms his method ‘sequential’ as the analysis recognizes two stages of interpretation: formulating and comparative. In formulating interpretation, much like other methods of dealing with interview data, such as Jonathan A. Smith’s interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) (Smith et al., 2009), the researcher first summarizes the transcribed interview, remaining as close to the text as possible and working

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‘within both the experience space and experiential horizon of his or her “informant” ’. Formulating interpretation adds nothing and can be seen as ‘reproductive’ understanding of the ‘world and self of an actor’ (Straub, 2006, p. 186). In comparative interpretation, ‘a more creative and extensive analysis procedure … interpreters focus on segments from which certain patterns of experience, expectation, meaning formation, orientation, action and/or development can be extracted’ (p. 187). There is a similarity here to Jonathan Smith’s IPA and his process of identifying emergent themes (Smith, 2008; Smith et al., 2009), but here Straub differs, and the difference is driven by the difference in the two researchers’ aims. Smith works in areas of public health policy and researchers using IPA are often concerned with clinical issues such as the ways in which an individual’s subjective reactions may affect medical treatment in that these can impact on compliance with a treatment program. It seems to be the case that the search for emergent themes, through close reading of a transcript summary, is geared towards factors linked to the treatment issues under investigation. Straub, as a cross-cultural psychologist, has a wider remit; being interested in how cultures differ from and compare with each other opens up a much broader range of social factors that may impact on both research subject and researcher. Straub recognizes and organizes these factors thus: Cultural stores of knowledge are understood [in this case, by the researcher] through reference to other stores of knowledge and experience; the latter can be regarded as pragma-semantically relevant counter-horizons. (Straub, 2006, p. 188)

The researcher’s counter-horizons allow him/her to abstract and elaborate on diverse phenomena noted in the first stages of analysis. A careful delineation of the counter-horizons – which will differ from interpreter to interpreter – makes it possible for other researchers to follow the reasoning behind the interpretation, thus going some way to address a frequent criticism of qualitative research, that its procedures are not ‘repeatable’ in the lab-science understanding of the term. Straub counsels caution, the researcher should attempt to distance him/herself from assumed knowledge and look at the data from different perspectives. Research groups, where practically possible, also help to avoid ‘egocentric’ or nostrifying tendencies. Straub sets out his counter-horizons, or ‘horizons of comparison’ in Figure 4.1.

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Comparative interpretation Interpretation by reference to HoC Interpreter’s empirical HoC

Further scientific knowledge as HoC

Theoretical knowledge

Knowledge derived from other empirical findings as HoC

Interpreter’s everyday knowledge as HoC

Imaginative, fictional, utopian HoC

Formal theoretical or domain-specific theoretical HoC

Figure 4.1 Sources of knowledge and types of Horizons of Comparison (HoC) (from Straub 2006, p. 190)

Interpretation by reference to HoC: 1. Interpreter’s empirical HoC: these are the researcher’s own findings 2. Further scientific knowledge as HoC { Theoretical knowledge – the ‘generally accessible store of empirical research results’ (p. 190) ƒ Formal-theoretical, or domain-specific theoretical HoC – the above but more specific; may function as an heuristic in the development of new theories { Knowledge derived from other empirical findings – background assumptions that may well have guided the formulation of research questions 3. Interpreter’s everyday knowledge as HoC = the researcher’s life experience, ‘which can hardly be overestimated’ (Straub, 2006, p. 190) 4. Imaginative, fictional, utopian HoC = i.e. experience the researcher gains through books, movies and other media, which enable one to ‘temporarily “share” someone else’s life and knowledge’. (Straub, 2006, p. 190)

It will be seen from the reference to Gadamer, and from the insistence of this method on maintaining a focus on the primary data, that this methodology is grounded in phenomenology. The elaboration of repeated readings and interpretations of the data shares similarities with other ‘thick description’ techniques.

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Two significant aspects of Straub’s ISA are his organization of the reflexive/ reflective elements as ‘everyday knowledge’ and the systematic inclusion of what might be seen as a box marked ‘miscellaneous’; the ‘imaginative, fictional and utopian’ horizon that allows for the admission of a productive serendipity of possible influences.

4.6 Adapting ISA to my own aims This breakdown of horizons of comparison is readily transposable to other qualitative research environments. Straub’s aim concerns the accurate observation of psychological factors in different, he frequently uses the word ‘alien’, cultures; for reliable results to emerge, any form of bias from the researcher’s own cultural background must at least be recognized and controlled for. In this book, I do not aim to compare different cultures but to identify a range of effects, centred on language, on individuals who have experienced a transit across or between cultures. Factors affecting the researcher’s ability to identify these effects include background knowledge from different, but associated, disciplines, the influence of reading outside these disciplines and personal experience. While Straub’s schema allows for identification, evaluation and control of these factors in an organized manner, thereby supporting the validity of the analysis, it is felt appropriate to adapt his scheme to the current study. In HoC 3, ‘fictional’ is changed to ‘literary’ to reflect a broader range of fictional and non-fictional influences. (Figure 4.2) Comparative interpretation Interpretation by reference to HoC Interpreter’s empirical HoC

Further scientific knowledge as HoC

Imaginative, literary and utopian HoC

Findings Chapter 5

Research environment Chapters 3/6 Chapters 2/6

Interpreter’s everyday knowledge as HoC

Chapter 1 1.8

Figure 4.2 Adapted HoC: The sources and types of HoC and their presentation.

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4.7 Participant selection criteria Firstly, self-identification as not being able to speak the language claimed by their parents as a first language (PL1). This allows for a range of actual ability from control (ability to understand and appropriately use) of a few words or phrases to the ability to engage in limited (in terms of vocabulary, syntax and length) conversational exchanges in familiar contexts. The important factor was that a participant felt that he/she had an inadequate ability to use PL1. Although all participants consulted here have families with migrant backgrounds, I do not wish to identify migrants as belonging to the first, second or third generations. A parent who migrated in his/her teens or earlier will have had a different relation to the host/majority community’s language compared with a parent who migrated in early adulthood or middle age. Likewise, in a three-generation context, where a grandparent speaks the host community language very little, the parent is able to speak both the host community language and his/her parents’ first language to a certain extent, and the grandchild is virtually monolingual in the host community language (at this point, use of the term ‘host’ is equivocal but I will continue to use it to avoid confusion). There can be a wide range of ability in the two languages for the ‘middle’ generation and also differing degrees of identification on the part of this generation with either of the languages or cultures. The degree of identification will depend on many factors including the grandparents’ and parents’ ages at the point of entry into the host community. The actual location of the parents’ birth may not be a decisive element in the language dynamics of the family. Secondly, the present age of the participant; middle-aged people were sought, and selected participants ranged in age from mid-thirties to early sixties. This criterion was applied for three reasons: to exclude factors associated with adolescent identity formation, rebellion against parents, experimentation and so on, to take advantage of a ‘longer view’ of life experience and also because it is felt that the very fact of this language question’s persistence – it was of sufficient interest to the participant in middle age to prompt active participation in this study – served to isolate it. I could hardly have asked for participants who had experienced no other problems in their lives.

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The third criterion is a purely practical matter, the interviews needed to be conducted in a language with which both interviewer and interviewee were completely comfortable: for this researcher that meant English.

4.7.1 Consideration of the number of interviews, four, carried out for this research Four participants were selected, initially following guidance on feasible numbers of participants to work with in carrying out IPA offered by Smith et al. (2009). Further guidance was sought as the methodology was adapted. In a paper put out to consultation by the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, ‘How many qualitative interviews is enough?’ (2012) Sarah Baker and Rosalind Edwards present opinions from fourteen wellknown researchers. There is a wide range of estimates, from one to over fifty, but there is some agreement on what constitutes criteria on which to base a decision. Several experts mention the overall purpose of the research and the methodology to be employed in data analysis. Also, the scope of the questions asked: a narrower field of interest allowing fewer interviews. Patricia and Peter Adler propose that the researcher’s own background knowledge may be a factor. Adler & Adler and also Luisa Passerini mention the expectations of the ‘epistemic community’ involved; some disciplines having more rigid guidelines than others could pose a problem for the early career researcher. Bryman suggests that the interviews continue until no new theoretical insights emerge: the theoretical saturation point. This seems problematic from two perspectives: difficulty in being certain that the next interview would not reveal something unforeseen and practical time and money constraints. More than one contributor mentions these. Kathy Charmaz points out that the question, ‘how many is enough’ involves three presuppositions; that number correlates with performance, that there is an answer and that this answer can be agreed upon. Charmaz notes, as does Howard Becker, that the number of interviews required may not be known in advance, but emerge as aspects of the phenomenon under investigation are revealed in successive interviews. She also suggests that ‘Sometimes researchers don’t give themselves credit for observational, archival, and documentary research they have done’ (Charmaz, 2012, p. 22).

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Charles C. Ragin, in a more inductive mode, recommends the researcher ask, in looking at a given piece of data, ‘What kind of whole has a part like this?’ (Ragin, 2012, p. 34). Ragin identifies two key issues: the first is researcher confidence, although this does seem rather unhelpful to the early career researcher who is seeking reassurance upon exactly this point, the second is ‘triangulation’ with ‘what else is known’ either of the specific population under observation or about the more general situation. Ragin’s ‘triangulation’ can be linked to Charmaz’s observation concerning the value of other kinds of research, and to Adler & Adler’s consideration of the researcher’s own background. Daniel Miller’s preference for anthropological observation over interview data could also be construed as a type of triangulation. This factor will be further discussed in Chapter 6, in relation to language and gesture. These points all offer support for confidence in qualitative methodology. They resonate strongly with Straub’s horizons of comparison, which systematize the inclusion of ‘triangulation points’ and make the inductive less vague.

4.8 Background to the participants The four participants1 all meet the criteria outlined for inclusion in the review, but differ in almost every other respect. (All names have been changed to protect anonymity.) Aurelio is a thirty-nine-year-old man from California. His mother, monolingual in English, is American, his father, an English/Spanish bilingual speaker, was born in San Diego of Mexican immigrant parents, he is the eldest of three with two younger sisters. An extended Mexican-American family now lives in California. Dating from his grandfather’s time in Mexico, the family has a serious professional and semiprofessional involvement in boxing. Aurelio participated in this in his youth. Today, Spanish is fully recognized in California and bilingualism is promoted in schools and in the media, this was emphatically not the case when Aurelio was young. Thirty or forty years ago, Mexicans formed an underclass that experienced discrimination at all levels, and the Spanish language was a prime marker of this underclass. Aurelio has lived in

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England for over three years and is in a settled relationship. His parents and grandparents are all still living. Habeeba is a married woman in her thirties with two children, boys, of primary school age at the time of interview. She came to England from Congo as an infant with her mother and she is an only child. Habeeba’s mother’s family had lived in Congo for three generations, her great-grandfather having migrated from a Gujarati-speaking area of North India (before partition into what would today be Pakistan). While retaining some ability to speak Gujarati and regarding it as a heritage language, Swahili was the language of everyday communication for Habeeba’s mother, who as an educated woman also spoke English. Habeeba’s mother subsequently married her stepfather, a Ugandan Asian who spoke Katchee as a first language and also Gujarati and English, but not Swahili. Habeeba’s husband was born in Uganda but came to England from Uganda at the age of six. His family’s first language is Katchee but they also speak Gujarati. Habeeba studied Gujarati in order to speak with her in-laws, even though they could communicate in English, as their culture regarded obliging elders to speak a foreign language as impolite. Habeeba’s husband is a dispensing chemist who started his own business a few years ago. His parents were born in India. His mother, Habeeba’s mother-in-law, died some years ago. The chemist shop is now doing well, after a difficult start, and Habeeba works in the shop and delivers medicine in the community. They own a large house in a quiet neighbourhood where they feel settled and secure. Julietta, the oldest of the participants, is in her early sixties. Her parents were Italian and her father, who died approximately four years before the time of interview, first came to England as a prisoner of war in the 1940s. Her father developed a very good relationship with his war-time employer, a farmer in the East of England, which continued throughout their lives. Both parents, her mother a woman ten years younger than her husband from his native village, worked as agricultural and horticultural labourers and, after a hysterectomy made heavy work impossible, her mother also ran a small corner shop. Julietta is the eldest of three with one brother and one sister. Her sister is married with children and lives in the same town as Julietta and their eighty-year-old mother. Her brother, who developed his own very successful accountancy business, lives in the USA. Julietta is divorced from her British husband and has no children. She has worked all her life, for an extended time as a clerk with British Rail, and then with refugees and asylum seekers.

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Marie, a woman in her thirties, was born in France and has been living in London for the past eighteen years. Her father is French, her mother French-Polish from a long-standing Polish community in Eastern France. Her maternal grandfather was taken prisoner of war while fighting in the French army early in World War II. He met and married her grandmother, who was apparently Polish-Latvian (this is unclear, the grandmother refused to discuss it) when they were held in the same POW camp in Germany and this was where her mother was born. Marie’s mother had never visited Poland, although she retained a Polish passport until her marriage. As a child, Marie lived with her parents and both sets of grandparents in the same rural area of France. The fact that her mother was of Polish extraction was common knowledge, though nothing in Marie’s appearance, given name or way of speaking would have distinguished her from other children. Marie is married to an Italian, they have no children. She speaks French, English and Italian. She now teaches French at a British university. In summary, the four participants represent a broad range of backgrounds and life experience. Aged from early thirties to early sixties with families from Europe, Africa/Asia and the Americas, they are single, divorced, married with and without children. They have all experienced discrimination from majority communities. Habeeba is the most visibly different from her majority community, followed by Aurelio. Julietta’s given name may distinguish her as not English; it would take independent knowledge to distinguish Marie from the majority French community. Habeeba, Julietta and Marie’s families have migration backgrounds in which escape from armed conflict was the chief impetus; Aurelio’s family migrated for economic reasons. All were exposed to some of their parents’ first language in early childhood, all functioned mainly in the majority community language from at least school age, and all made some attempt to (re-) learn the parents’ language in adulthood, with mixed results. These commonalities were not sought in the original criteria but emerged from the interviews.

4.9 Ethics and practical approach Participants’ agreement was obtained in accordance with ethics committee regulations. I carried out face-to-face interviews, at locations chosen by the

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participant, in all but one case this was the participant’s home. No one else was present during the interviews, which were audio-recorded using an unobtrusive device. It was felt that video-recording would inhibit the participants. Interviews were semiformal in that an interview schedule was drawn up in advance (Appendix 2); however, after initial questions relating to family situation, the interview was participant-led in that the interviewee was encouraged to develop the thoughts that occurred to him/her without interference. As the participant relaxed, the interviews developed in the manner of a conversation, interviewees also asked questions of both a general and personal nature on the topic of family languages, which were answered. My aim was to encourage the participants to feel that we were exploring the topic together, rather than feeling like the object of intrusive scrutiny. Interviews lasted from one hour to an hour and a half. I have had subsequent informal contact with participants, either meetings or emails, which gave opportunities for follow up enquiry. Interviews were transcribed in their entirety, using modified transcription criteria (Appendix 1). They were then summarized in accordance with the formulating procedure outlined earlier. Themes were then identified within each interview. These emergent themes were compared and common factors identified. While the researcher’s thinking on these themes was not overtly shared with any participant, some ideas were tested in informal follow-up contacts.

4.10 Review of analytical procedures followed It is useful at this point to review this somewhat complex set of analytical procedures taking an example theme and tracing elements of its emergence and interpretation. Blame/resentment, mentioned in Chapter 5 as a heading for analysis, though not as a major focus, will serve to illustrate the process. The first stage of analysis, similar in Smith’s and Straub’s methodologies, is to examine the transcripts separately, to restate without adding or subtracting. Once the researcher is reasonably certain that what was actually said has been clearly understood, aspects that the participant stresses, highlights or repeatedly returns to are identified. In the case of blame/resentment, at this stage not yet so labelled, briefly,

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• Aurelio tends to self-criticism; in reference to his exaggeration of a ‘Mexican’ appearance – long hair and moustache – in his late teens, he rationalizes, ‘I guess it was my own (0.1) weak grasp of trying to be an individual.’ At several points, he uses the word ‘reprimand’, people ‘reprimand’ him for his lack of fluency in Spanish. This suggests he is in some way blameworthy. Conversely, he expresses anger in this regard, he wants to tell people, ‘It’s not my fault. My father chose not to speak Spanish to me, it wasn’t because I asked him not to speak Spanish.’ • Habeeba does not express regret or assign blame for her situation. Anxieties centre around questions of wider cultural acceptance/exclusion, but language is a central feature here. With some humour and a little pity, Habeeba describes her mother’s reaction to the realization that her daughter was ‘English’. She, ‘had a panic attack when I was about ten, and ()“Oh my god! She’s not going to know anything about our culture” ’. The mother’s attempts to remedy this include language classes (which the child rejects due to their unfamiliar teaching methods), cooking classes and enforced viewing of Indian films. These anxieties re-emerge at the time of Habeeba’s marriage; however, although Habeeba finds her introduction into her husband’s family difficult, no suggestion of blame is imputed either to herself or her mother. • Julietta’s narrative is dominated by stress on practical hardship and necessity. The oldest participant, she is at the greatest distance in time from childhood experience; she intellectualizes and occasionally contradicts herself. ‘And I think Mum and Dad, half-conscious, said, er, “If you’re going to do well in school here, it’s better you start school in English” ’. This can be seen as justification for her parents’ not insisting on a bilingual upbringing. A little further on, Julietta assumes responsibility; ‘They did try and encourage us to speak, but I was always shy about making mistakes … So I was probably the hold-up’. Similar expressions appear in the transcript, usually followed by expression of regret, excused by the need to ‘work hard’ to integrate with the host community and get on in life. • Marie is quite definite about her feelings, she declares that ‘something was stolen from me’. Her Polish-speaking mother clearly favoured a bilingual up-bringing, and her French-speaking father seems to have been sympathetic to this. However, her French grandparents, in particular her

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grandmother, fear that this will put the children at a disadvantage. They ‘forbid’ her mother to speak to the children in Polish and their influence is evidently such as to make the prohibition enforceable. The next stage in the analysis is to compare transcripts, searching for commonalities and contrasts. The theme of blame is not one of the first that becomes apparent to the researcher. The initial interview schedule does not anticipate it; this, in all probability, might be explained by too narrow a focus in the initial research question, ‘how is the person affected’ in daily life. However, bringing in a ‘common-sense’ perspective, when something is perceived as a problem, or generally problematic, explanations are usually sought and frequently expressed as causes. When persons, or people, are identified as part of the explanation/cause of a problem, then it follows that blame attaches to them, which, in turn, can be excused through a more dispassionate consideration of their motivations. This process is evident in the data for Aurelio, Julietta and Marie, summarized earlier, and conspicuous by its absence from that for Habeeba. Over repeated readings and comparisons, blame emerges as a theme, but it is not simply straightforward assignment of responsibility to another person and the split heading ‘blame/resentment’ is decided upon. At this point, the other horizons of comparison may be brought to bear. A factor in HoC 4, interpreter’s everyday knowledge, is evident both prior to the interviews and after the analytical process so far: the researcher feels (slightly) guilty over her own children’s loss of contact with their father’s first language and knows that they have blamed her for this. The scope defined for this research restricts the analysis to recognition of this fact. Turning to HoC 2, further scientific knowledge, we encounter one of the restrictions on the current researcher as interpreter; consideration of blame, resentment or feelings of guilt from the perspective of individual psychology is outside both the scope of the research, particularly as represented to the participants prior to obtaining their consent, and beyond the expertise of the researcher. Therefore, the analysis must not attempt to analyse these areas, but simply state the findings. However, the work of Timotijevic and Breakwell, and that of Zielke and Straub is relevant in this regard and is discussed in Chapter 6.

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HoC 3, imaginative, literary and utopian sources are under none of the restrictions mentioned earlier. Atta flings vehement resentment at his mother for not having brought him up bilingual, Karpovsky whines that his mother’s English is insufficient for him to communicate complex matters to her. Kerouac blames himself for having ‘Englishized’ himself as a high school student. Derrida wrestles with language and origin, and his own identity through successive metaphors, some featuring violent appropriation of an anthropomorphized French language, in explication of the koan-like ‘my language, not my own’. Thus, the four horizons of comparison provide justification for identification of ‘blame/resentment’ as a component of the target population’s experience of inability to fully share PL1, and this category’s inclusion as part of the answer to my overarching research question.

4.11 Summary In as much as the aim here is to examine language attrition from the point of view not of what remains but of the effects of what is absent, standard methodologies in applied linguistics did not meet the needs of the study. However, the field being essentially interdisciplinary in outlook, the perspectives of other disciplines can legitimately be mobilized in the construction of an organizing methodology. As I wished to focus on the feelings of the participants, theory and methodology in psychology were examined. The danger of trespassing onto areas the researcher is not equipped to evaluate, those concerning psychology’s primary focus, which is addressing mental distress, was soon recognized. Cross-cultural psychology, which takes a viewpoint closer to the spirit of anthropological investigation, provided a theoretical and methodological grounding for the analysis of the interview data gathered for this study. The effect of the researcher on the participants, of interviewer on interviewee, has been very thoroughly examined in psychology and psychiatry. This is fully taken into account by Straub in his system of horizons of comparison. Another primary focus being to examine the possible roles of language in the maintenance and evolution of cultural identity in migrants and people of a

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migrant background, to borrow Zielke and Straub’s phrase, the perspective of cultural memory studies was also recruited. It was noted that the attitudes of oral historians in interpreting the reported memories of their informants, in that they take into account not primarily what is reported to have happened but why it is remembered in particular ways, displays the nuance of psychological approaches without the clinical overtones: a more humanities-oriented attitude. Aligning perspectives to include insights on language acquisition and attrition, cultural memory and individual memory of lived experience of language contact and shift, Straub’s system of Interpretive Sequential Analysis was adapted to meet the requirements of the current study. While the participants in the study are ‘used’ as informants and their memories abstracted for analysis, the basic attitude adopted was one of exploring lived experience in conversation.

5

Findings 5.1 Introduction Interview data are presented in three sections: first, a summary of the main points for each interview; second, identification of five themes that emerge across the four interviews, followed by a summary of data from each interview which relates to each theme; third, a cross-comparison of the four interviews and the ways in which the five emergent themes are expressed in each. There is some overlapping of data between parts one and two. These two steps are presented separately, in order that the analysis be performed, in line with both Straub’s methodology and Smith’s recommendations. This allows the researcher to give sufficient consideration to each interview to avoid the danger of imposition of a hypothesis onto the data.

5.2 Summaries of the primary interviews 5.2.1 Aurelio The interview took place in a private room at Aurelio’s place of work. He seems rather stiff but not unduly nervous. The first questions establish his place of birth in Northern California but that he was brought up in his father’s place of birth, San Diego. The scheduled question on his parents’ first languages proves a little difficult. A: My father’s, um, well both, they’re both (.) my father’s first language is I don’t know if it’s his first language because his parents’ first language are::my grandparents’ first language is Spanish. On my father’s side. S: [Right

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A: [Um So he had he spoke both in the house um: but he spoke (.) predominantly Spanish in the house while my mother was just (.) English. It wasn’t she doesn’t speak Spanish, actually.

His two younger sisters have less ability in Spanish than he does. We go on to the subject of Spanish in the California schools when Aurelio was a child, where his physical appearance and given and family names clearly identify Aurelio as coming from a Mexican family. He recounts that this has always led to confusion of expectation of his language abilities. He is suddenly reminded of a particular incident in which a Hispanic stranger in a car calls to him, in Spanish, for directions and he is forced to admit that he is unable to give them in Spanish. At this point his speech becomes faster and loses strict grammaticality. We talk about his life in England and the fact that his appearance and given name do not immediately suggest to British interlocutors that he has a Mexican heritage or might be supposed to speak Spanish. In the course of this conversation Aurelio mentions that he has worked as a bartender then seems defensive about this. The interviewer shares the information that she had worked in bars as a student. This amuses Aurelio; we briefly discuss my own life in America after which Aurelio visibly relaxes. We return to the topic of the status of the Mexican-American in California when Aurelio was a child and teenager. His experience was atypical in that, due to his father’s success and his mother’s ethnicity. He went to private grade schools and the family lived in a predominantly white, middle-class neighbourhood; the sort of place, he says, where Mexicans are employed to cut the lawns. He was not much aware of any discrimination as a child, but as teenager, he experienced some mild police harassment due to his appearance. A: Yeah, and it wasn’t really, it was never really that bad (0.1) I did notice as I got older, um it was more () it was more with the police. Than it was with anything. S: Mm A: Um (0.1) and (.) I got pulled over once or twice and, because I was used to surf and I was very dark and I was always outside, um so you know (.) and my hair was also very long, I grew my hair quite long (.) and I looked like (.) just like a dirty Mexican and um so (.) I had a moustache as well ((smiles)) which also made me look even more Mexican.

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He relates that he cut his hair and shaved before moving to Alabama at the age of twenty-two, in the expectation of further discrimination. In high school, state school now rather than private, friends’ parents were often wary of him until they heard him speak (good, unaccented American English) and came to appreciate that he was very well-mannered; a fact he attributes this to his Mexican heritage (further discussed later). He recalls, with evident pleasure, life among his Mexican aunts and uncles and his great admiration for his father’s father (still living at the time of interview). Asked about the reactions of Spanish speakers when they discover that they have made mistaken assumptions about his language abilities, Aurelio says ‘Generally, they get angry.’ He can produce an authentic accent when saying ‘No hablo Español’, people can presume that he is mocking them or their own language abilities. At times ‘They reprimand me.’ And accuse him of not being ‘proud of your culture’. The word ‘reprimand’ is used in this regard three times in the interview. Increasingly, as he got older, this sort of reaction made Aurelio angry. But ‘I didn’t know if I should be angry at my father. For never speaking Spanish to me. Ah, angry at myself, for taking the Spanish classes I did in high school and not really kind of capitalising on the opportunity.’ Here Aurelio had been using the present tense but switches to the past. The statement that his father ‘never spoke Spanish to me’, seems to contradict what he had said earlier about his father using predominantly Spanish in the house. Slightly later, ‘It’s not my fault. My father chose not to speak Spanish with me; it wasn’t because I asked him not to speak Spanish.’ Between these two statements, he mentions again the (superior) Mexican cultural values with which he had been raised. Following the second, he returns to the subject of his respect for his grandfather. Asked if his lack of ability in Spanish has ever been a problem for him, he first talks about students in Spain, where he taught English for two years, but implies that this is trivial stuff, ‘Da da da “Why don’t you learn?” ’; he then recalls a more serious incident. ‘I was actually hired one time because of my name. They thought I spoke Spanish.’ He recalls the embarrassing result of this with real vehemence, his speech becoming more rapid and louder as the details return to him. He then immediately repeats that he blames himself for not applying himself to the Spanish lessons in high school. The interviewer summarizes this, then risks the following:

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S: Er, were you, I’m just sort of um (.) theorising, here. When you were in high school, and you had the family round you, and the Spanish lessons, and you still (.) pushed it to one side, I was wondering if awareness of the fact that the Mexican-American is a lower status [than A: [((coughs)) S: [the (.) another kind of American, do you think that that was preying on your mind?

Aurelio, after some hesitation but not showing signs of stress, admits that in the past he had rejected chances to maintain or acquire Spanish due to societal attitudes towards Mexican-Americans. The interview closes with some general talk about Aurelio’s current concerns. He seems happy and relaxed.

5.2.2 Habeeba: The interview took place at Habeeba’s home: No one else is at home at the time Habeeba is only a little tense as the recorder is started. She begins with some generally ‘intellectualizing’ remarks on language and culture and states that she learned what she has referred to as ‘her’ language almost as a second language. She then suddenly recalls that her mother had sent her to language classes at one time but ‘I was awful, and I just gave up.’ We then discuss the complex language backgrounds of her mother and stepfather, which are not untypical of Asians who after several generations in Africa were driven from their homes by the wars of the 1970s. This is detailed below. As the only child of a single parent in North London, away from other minority populations, Habeeba grows up hearing other languages only occasionally. She speaks rapid, expressive and idiomatic cockney. She mentions some school bullying on the grounds of appearance, but quickly counters this with positive memories. She only began to speak ‘her’ language after she married and had to speak to her mother-in-law. She returns to her mother’s having sent her to language class: H: And then she had a panic attack when I was about ten, and () ‘Oh my God! She’s not going to know anything about our culture and’ She sent me to cooking classes; oh it was funny! So funny to … now if I think about it; oh my God, she really did have a panic attack when she started to make me watch

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Indian films. I used to watch it () didn’t understand a word but I think for her, again, it was holding on to some form of culture, so ((chuckles, a bit sadly))

We agree that her parents’ generation had a very difficult time, Habeeba says ‘it was just muddling through’. Then Habeeba without prompting continues H: So, ironically, with my kids I thought they would speak the language, we () encouraged them. We all just speak our language now when we don’t want the kids to understand.

She says her ability has decreased since her mother-in-law died, over two years before the time of interview. At this point, approximately ten minutes into the interview, I ask directly which language she is referring to when she says ‘my language’. H: Gujarati – I don’t even say it how it’s meant to be said. It’s supposed to be gu-ja-ra-ti ((retroflex r & t)) I say ‘gujerati’.

It becomes clear that this is a lingua franca in the family: her in-laws’ (born in India), husband’s (born in Uganda) and her stepfather’s first language being Katchee. Her mother’s first language is, effectively, Swahili, the majority community language in the area in which she grew up, which her stepfather cannot speak, but of which Habeeba understands a few words. All, including the mother-in-law, speak good English. Habeeba learned her Gujarati for cultural reasons: SS: Uh-huh. (.) So you, you learnt Gujarati in order to communicate with your (.) in-laws? H: Yes. That’s why my mother was keen for me to learn Gujarati, she says ‘It’s not going to be like living at home, you know! A lot of them will expect you to learn a lang … you have to speak the mother-tongue’. It’s also seen as disrespectful to speak English in front of elderly people.

There are mixed assumptions packed into this statement. ‘It’s not going to be like living at home, you know!’ carries both motherly concern and underlying threat. ‘A lot of them [this was from a time before Habeeba’s eventual in-law family was known] expect you to learn a language.’ This sounds like foreign language learning, but, ‘you have to speak the mother tongue’; which ‘tongue’ is not specified. Furthermore, it is English that is the problem language; Gujarati

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is no more her in-laws’ ‘mother tongue’ than English is; centuries of cultural history are sensed behind this. The first few months of married life were ‘Terrible, absolutely terrible … I was so quiet just feeling I didn’t want to say anything, ’cause I knew I’d mess it up … But at least I made the effort, you know.’1 The information just summarized was actually delivered in Habeeba’s habitual style; rapid speech, rapidly jumping from topic to topic, repeating or returning to a previous point as it occurs to her. It seems unforced – the ideas examined as they tumble out, set aside and then picked up again in a cheerful and engaging manner. We move on to the topic of others’ perceptions of ethnicity and language. Habeeba notes a family history of being misperceived; they are not accepted in Africa even though her grandfather was born in the Congo. ‘That’s the thing, we can’t relate to India, but we look Indian (.) we like Indian things, but, I think, so do people who aren’t Indian like Indian things, so.’ I remind her of a very unpleasant incident that she had told me about on a previous occasion, when a man used racially abusive language to her in the public library and she had told him off in no uncertain terms. She says she is quite used to being taken for Pakistani, due to her appearance and dress. In a lengthy and fluent utterance she describes people’s shock on meeting her in person when previously they have only spoken on the telephone. Also, an incident in the supermarket when, on hearing her carry out a fluent colloquial exchange with an acquaintance at the checkout, the clerk shyly observes, ‘You’re just like an English girl, you are.’ This reminds her that elderly customers to whom she delivers goods from her husband’s pharmacy will say H: ‘You’re just like one of us, aren’t you?’ And I’ve had a customer actually touch me and say, ‘You’re just like one of us.’ Touching my face. SS: An elderly person? H: Yeah, an elderly person, seventies stroke eighties. SS: Uh-huh. H: And that’s bizarre, but some way I get a kick out of it, ’cause I think well it sort of breaks down stereotypes? So, I quite enjoy it.

She contrasts this sharply with her interactions with the Urdu-speaking Pakistani population. This is the only time in the interview that Habeeba seems really angry.

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H: Pakistani people, like I’ll go to the butchers, Pakistani chap, and they all speak to me in English. They speak to each other in Punjabi/Urdu and they’ll go, ‘Why don’t you speak Urdu?’ and I’ll go ‘Because that’s not actually my mother tongue.’ and they said, ‘But you’re Indian.’ And I go ‘Yeah, but’. They don’t seem to have a knowledge.

She is challenged on cultural and on religious grounds, in relation to Urdu and Punjabi or Arabic, even though the local mosque no longer has exclusively Urdu-speaking priests and she reads the Koran in translation. She reports that she feels like a foreigner among Pakistani friends, but not among English ones. H: erm (.) the Asian people expect you to speak an Asian language and they expect you to speak their language, whether it be Punjabi, Urdu or Gujarati, erm (0.1) Yeah, there is that expectation. And they, if you don’t speak their language, they say, oh you’re, you’re English, you are, you’re English ((slightly pejorative)) they always say that, ‘You’re English, you are.’

Habeeba says she sees no need for her two small sons to learn an Asian language, although she had at first. Recalling her own mother’s motivation, says her case is different because, ‘I don’t have a “back home”; this is home to me, so (.) I think our, we’ve got completely different objectives to why do we want our children to know.’ However, when I mention that my own sons are upset with me for not keeping up their Japanese, she recounts a rather disturbing trend: H: I () if my kids will talk like that when they’re, later on? My son, you see, my son is very, very well spoken he sounds like someone who’s gone to private school very, very good English. His grammar is brilliant. And he gets comments, he goes to King’s School at the moment and he gets comments by the other (.) Pakistani children, at King’s, who say, ‘You’re very posh (.) is one of your parents, are one of your parents (.) white?’ They’ll be asked, and they’ll say, ‘Why do you speak so posh?’ And the English children say ‘Why do you speak so posh?’ And he goes, ‘Mummy, am I posh?’ And I say, ‘No, you’re well spoken.’ Unlike me! ((laughs)) … H: He plays cricket, he’s not posh … but he plays cricket and all the children, or a lot – the majority of the children that play are Pakistani background so they all spoke in Urdu at home and then learnt English, so they’ve got quite an accent when they speak English.

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SS: Mm H: And because his name isn’t traditionally Indian, he’s got a Bosnian name ((SS doesn’t want to break the flow by asking)) because it’s not traditionally Indian, they say, erm for example, not Indian, sorry, he hasn’t got a Muslim name, his name’s not Mohammed or Ali, so they’ll, they’ll say to him, ‘Oh you’re not a Muslim!’ You’ve not got a Muslim name and you don’t speak like a Muslim, i.e., with a Pakistani accent. I always say to him, ‘That’s their problem. That’s not your problem.’

This child, at eleven, seems to have inherited his mother’s positive outlook and sense of humour; he calls the bullies ‘chavs’ and tells them he’s Jewish.

5.2.3 Julietta The interview takes place in Julietta’s home. She is very tense and nervous; the informal and conversational aspects of the exercise are stressed. We begin with family background and the story of how her father, conscripted into the Italian army in World War II, is taken prisoner in North Africa and eventually arrives, with a small group of other POWs, in East Anglia and is put to work on a farm. The only negative memory her father related of those times was that he was obliged to wear a jacket with a symbol on the back to alert locals. He got on well with the farmer, however, forming a life-long friendship with him and his family; he eventually settled in the area. He returned to his home in Calabria after the war only to marry, immediately bringing his wife back to East Anglia. The deciding factors in this decision were the poor post-war economic situation in Calabria coupled with the fact that the farmer he had worked for as a POW had offered him a permanent job and tied cottage. Julietta reports that her parents had initially planned to remain in England for only ten years, but stayed due to continuing poor prospects in Italy. The farm was in an isolated area but there were a number of Italian ex-POWs in the area, who had decided to stay on, although none in the village where the family lived. Julietta does not remember there having been any other Italian children in her primary school class. Julietta was born in the first year of their marriage and, as her mother would have spoken no English at that time, she supposes that she must have heard and spoken Italian in the first years of her life; however, she retains no specific memory of this, or of her parents ever having, ‘sat me down and … taught

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me Italian’. She has a brother who is four years younger and a sister ten years younger than her. By the time of her sister’s birth, Julietta is sure that the language used at home was almost exclusively English. J:

And I think Mum and Dad, half-conscious, said, er, ‘If you’re going to do well in school here, it’s better you start school with English.’ SS: Right, a lot of people think that way-yeah. J: Er, whereas if I was fluent in Italian between, I don’t know, being born and going to school, maybe when I got to school – this was their thinking – when I got to school I would be a bit behind the English children, because I had this second language interference. SS: Yeah, a lot of, er J: I know Mum and Dad made a conscious thing about our level of English was important for when we start school but they did try and encourage us to speak-me ’cause I was the eldest-but I was always shy about making mistakes, and being embarrassed. So I was probably the hold-up, in not being fluent … hhh

There is confusion and contradiction here. ‘Half-conscious’ becomes, ‘a conscious thing’ and now there is apparent awareness of ‘second language interference’. Having previously said she did not remember using Italian at home, Julietta now states that ‘they did try and encourage us to speak’, but, ‘I was probably the hold-up.’ Julietta seems to feel it necessary to both excuse and rehabilitate her parents as teachers of L1 and L2. She intellectualises the situation, ‘second language interference’, and takes responsibility for thwarting efforts to maintain Italian, but with the excuse of being shy about making mistakes. She then jumps ahead many decades to compare her own childhood with that of a bilingual colleague. J: I was talking to M. C. about this, and I think she said that since she speaks fluent Italian, er: but I think her Mum and Dad the household was () so she’d probably go home and the whole conversation was Italian, where they spoke Italian to her and she spoke Italian to them. Whereas in my household, Mum and Dad would speak English and when they did speak Italian, I’d probably reply in English. ((chuckles))

Julietta does not actually report what M.C. said, but proposes a probable situation. The elements of blame and responsibility are then reshuffled between herself and her parents.

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Both parents worked in agriculture and horticulture, at first on farms, then for a packing factory and a plant nursery; this meant that the family could move into town. Her mother was able eventually to open a small corner shop where she sold Italian foods: a great novelty in the 1950s. Throughout the interview Julietta returns to the theme of hard work, stressing the long hours and physical nature of her father’s various jobs. There were occasional trips to Italy but the family could rarely travel all together. Julietta recalls a holiday with relatives on which she was allowed to bring a school friend but does not go into detail. She also recalls a friend coming home to tea at which Italian food was served, and demanding to have egg and chips made for her. Asked directly whether she remembers feeling in anyway different as a child, Julietta replies firmly, ‘I don’t remember.’ However, she immediately becomes pensive and distant, not listening to the interviewer’s phatic interjections and, after repeating ‘I don’t remember’ four times more, recalls an incident in her mother’s shop when a child whose request her mother had refused told her ‘Go home you bloody foreigner!’ She supposed that this sort of thing was not uncommon but that it was casual and unthinking, ‘because you were the Iytie, the foreigners …’ Asked whether she had ever taken classes in Italian, Julietta becomes uncharacteristically terse: SS: J: SS: J: SS: J: SS: J:

Mm. And have you ever tried to relearn? Yeah. Have you? I went to Italian classes. Really, when did you do that? Ah: (0.2) in my twenties, or something … So, quite early on. ((mumbles)) twenty-two () something like that (0.1) But then, what stopped me, I think, just your own life’s so busy. And, where would I use Italian, anyway? ((chuckles)) Just in Italy and, and It’s very important, ’cause, um … SS: You’ve had your parents with you, for (.) your mother’s still, er J: Mm SS: Would you ever, when you speak to your parents, do you mix Italian and English, or is it mostly English, or …? J: English. (0.3) It’s a regret, now, I think.

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The theme of regret is also a recurring one, prominent in the recorded interview and at other times. Usually in close proximity of the excusing theme of hard work and being busy. J: That’s very, I like to say, it is a regret ah, that I’m not fluent in Italian. That I didn’t take the opportunities that were actually under my roof. And: so it is a regret, but I think when you’re young you’re busy with the here and now.

Julietta also couples her ability to speak some Italian with responsibility that devolves on her, perhaps also as the eldest, for keeping up ties with the family in Italy. Her brother is ‘so busy’ and ‘seems to have cut ties’. Her sister travels ‘for cultural reasons … but I think because of her lack of language? Remain in contact with the relatives is not so easy. So, the last time my sister went for a family visit, I can’t remember.’ Whereas when Julietta visits Italy, J: Yeah. It’s generally family. Which is good and bad ((chuckles)) ’Cause you want a holiday to relax from work, and enjoy the sights and erm you plan to see one or two relatives, ah, but if you go and see those one or two, the other one or two that you don’t see …

Julietta feels that both siblings would describe themselves as English but that she hesitates to do so. After the interview we go to lunch at a café, Julietta says, ‘If I was a real Italian, I would have made you lunch at my house’: only halfjoking. The interview closes on wider themes of regret. Julietta reports a conversation with her father that had taken place as he was sitting in the same chair in which I am now sitting. J:

(.) About three months before Dad died, ’cause sometimes I’d pick him up and bring him here for coffee and a walk round the garden … And, of course he’d talk about his little war-day experiences, but always the good times. ‘Oh, did I ever tell you?’, ‘Yeah, Dad you told me about a hundred times’, But you were pleased to listen to the story again and again. But one day, ‘It’s all gone wrong, you know.’ (imitates father’s sad voice) I says, ‘What d’you mean it’s all gone wrong, Dad?’ um: he says ‘When we came here’, he says ‘it was for the better life, you know, for us and better life for the children, than we would have had if we’d stayed in Calabria.’ SS: Mm J: I says, ‘Well, that’s happened, Dad. You and Mum worked very hard, and look at R ((brother)) couldn’t ask for a better success than that!’ I

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said, ‘I’m a lecturer at a college and my sister’s got a good job’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t just about that. Yes, of course, you’ve all done very well.’ He says ‘We came here so that we’d have a better life and you and your brother and sister grew up together and then your children’s and your brother’s children would grow up together and your cousin’s children’, and he says, ‘that’s all gone wrong.’ So that’s () that’s the society that’s changed, unfortunately. So, that was my father’s three months before he died. ((J looks a little tearful))

Working hard or being busy is mentioned twelve times in the context of explaining why language and/or family connections have not been maintained. Regret is mentioned six times in the interview but more frequently in unrecorded conversation.

5.2.4 Marie Marie seems nervous and looks very tired. She says she has been overworking. The interview takes place at her home, in London. Marie is from Eastern France, where there was a well-established Polish presence associated with the coal mines. Her father is French. Her mother’s background is complicated as her Polish grandparents seem to have migrated several times. Her grandfather had been in France before World War II. He joined the French army but was quickly captured by the Germans. Her grandmother, who had been living in a Russian-speaking part of Latvia, met her grandfather in a German prisoner of war camp, but Marie is unclear how she came to be there as she refused to talk about it. The grandparents spent the war as POWs; ‘it’s funny, because they had kind of happy memories. Because they were working in the countryside, in the farm, um and people treated them really nicely’. Marie’s mother was born in a post-war refugee camp and the family eventually returned to where the grandfather had been living in France; more children were born and the family maintained Polish as their first language. Marie has an older brother, a younger brother and a younger sister. She recalls happy visits with their grandparents, aunts and uncles: M: When we used to go like visit all during the holiday: um, the language was Polish, although we didn’t speak it, it didn’t matter ((laughs)) it was Polish so we were just struggling and saying some Polish and French when

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we didn’t, you know, when we could say, but when we were born, er, my grandparents look after us, me and my other brother, two years older than me. And we spent quite a lot of time at our grandparents’ home, and we were spoken in Polish all the [time:

Marie believes that her mother had always intended her children to be brought up as bilingual; however, when her elder brother reached school age, her French grandparents, her grandmother in particular, who had never been happy that her son had married a woman with a Polish background, became worried about the possible effect on his education. They ‘forbade my mother to speak to us in Polish. Um: well, in my view () It was in seventies, it was in France, where: bilingualism was considered as a: handicap.’ Not being able to speak and write French properly or mixing the languages would have been ‘an embarrassment’. Marie reports that she had been aware of a background of discrimination against the Poles in the area and, although nothing about her name or appearance suggested she was not 100 per cent French, the village was small and people would have known her mother was Polish. Her father did not entirely share his mother’s worries and the prohibition was not strictly enforced: M: … I think my mum, and even my dad, wanted us to feel Polish, as well; to have this Polish identity. So we were sent to camp, er, well Polish summer camp, as well. So, like things we were doing, although we were not speaking Polish at home, things like prayers were in Polish, SS: Oh. M: Um: we used, sometimes to go to Polish mass, and: (0.1) yeah () we had just like, they wanted us just to have this identity. Um, and we used to go to Polish, Polish, er, well we had, like Polish things in our lives. Er, food, and er

Marie’s mother was involved in organizing the camp, which also accepted French children. She recalls feeling envious of other children’s Polish language abilities, which were praised by her mother. M: … She didn’t mean to be bad or anything. So they were praised for their Polish and I thought, I’m not speaking Polish, that’s not fair. And I think that’s when I realised that, and because it was like a Polish camp so like you were more (.) legitimate, in a way SS: It’s what you remember, [so

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M: [Exactly, exactly. You knew more, like things like, you knew the food, you knew more than the non-Polish children. So, I think I felt () going to this camp I felt, it’s good to be oh yeah, I felt something positive about being Polish.

However, the idea that Polish was something to be embarrassed about persisted. In a vocabulary lesson in elementary school, M: … I remember once I said a word and nobody knew in the class, SS: [Mm, M: And I thought’ Oh, I said something in Polish. And I didn’t realise, actually it was a French word, but that also made me more, maybe self-conscious

Later, in high school, M: … that was, er, very posh, ah, lycée. And obviously you had to be, everybody was very French, very posh, ah at this time I started to be ashamed to be, of having a Polish mum, so we were very conscious about that.

Marie is aware that her mother suffered severe discrimination in the past, which is still painful to her. As she grew older, Marie’s mother began to revert to speaking only Polish with her brothers and sisters. She did not attempt to (re)learn Polish, but does not feel bad about this. She is, however, angry about being denied the possibility to grow up naturally bilingual. M: Yeah … I feel um, maybe I have strong word but I feel that this has been like stolen from me, in a way, something that, maybe, I was entitled to have. Somebody forbade it to happen and took it away, obviously my French grandmother, er ((slight laugh)) Yes, I have this feeling and I sometimes have this feel of anger, um:: yeah, yeah.

She still enjoys the company of her extended Polish family at parties that feature traditional ‘late nights and drinking a lot and singing and playing music’.

5.3 Emergent themes: These are themes found to be common to some extent to all interviews Next, each theme is briefly defined, then the themes traced through each interview. As a final step, the four interviews are compared.

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5.3.1 Inauthenticity/imposture Inauthenticity will be defined as feelings of not truly belonging to a given group, imposture as a feeling occasioned by others’ resentment on finding the person is not what had been assumed, as if a deliberate deception were being practised.

5.3.2 Ambivalence Feelings of ambivalence towards either language or either community may not necessarily constitute a negative as they may be interpreted as widening choice.

5.3.3 Blame/Resentment Resentment: feelings of inauthenticity/imposture may give rise to resentment and the assignment of blame. This blame may be directed towards the parents, for not having sufficiently promoted bilingualism’ towards the self, for not having learned the language; or towards those who occasion feelings of imposture. Typically, some combination, or all, of these types of blame are observed and all give rise to frustration and anger.

5.3.4 Change over time One of the main reasons for choosing to interview middle-aged or older people was to have the possibility of examining their reflections on life experience from the perspective of the elapse of decades.

5.3.5 Feelings of participation Feelings of genuine participation in the use of the ‘lost’ language are associated with more positive phenomena, the opposite of feelings of inauthenticity: occasions or situations in which the individual feels a valid member of the group through participation in a speech act. Although not explored in interviews for this study, Claire Kramsch’s observation that retained trace elements of PL1 can acquire ‘symbolic value through childhood experience words which, like the spells in fairy tales … have performative power’ (Kramsch, 2009, p. 13) may well apply here.

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5.3.6 Inauthenticity/imposture Aurelio: Feelings of inauthenticity/imposture centre on the expectations that Aurelio’s name and physical appearance set up in interlocutors, and his actual inability to speak Spanish. This extract from near the beginning of the interview is illustrative. Previously, Aurelio had talked about changes in California in favour of bilingual education. He viewed this as positive and seemed relaxed in talking about it. S: You said, when you were a kid, there was more separation of Spanish and English in California. Um, tell me about what that was like, what er school … A: Um. It varied, because sometimes it was quite difficult because, because I did look, because I have darker skin, and brown hair, brown eyes, um, and a name, my name is actually ((redacted)) so people call me ((redacted unusual diminutive)) um but there was a very odd name and um, so people who did speak Spanish, even up until ah, actually I could say throughout my entire life even when I moved here, cause I lived in Spain, first, people approach me and start speaking in Spanish. And people ask me to pull over on the side of the road, in California, and ask me directions in Spanish. And my Spanish is [ah

The information about his appearance and given name were obviously things he had explained in the past, but he became noticeably more tense as he went on, and from the grammatically incorrect ‘was’ the utterance becomes muddled and difficult to follow. It was delivered quite rapidly, almost in one breath, and with a severe facial expression. He jumps in time from his high school days to a more recent period in Spain and back to California. It is unclear whether the final part about being asked directions on the side of the road refers to his younger or more recent self. The very public nature of that kind of exchange, being addressed by a (male) Hispanic stranger in Spanish on the basis of his appearance and being obliged to declare that he did not speak Spanish, and was therefore not an in-group member, seems to have engendered a lasting resentment. Later in the interview we return to this theme: S: Ah (.) let’s bring us back to the language. You said people address you in Spanish and, when they don’t know because you’re er … What is their reaction when er you have to say you’re sorry you [don’t

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A: [Sometimes they get (.) angry. Generally they get angry, I mean depending on who they are. I mean the (.) If I try, and I say in Spanish ‘No hablo Inglés, No hablo Español’, which is ‘I can’t speak Spanish’ S: Mm hm A: Then they might look at me question questioningly saying S: Are you taking the mick? A: Yeah, exactly, because I can have the accent. When I say words I can actually pronounce them correctly but um at other times people reprimand me (.) ‘Why aren’t you, why don’t you speak Spanish, you should be proud of your culture’ and this that and the other, and would really, really get on me.

At this point Aurelio is more relaxed, but uses quite strong words; ‘they get angry’, ‘people reprimand me’ (he uses the word ‘reprimand’ three times during the interview in this context) ‘[they] would really, really get on me’. This is an aggressive, direct challenge to Aurelio’s identity. I am uncertain of the significance, if any, of the slip of the tongue with ‘Inglés’. Habeeba: Habeeba’s language background may perhaps be described as diffuse; she was brought up exclusively in English by her Congolese-Asian mother, whose own language background was predominantly Swahili, yet both look to Gujarati as a so-called heritage language and as a marker of identity. Gujarati is/was also used as a lingua franca within the family; Habeeba’s mother to her stepfather, Habeeba to her mother-in-law and occasionally Habeeba to her husband, for none of these interlocutors is Gujarati an L1. Since none of them is an ‘authentic’ Gujarati speaker, there is no exclusion, within the family, on the basis of any perceived inauthenticity. By the same token, there exists no strong identification with any one language, even the de facto L1 that is available to counteract societal challenges to identity. These challenges come from various sections of society but most importantly from the Urdu-speaking Pakistani community and members of the majority (white) British community who assume that she cannot speak English: both anger Habeeba. However, a degree of ambivalence towards all of the communities to which Habeeba might claim membership (British, British-Asian, African-Asian, Gujarati heritage) is more characteristic of Habeeba’s attitude than strong feelings of exclusion from any one of them. With the exception of outright racism, Habeeba cultivates an ability to see the other person’s point of view, and seems to draw strength from the equilibrium this produces.

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Habeeba is very relaxed about her language and cultural background, and seems happy to choose facets of culture to incorporate into her own life; however this is not entirely seamless. She says, ‘your language is part of your culture, your heritage’, and yet the language both at home and outside the home was English, which she does not associate with her heritage. She rejects the language classes she was sent to at the age of ten precisely because she could not accept the ‘traditional’ teaching style. Which tradition is not specified, but is understood not to be the British one with which she was familiar. Habeeba is obliged to engage with traditional aspects of Asian culture at the time of her marriage. There has been implicit threat; her mother ‘panics’ that she will not know how to handle traditional roles which will include language ability: ‘It’s not going to be like living at home, you know!’ The young Asian wife in her new family is in an insecure position; Habeeba will not only be separated from her mother, but she has no ‘mother tongue’. Habeeba did, indeed, find the first months of marriage difficult; it was ‘Terrible, absolutely terrible!’ Married, now, for many years, she says, half-jokingly, ‘my husband often makes fun of me, he goes, he says, ‘If you had fallen in love with a Pakistani man’, he says, ‘I dread to think how you would have coped with the family, I think you’d have felt so isolated.’ Habeeba can become angry when her origins, and therefore her assumed first language, are misattributed. H: At the mosque, when I was growing up, it’s now all in English – the whole service and everything is conducted in English SS: Really H: But when it used to be in Urdu, I just sit there really bored, because a lot of the priests came, they were hired out from India, so they spoke Urdu. And if I would say, even now if someone comes from abroad I would say, I don’t really understand the lectures, they’re a bit boring ’cause they’re in Urdu, they go, ‘Well, why don’t you speak Urdu?’ and I say, well that’s not my mother tongue but they say, ‘well you should know Urdu, ’cause that’s what the lectures are in.’ SS: it’s a bit circular! H: Yeah. I know, I think ‘Hang on a second!’ And the other one is, erm, like I can read Arabic but I don’t understand Arabic, ’cause our holy book’s in Arabic. So you’re encouraged as a young child to learn to read Arabic, and understand it, but I’ve always read it in English translation. So if you meet someone from, like I’ve got Lebanese, Syrian friends,

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Moroccan friends, they’ll say, ‘Well, why don’t you speak Arabic?’ and () ‘That’s not my mother tongue.’ ‘But you’re Muslim. You should understand and speak Arabic.’ And I think, well no, not really!

Even good-natured kidding becomes tiresome and alienating. H: Yeah ((laughter)) and, I’ll walk into the shop and they’ll go ‘Oh the English customer ()’. Now, they’re not being mean. I know they’re not being mean, but it’s almost like they’re saying, ‘Oh, you, they use the word ‘gorengore’ means light-skinned ((H is rather)), they’ll say that’s the goren one, the light-skinned one, and what they actually mean is, this is the English one, she has got absolutely no culture in her at all.

Similar prejudice and misunderstanding are carried into the next generation, and at another remove; as quoted earlier on her son’s problems with his Pakistani classmates. This combination of anxiety about authentic identity, given added force by the suggestion of possible alienation from Islam, but turned away by humour and supported within the home, seems a typical pattern for this family. Habeeba not infrequently encounters real racist aggression from members of the white majority community, in the form of verbal abuse that it is assumed she cannot understand. She counters this with forceful rebuttal in fluent cockney; the anger, however, seems to dissipate quite quickly. She describes a potentially serious incident: H: … in Leicester, where my husband was parking his car and a guy, he parked his car and a guy came out of a restaurant and says, ‘You banged my car, look at that big dent.’ And he hadn’t even touched his car. He came out with real (.) aggression and, you know, they’re not going to be able to fight back, because they probably can’t speak English, and my husband’s quite quiet, but I just came out and I just went off on one. And he went, ‘Calm down, calm down. It’s alright, then, you didn’t touch my car.’ He says, ‘I’ll call the police’: I’d have called the police, ‘Here’s my phone, call the police! I want the police to come!’ And he was, I think he was shocked, ’cause my husband was quite, ‘You () get on with it’. ((laughter)) And my bloody friends, and they’re all big men, and they’re all just standing there, watching. It’s me, the gobby one, five foot tall, givin’ it [that ((gestures chatting with both hands)) SS: [Well, it’s nice to have a car full of big men behind you! ((laughter)). H: [Yeah, so yeah, good, yeah, I think it’s worked positively.

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This type of outburst can be interpreted as the release of pent-up aggression, a demand to be recognized and treated as an equal, equally valid, member of society, its vehemence a gauge of the depth of her alienation. Habeeba could not have been unaware of the risks; the men friends quite probably hung back in the knowledge that their only further recourse was likely to be physical violence. It ‘worked positively’ that time, but a positive outcome was by no means assured. Julietta: It was a throw-away remark of Julietta’s that first led me to think about these negative feelings in terms of inauthenticity. After our interview, which took place at her home, we went out to a coffee shop where she insisted on paying with the words, ‘If I was a real Italian, I’d have made you lunch at my house.’

Julietta makes a point of explaining her father’s presence in England as a prisoner of war with a label on his back. It seems reasonable to interpret her very frequent allusions to ‘hard work’ as justification of a situation that might be seen to require justifying. On the whole, though, feelings of inauthenticity do not seem to feature strongly in Julietta’s narrative. This could be due in part to her having little or no public identity as a member of the Italian community – itself no longer particularly ‘visible’ in her area. Her parents did not participate in any of the Italian associations that sprang up and she now has occasion to speak Italian only when she visits family in Italy. Marie: Marie’s childhood resentment at not being able to speak the language that her mother admired in other children, and her anxiety over possible revelation of herself as half Polish at school, points to divided identification; she was neither Polish nor French ‘enough’. Marie approached me and asked to be part of my research after hearing a talk on the topic. She had never heard any discussion of the feelings of people in similar situations to herself. Asked if she felt more French or Polish now, she replied, ‘60/40’. She has lived in London, with her Italian husband, for ten years now and enjoys the cultural mix and attitudes very different from those met with in her home town. M: And then, I think it was only because I came to the UK, er I live in the UK, especially in London where everybody is everything, and er, it was OK actually it was fine and I’ve developed this, I think I have developed, I accept it [i.e. being half Polish] more now, yeah, …

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She mentions with a bright smile, and she rarely smiled during the interview, that there is now a Polish presence in her North London neighbourhood, including Polish grocery shops.

5.3.7 Ambivalence Aurelio clearly felt ambivalent in the past, particularly as a teenager. He identifies with Mexican cultural values seen as positive, his ability to impress school-friends’ parents with his well-spoken good manners and his respect for older people, even those who ‘reprimand him’ for failing to speak Spanish. However, he cannot but be aware of the low status of Mexican-Americans; they are employed as home-help in the middle-class neighbourhood the family lives in. He exaggerates his Hispanic features, then says he looks like a ‘dirty Mexican’, altering his appearance to minimize possible racism he may encounter when he moves to a different part of the United States. In England, it is a relief to him to be perceived as simply ‘American’. For Habeeba, while she readily states that she does not have a ‘back home, this is back home to me’, establishing and maintaining a hybrid identity requires effort. Her relationship with Gujarati is typical of this. She says she feels no great attachment to the language, yet made significant effort to acquire enough to fulfil traditional expectations. She had expected her children to grow up speaking Gujarati, but then she and her husband enjoy the fact that they have a language that they can converse in privately: the children sometimes express resentment at not being able to understand. When recalling racist incidents she can become animatedly angry but soon counters this with a more positive recollection. She works, with success, to maintain a positive outlook, which she also nurtures in her children. Julietta sometimes seems ambivalent about her actual ability to speak Italian, conflating this with somewhat tiresome family duties. This interpretation finds some support in Julietta’s description of a typical visit to Italy, for her, which contrasts with the sister’s trips to enjoy the culture and the food. J: Yeah. It’s generally family. Which is good and bad ((chuckles)) ’Cause you want a holiday to relax from work, and enjoy the sights and erm you plan to see one or two relatives, ah, but if you go and see those one or two, the other one or two that you don’t see … The () are generous and support you for that moment, but then, when you go, they’re busy working.

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If the visit is made to benefit the family at the cost of relaxation and enjoyment, then resentment at the momentary nature of attention that they are in fact too busy to give is a reasonable response. Earlier in the interview, Julietta makes a statement that may point to some residual resentment of the families who were able to remain in Italy after World War II; this comment comes later in the interview and is the first mention of better off family members. J:: […] And the professionals in the family didn’t come over. SS: Right, yeah. J: so those that were doctors and chemists and engineers, they had good jobs, there. SS: Yeah J: no need to, whereas the farm labour type of worker in Calabria, the wages were low, the standard of living was low.

Of all the participants in this study, Julietta apparently retains the greatest actual range of ability in PL1. Marie’s past ambivalence is perhaps only evident today in her stated reasons for liking life in London: ‘everybody is everything’ there is no need to be embarrassed about your origins or the degree of one’s affiliation to them.

5.3.8 Blame and responsibility Aurelio reports that I didn’t know if I should be angry at my father. For never speaking Spanish to me. Ah, angry at myself, for taking the Spanish classes I did in high school and such and not really kind of capitalising on the opportunity, but I was a young … ‘It’s not my fault. My father chose not to speak Spanish to me it wasn’t because I asked him not to speak Spanish.’

Habeeba finds no need to blame anyone; in fact she expresses satisfaction that in learning Gujarati she did fulfil cultural expectations, ‘At least I made the effort.’ Julietta’s repeated expressions of regret immediately followed by the explanation of being too busy, and suggestions that either her parents did try to maintain Italian and she did not cooperate, or that they did not because they

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worried about a lack of English affecting her education, and were also busy working hard, suggest seeking an explanation rather than seeking to fix blame. Marie, uniquely, knows exactly who is to blame: her French grandmother. She feels as if ‘something had been stolen from me’.

5.3.9 Change over time Aurelio reports that he did not notice language or discrimination problems as a younger child, but that these things made him angry as he got older. He noticed a change in people’s perceptions and expectations when he came to live in England, ‘I don’t think people notice me in that way, they just notice me as an American.’ His feelings for his paternal grandfather, ‘for whom I have the utmost respect and love him dearly (0.1) one of the reasons why I tried to learn Spanish, and again trying to learn, is because of him’, formed a constant in Aurelio’s life and his relationship with the Spanish language. He reports that after an extended trip to Central and South America, his grandfather remarked on his improved ability, but that ‘when I came to England it kind of phased out, and I’ll go through phases.’ Habeeba has experienced a kaleidoscope of language change; English as an only child in England with her mother, Swahili on visits to the Congo, then Gujarati between mother and stepfather, which she learned as a new bride; this does not disturb her, other than her anxiety in the first months of her marriage. She has ongoing problems due to living in an area with a large Urdu and Punjabi-speaking population whose reactions to the mismatch between their expectations and her actual language affiliations can border on hostility. Her children, somewhat to her surprise, have not automatically grown up multilingual. She does not find this worrying but does, however, have some anxiety over the children’s own difficulties with appearance, expectation and language. Julietta seems to experience her lack of fluency in Italian as part of a larger pattern of regret over alternatives not exploited; no causal relationship is suggested. There seems to be some identification with the necessity forced on her parents to ‘work hard and get on’, to the exclusion of much else. She recognizes her father’s sadness at the end of his life over his family not having held together, in close geographical and emotional proximity. The language that

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she knows she must have been exposed to as a small child has been supressed under the assumption that it would form an impediment to education in English and is now associated with family visits about which she is ambivalent. Marie reports a carefree relationship to the Polish used at her grandparents’ home when she was a small child. This became conflicted as she experienced envy of children who were fluent in Polish alongside anxiety that speaking Polish would be seem as a defect among French-speaking schoolmates. This produced lasting anger which has dissipated over her years living in London, where the conflict between Polish and French that obtained in her home village has been obviated.

5.3.10 Points of contact/Feelings of participation Aurelio feels he was genuinely included and could participate in PL1 as a child in more or less phatic communication with his Spanish-speaking relatives. Cultural norms of formality and politeness, ‘they would speak to me um in Spanish and I would have to address them, you know, Tia [X], Tia [Y], you know. I couldn’t call them “aunt” you know, couldn’t call them by their name without (.) addressing them properly’, manifest in the language, were carried over into encounters with English speakers, with positive results. He was perceived as having better manners than classmates whose parents had at first rejected him. He interpreted this as a boost to the status of Mexican culture in general: the culture of the people who were mowing his friends’ families’ lawns. Habeeba found that the effort put into learning to speak enough Gujarati to satisfy her own, and others’, conception of correct, decent behaviour for a daughter-in-law towards her husband’s older relatives supported her sense of herself as a person able to understand and function correctly within the admired culture. Use of the language, at whatever level of expertise, now serves to strengthen and maintain her relation with her husband. However, Habeeba readily admits that she does not have a sense of this particular language being an essential part of her ‘self ’. This point will be further explored in the following chapter. Julietta’s grasp of Italian means that she is able to fulfil a family obligation; this is found to be both enhancing and limiting as already discussed.

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Marie has clear memories of participation in prayer and singing in Polish in a family context. These memories have an ongoing positive effect and serve to support other facets of cultural participation, such as sharing Polish food.

5.4 Cross interview comparison of the four participants All the participants in this study meet the initial criteria. It is significant that three of them, Aurelio, Julietta and Marie, first approached this researcher and expressed interest in participating after hearing me speak about the project in various forums; these were informal circumstances in the cases of Aurelio and Julietta, a formal presentation in the case of Marie. The opposite was the case for Habeeba, whose overheard remark, ‘I don’t even speak my own language’ set the direction for initial work on the project; the researcher has previously been considering the way cultural links were maintained in migration and the effect of obligatory L2 classes on vulnerable migrants in this regard (Figure 5.1). The four participants have differing degrees and kinds of relationship with PL1. It could be said that Habeeba is living with some of the consequences of what Fishman describes as investing a language with a quasi-religious significance. Through more than three generations, two migrations and taking on the languages of two different host communities as effective L1s, Swahili for Habeeba’s mother, English for Habeeba, a notional connection with Gujarati and at least a vestigial ability to use it in communication have been maintained. The strength and significance of this conception of language is demonstrated by Habeeba’s feeling that it was essential to use ‘the mother tongue’ as a young bride entering her husband’s family, even though Gujarati was not in fact their L1 but simply represented an acceptable step away from languages seen as even more foreign. Although Habeeba would have heard some Gujarati used in her family, after her mother married her stepfather, for example, it is, as she says, a language she learned more as an L2. The same phenomenon of investing a language with iconic status is at the root of Habeeba’s problems with the attitudes towards her, and towards her children, displayed by people whose ethnic appearance, religion and mores she shares but whose language she does not.

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Aurelio

Habeeba

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Family migration background involving armed conflict

Julietta

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Marie

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Sense of inauthenticity

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Assignment (partial) of responsibility for lack of PL1 to self

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Figure 5.1 Commonalities among the four participants’ experience of PL1.

Aurelio does have a primary connection with PL1 in that he has been exposed to it from early life. However, this connection would not have been as close as, for example, that described by Cowley in observing mother–baby interaction in isiZulu; such a connection I would like to refer to as ‘organic’. Aurelio’s mother is an L1 English speaker with little knowledge of Spanish.

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Marie’s early connection with PL1 is likely to have been of this organic nature as her mother spoke Polish as a first language and was highly motivated to bring up her children as bilingual. Moreover, interaction with her mother’s family provided a steady passive exposure to PL1 and also occasions for phatic participation. Julietta, too, must have had an organic exposure to PL1; her mother hardly spoke English at the time Julietta was born. Again, like Marie, there was a conscious turn away from PL1 and towards the majority community language from school age or before. In contrast to Marie, however, Julietta, did retain some communicative, as opposed to simply phatic, ability in PL1. This degree of ability appears to be approximately similar to that achieved by Aurelio after he had studied PL1 on a second language basis: a course of action that Julietta attempted and abandoned quite early in her adult life. All feel that fluent, if not native, ability in PL1 is something that they ‘ought’ to have, although it is unclear whether this is seen as an obligation or a natural right. They feel that they would be happier, more rounded or perhaps more complete people if they had developed or maintained this ability. Julietta and Marie do not have children; Aurelio, who has recently married, does not rule the possibility out; Habeeba has two sons and had assumed that they would more or less automatically grow up speaking Gujarati as the ‘other’ language heard most frequently, but now does not attach importance to this. One can only speculate on whether her attitude would have been different had her children been girls. All the participants have been aware of various forms of discrimination since childhood. This appears to have taken its mildest form for Julietta. Habeeba contends with a low level of out and out racism on an ongoing basis. Aurelio experienced a degree of police harassment in his youth, and also negative stereotyping from the white middle-class community. Marie was aware of an entrenched negative attitude manifest in a kind of parochial drawing aside of skirts, conversation ceasing when her mother entered a village shop. This was heightened by fears of being found wanting by the majority community as represented by her schools. Both Aurelio and Marie find relief in being removed from problematic local contexts and both have married people from entirely different communities. Neither Habeeba nor Marie blames herself for their lack of PL1; Marie has a rather readymade culprit in the French grandmother who rejected Marie’s

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mother, and Habeeba is quite clear that no blame attaches to anyone in her case. Aurelio is ambivalent on this, recognizing that possibilities had existed for a different outcome; however, as a teenager he shied away from L2 classes at school, and admits that an element of being unwilling to be identified with negatively perceived Mexican-Americans. On the other hand he says that he never asked his father not to speak to him in Spanish, with a degree of exasperation. Julietta repeatedly expresses regret for not having maintained a more expert ability in PL1, in a manner so marked as to suggest that she accepts some responsibility for this. Indeed, the researcher had heard Julietta talking in this vein on several occasions previous to the recorded interview. All the participants have experienced feelings of genuine participation in PL1 at the more phatic end of the communication spectrum; Aurelio in formal greetings, address, thanks; Marie in prayers and songs; Habeeba in the semiritualized offering of hospitality to elders; Julietta in limited and predictable ‘small talk’ among relatives. Aurelio is the only male participant. Gender seems to have only tangential effect on this situation for these participants; Aurelio recounts very public contexts, police encounters, being embarrassed in a work situation; Habeeba’s cultural background had very different expectations of women in relation to their in-laws. Gender seems to play little or no specific role in Marie’s or Julietta’s narrative. Both Aurelio and Habeeba have experienced being accused of ‘letting the side down’ by not possessing the language ability their appearance had suggested to their interlocutors they ‘should’ have had. Of the five emergent themes identified in the data and traced, to varying degrees, through each interview, those of resentment, ambivalence and change over time were to an extent anticipated. The degree to which feelings of inauthenticity or imposture would emerge as major preoccupations was less expected. That feelings of genuine participation were strongly experienced as positive and self-affirming, even where actual participation is quite minimal, was unanticipated. It is felt that this aspect of connection with PL1 should be investigated further. This is discussed in the following chapter.

6

Discussion and Conclusions 6.1 Introduction It is felt that the findings reported in the previous chapter give a fairly comprehensive description which answers the initial research questions concerning the nature of the lived experience of not fully sharing PL1 and the generalizability of the findings in this respect. To summarize: my interviewees differ from each other in almost every way except in as much as they meet the main criteria for inclusion – a felt lack of ability to speak PL1and having attained an age by which a varied lived experience can be assumed. They are male and female, married, unmarried and divorced, with and without children and have had varied professional lives. They were born in different countries, indeed different continents, their family backgrounds represent different social classes, and they range from being virtually unmarked in comparison to the majority community to being immediately identifiable as a member of a minority community. Their parents’ language backgrounds vary from intensely multilingual to completely monolingual; there are both endogamous and exogamous marriages represented among the family backgrounds and the participants themselves. Parental education levels span primary school to university levels. Two major similarities in participants’ family backgrounds stand out: first, migration was initially necessitated by factors, economic and/or political, that were substantially beyond their control, and second, they encountered significant levels of discrimination in the host countries. These factors resonate with the observations of Timotijevic and Breakwell (2000), cited earlier in the book, concerning rejection of personal responsibility for the factors which lead to migration. Given the levels of disparity among the participants, the similarities in their responses to their predicament vis-à-vis PL1 are the more striking. Feelings of

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exclusion from, or non-acceptance by, either of the language communities to which they have a legitimate membership claim leads to the development of subject positions that include a sense of inauthenticity and awareness of the ever-present possibility of challenge to identity. A concomitant ambivalence is displayed. This can manifest in the positive attitudes of Habeeba and Julietta, who both mention choosing only the best from each culture, or in the relief that both Marie and Aurelio feel in having removed themselves from the context which challenged their identities. Varying levels of anger, directed mainly towards those who wrongly ascribe or assume language ability, are evidenced. A need to attribute responsibility, or fix blame, for their language situation, indeed, a more general search for explanation and exploration of why things did not work out differently, is a feature of all the narratives. Finally, in all cases towards the end of the interviews, after the more negative aspects had been dealt with, all participants remembered occasions of genuine participation in PL1. None of these had anything of a sense of partial success about them. The success of a phatic utterance is that it sets up an instant and immediately recognizable gestalt. This may be for the brief duration of exchanged greetings or to the extent, for example, of sharing a song. These gestalts, moreover, imply an affective ecology that includes an iterative chain of causes shaping the whole shared cultural memory of the interlocutors; a Barthean blind field of inclusion opens up.

6.2 A spectrum of separation or of connection I have defined five types of reaction observed in non-speakers of PL1: a sense of being inadequate or inauthentic; a sense of ambivalence towards either language and/or either culture; feelings of resentment and blame, change over time in attitudes and feelings towards lack of ability in PL1; and occasions when people feel a genuine sense of participation in PL1. Any or all of these may, or may not, be present. What I want to suggest here is that these are reactions which typify a person who has a close relationship with a language, with its speakers and with the cultural context of its use, but whose ability to speak the language falls far short of native fluency. In at least partial answer to the third research question posed

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in Chapter 1, how does the situation come about?, it is proposed to categorize such individuals according to the nature of their connection to the language in question. This connection can be described as a spectrum of gradual separation or gradual shift from the type of physical, maternal link I term ‘organic’, the type of complete environment described by Cowley (2011), through degrees of separation that would include bilingual exposure in which users of two different languages are present in the infant’s environment, but one language actually predominates in actual contact with the infant, conscious switching in the home to another language and situations in which PL1 is more distant from the infant/child, occasionally visited relatives or intermittent situations that require use of PL1. The opposite extreme of this spectrum would include the ‘heritage’ phenomenon, where the link, perhaps many generations removed from the ‘organic’, is ideological or sentimental; this last category would span the attrition–shift divide. None of the points on such a spectrum is capable of exact definition, the divisions are notional, for example, the definition of ‘frequent’ or ‘infrequent’ use of PL1 in the home, or what is meant by ‘occasional’ visits. At the more ‘organic’ end of the spectrum, at which there is likely to be more day-to-day exposure to speakers of PL1, the non-speaker is likely to be more aware of the somatic environment of PL1, of which Enfield’s dimension of gesture makes up one part but which will include socio-lingual norms concerning gaze, distance between speakers and degree of expected physical contact: the entire affective environment of PL1. This may be most evident to the non-PL1 speaker in observation of interactions between PL1 speakers; the affective environment will subtly shift as the PL1 native speaker turns to address the non/inexpert-speaker. This may well be experienced as exclusion, even where the shift in affect is not experienced as entirely conscious, or intended by the PL1 speaker. The inaccessible affective environment of PL1 may be imagined as analogous to Whiteread’s House, massively present but impenetrable. As the spectrum shifts through increasingly tenuous or indirect links to PL1, the individual may become increasingly aware of wider societal influences. Examples of this sort of influence include two popular notions with language as a central feature: multiculturalism and the promotion/assumption of multilingualism. Those who do not (fully) share PL1, especially if they are

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visibly members of a particular ethnic group, are liable to negative assessments/ sanctions from several perspectives. The majority language community may assume that they do not speak the majority community language, and/or conversely that they do speak PL1. Habeeba frequently experiences the former; the negative effects of the latter are described by Block (2008). The minority community may assume that they either speak PL1, or ought to, and interpret inability in a variety of negative ways – that the non-PL1 speaker is implying that PL1 and its speakers are unworthy, that is attributing the most negative majority community attitudes to the non-PL1 speaker, as recounted by Aurelio – or that inability in PL1 amounts to more generally ‘letting the side down’ or rejecting the PL1 community; the type of mind-set that labels an Asian with assumed ‘white/western’ values a ‘banana’ or a black person a ‘coconut’. This is not to say that more positive attitudes, openness and acceptance of a scale of language abilities and cultural perspectives, Gilroy’s ‘conviviality’, cannot ensue. However, the negatives seem prevalent and can leave the nonPL1 speaking individual exposed: lacking the full social support of either group, unable to fully invest a sense of self in either. To continue the analogy to artwork begun earlier, this situation carries the shock of expectation frustrated and identification denied experienced by the viewer of Magritte’s Reproduction Interdite. At the furthest extreme on this spectrum of separation, or of linkage, is the notion of ‘heritage language’, which has developed to meet a felt need. In its public aspect, this may perhaps be associated with a fascination for the more positive representations of multiculturalism, but it has a rather uncertain foundation. The ‘possession’ of a heritage language does not, necessarily, imply fluency; the less ambiguous term ‘bilingual’ or the clear statement ‘I speak LX’ would seem to cover this already. The word ‘heritage’ carries certain connotations; something inherited, that one is entitled to, that comes as a matter of course: almost inalienable. Another set of connotations, however, also attach to the word as applied to the recent popularity for genealogy and musealization. ‘Heritage tourism’ is a term readily understood; it is associated with a shallow nostalgia and the shoddy wares of the ‘heritage monger’. In this respect, it is recalled that both Fishman (1986) and Edwards are somewhat disparaging towards ‘relinguification’; the latter terming it ‘a parlous enterprise’ (Edwards, 2010, p. 33).

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In Sedira’s Mother Tongue, the black frames around the speakers and the blank spaces between them suggest rigid official intervention and the growing interpersonal atrophy experienced as the ‘organic’ link becomes increasingly tenuous, and language attrition becomes language shift.

6.3 The gradual impoverishment of a language environment Kees de Bot (2007) identified two questions that must be posed when an established L1 becomes replaced by another language: how and why. The answer suggested for the latter is that major life events intervene. For events such as the adoptions and trauma studied by Palliser and Footnick, respectively, the causation is fairly clear. Verschik’s study of incomplete acquisition, however, complicates the picture considerably. At what point can a first language be described as ‘acquired’? Attrition studies describe an age range after which attrition is less likely to occur, and have established that attrition does not proceed in a uniform manner, but that lexis is more vulnerable than syntax, this seems to be the reverse order to that of acquisition; words are needed before they can be put into orders. Incomplete L1 acquisition can arise when the process is interrupted, as it were, gradually. Difficulties in the study of such processes arise due to their unpredictability; they are recognized retrospectively. Yet such situations, in which the elements such as exposure, interaction and motivation, needed for language acquisition, become gradually impoverished, are far from rare; arguably they, as opposed to a major intervention such as adoption out of country/language, are the norm. And, again, these elements are not withdrawn in a uniform manner; the child being raised in a household in which L1 is being used less-and-less as the necessity for L2 intrudes, for whatever reason, will still be exposed to elements of L1 and its influence on the L2 being acquired. This may include situations for which parents will revert to, or retain, their L1, such as the use of ‘baby words’, prayers for Marie’s mother or terms of address for Aurelio’s family, situations in which the parent is angry or alarmed (Pavlenko, 2004) and visits from or to non-L2-speaking relatives (Atta, 2012). The whole somatic environment of PL1 from gesture to choice of metaphor will inevitably surround the child to some extent.

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Parents frequently report that children stop using PL1 when they start school (Mills, 2004). At this time, the L2 acquires a complete somatic framework and also a prestige; school has likely been represented to the child as a good thing. He/she will naturally want to make friends and establish an identity in the new setting, for which the majority community language, shorn of PL1 influences, will be required. The situation in which Habeeba’s son finds himself forms an interesting corollary; the PL1 influenced version of L2 has been taken as a legitimate dialect of L2 that forms an in-group marker for class, race and religion, within the limited horizons of their primary school. Parents anxious for their child not to experience the language problems they had themselves may also see the child’s success in the host country as an endorsement or validation of their own initial decision to migrate, to ‘abandon’ home and family. What has been ‘lost in the translation’ in terms of language and/or culture may only be evident in retrospect. Julietta’s father’s sadness, at the end of his life, that ‘it has all gone wrong’, is an example. The success he had projected was to be that of an extended Italian family established in the more favourable conditions of post-war England. The success achieved is that of the highly mobile twenty-first century kind, with family members continuing the migration away from Italy, to America. The categories, L1 acquisition, incomplete L1 acquisition and bi/ multilingual acquisition, are notional in multilingual contexts because the conditions which may impinge on the individual who is in the process of acquiring language/languages are chaotic, in the technical and the nontechnical senses of the word. Thus, attrition from any, or any combination, of these degrees of acquisition of any of the languages involved is extremely complex; however, it is not entirely impervious to analysis. While the search for a single unifying framework may, as de Bot suggests, be quixotic, a combination of methodological perspectives may be productive. Brumfit’s attitude of ‘what if we treat this group of phenomena as a set with shared properties?’ (Brumfit, 1997, p. 89) is the one needed, here. The definition of a system as complex and dynamic forecloses the possibility of isolating discrete chains of cause and effect. However, analysis of effects outside the framework of seeking to understand, and by implication control, their causes, rather in the spirit of Derrida’s arrivals without points of departure, can provide workable insights.

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For example, Julietta seems to express an excessive regret over not being completely bilingual, excessive particularly in the light of the familial and wider social forces that formed the context of her not maintaining two languages. Simply to ascribe this to a neurotic cause, and therefore to set it aside, would be to miss evidence that suggests not only the kinds of social factors that can reach into family life and lead to L2 (majority community) monolingualism, but also something of the scope of influence exercised by PL1 in that its recognized absence can have profound and far-reaching effects. A single instance of an informant saying ‘I regret it now, but hindsight’s a wonderful thing’ may be judged anecdotal, but this may easily be shown not to be an isolated case. A fact that might appear in a quantitative survey to be a statistical outlier may mark the tip of an iceberg or act as the punctum that opens a Barthean ‘blind field’.

6.4 Attrition and beyond To fit the current study into the field of language attrition studies, which would in many ways seem to be its natural home, would require some significant expansion in terms of reference. The Roger Andersen statement as quoted by Schmid et al. [l]anguage attrition is a special case of variation in the acquisition and use of a language or languages and can best be studied, described, documented, explained and understood within a framework that includes all other phenomena of language acquisition and use. (Andersen, 1982, p. 86)

introduces a discussion of possible methodological avenues of approach to ‘all other phenomena of language acquisition and use’. The approach proposed is to adopt dynamic systems theory as a way to control a wide range of constantly changing variables. This is, however, a computer model and as such demands quantified data. The lived experience of language use is not, if we aspire to include ‘all phenomena’, amenable to such reduction. Language attrition studies generally assume an established L1 from which attrition begins. As work in language contact studies demonstrates, even this start point can be equivocal. Verschik (2002) argues for qualitative, or narrative, data for the investigation

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of intensely complex situations. This is not to say that DST, or quantitative methodologies in general, have no explanatory power in the study of language attrition, rather that it should be recognized that such methods can be applied to a subset of observable phenomena. De Bot does tacitly acknowledge this when he says that due to its complexity, ‘we may never be able to model [i.e. produce a computer model] language as a complex system in all its details’ (de Bot, 2007, p. 66). The qualitative interview format was adopted in order to elicit from a defined set of informants, remembered details of lived experience. Analysis and interpretation of data resulting from this type of survey is difficult to justify. There is a danger that the researcher may unconsciously apply nostrifying criteria to the analysis or be limited by narrow disciplinary preoccupations. The methodology developed by Jürgen Straub and adapted here, seeks to open the analysis to interdisciplinary perspectives and, at the same time, to declare the influences that have a bearing on the specific researcher’s approach to interpretation of the data. In theory, this renders the process, if not replicable, at least transparent. The lived experience recounted in the interviews considered here includes a very wide spectrum of phenomena of language acquisition, attrition and use; many of them are extremely subtle and indirect. Marie recounted the memory of having felt it was unfair for her mother to be pleased that another child spoke good Polish while she, through no fault of her own, did not. Aurelio remembers that it supported his self-esteem to bring the attitudes learned in his Mexican context into situations in which being half Mexican was considered a drawback, and thereby procuring a degree of acceptance. This type of language-centred phenomenon moves towards an almost Benjaminian subtlety. Habeeba and her mother have the felt need to resonate the sounds of Gujarati in order to awaken the echo of cultural belonging from the situation of a new bride serving her husband’s family elders. Emotional response conditions these attitudes towards language use. Dewaele demonstrates the varying levels of emotional significance their different languages may hold for multilingual speakers. He notes particularly that ‘Languages learned early in life seem to have a stronger emotional resonance than languages learned later, which seem to have a weaker emotional hold on the individual’ (Dewaele, 2004, p. 207). This resonates with the claims

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of Schmid et al. (in press), cited earlier, for the special status of a language acquired in the context of the other cognitive developments of early infancy, and also with Cowley’s view of the role of the whole ecological ‘package’ of early life experience in the orientation of the infant towards language (Cowley, 2011). My informants were chiefly aware of their emotional responses to the effects of their lack of fluency in PL1, to the responses of interlocutors and to general perceptions and expectations of their identities based on ethnic appearance or names. Positive feelings occasioned by points of genuine participations in PL1, while often strong, seem to arise in a more diffused context of cultural or ecological support than as a reaction to the spoken word alone. Or, perhaps it is the case that subtle aspects of the wider somatic environment of language are not usually recognized as being part of language as such. However, this is an area which requires more specific investigation than was attempted here.

6.5 Practicalities and ‘soulish things’ The punctum that initiated the current study, Habeeba’s remark ‘I don’t even speak my own language’ fits the explanation forwarded by Block (2008); this is a learned response, reiterated without reflection. Habeeba states as much at the beginning of the interview, when we recall the incident. ‘I’m thinking, why would I say “my own language” because, I don’t know () probably ’cause you’re just told, “This is your culture, this is your language” ’. Throughout the interview Habeeba refers to ‘the language’ or ‘a language’, sometimes just ‘language’. Indeed, the interviewer has specifically to ask which language it is we are talking about. When she says ‘our’ language, this seems to refer mainly to the Gujarati used in speaking with her husband. She uses ‘my’ for ‘my grammar/pronunciation’ always followed by ‘is awful’. She reports feeling no personal connection with ‘the language’ and is not bothered by the fact that her sons have not grown up bilingual. However, lack of a language becomes a palpable force in that it has formed a central concern in Habeeba’s life. She felt strongly obliged to learn an Asian language in which to address her in-laws. It did not have to be their first language in order to carry the freight of cultural expectation, but the conveyance of

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respect and the recognition that respect was due could not be accomplished in English: a language they all spoke perfectly well. It seems reasonable to assume that English carries connotations of imperialism and exclusion for Habeeba’s family. Habeeba’s self-respect, her subjectivity, was invested in ‘at least making the effort’. This illustrates the strength and persistence of investing a language with spiritual dimensions, this seems more perdurable than the, arguably, organic effects of linguistic relativity; the quasi-religious symbolism does not require an unbroken connection, merely that the ‘believer’ subscribe to such a connection. This is the ‘spirit’ of an ethnic language as described by Fishman (1997b). This form of symbolic connection is a phenomenon which also affects Habeeba from a less personal, but a frequently intrusive perspective in daily life. The investment of Urdu speakers in their language combined with the ethnic group membership her appearance suggests leaves her ethnic allegiance, personal worth and even religious beliefs open to challenge. Fishman stresses the seriousness of this type of investment, ‘the association of the beloved language with all that is dear and holy obviously leads to the association of its abandonment with all that is base and reprehensible’ (Fishman, 1997b, p. 20). Furthermore, due to the frequent co-occurrence of religion, ethnicity and language, ‘[Religion] links the beloved language to eternity … to priorities and obligations that are more powerful than those of life itself ’ (Fishman, 1997b, p. 27). It is this feeling, outside any logical explanation of language background, which leads people to insist to Habeeba that ability to speak their particular language is part of being a ‘good Muslim’. Similar feelings are behind the ‘reprimands’ directed towards Aurelio, although a combination of politics and ethnicity appears to be more prominent than religion in this case. Monica Ali’s Karim illustrates this attitude taken to a further extreme; he and his associates take Bengali almost literally as a shibboleth; deviation from this norm will result in death. Ien Ang (Ang, 2001, p. 31) suggests something of the long reach of the notion of identification with a ‘beloved’ language in the enthusiasm among Chinese-Indonesians in the Netherlands for ‘re-ethnicizing’ themselves as Chinese rather than as a kind of Indonesian, which given their presence of several centuries in Indonesia might seem illogical. The phenomenon of loading symbolic and emotional content onto a ‘beloved’ language seems to be the impetus that can project the ‘heritage’ language concept into the type of long durée phenomenon Ang describes.

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The reasons for language being a good candidate to bear, more or less metaphorically, religious sentiments, political ideologies and ethnic group identities have been explored, as noted earlier, by Tabouret-Keller, pointing out the physical closeness of speaking with breathing and eating, by Edwards, stressing the element of group identity and by Crites’ association of evocation of the past and projection of the future, which have no materiality and are thus termed ‘soulish’, with the process of creating a narrative account. The life of the individual is bound up, from the religious point of view, with the notion of soul and, from the secular, with phenomena of similar immateriality; subjectivity, the vexed questions of how notions of selfhood arise, and the nature, or the location, of the mind. None of these notions is particularly firmly based in empirically observable reality. The hard-headed empirical scientist V. S. Ramachandran admits that Even though it is common knowledge, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life … even what each of us regards as his own intimate private self-is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in our heads, in our brains. There is nothing else. (Ramachandran, 2004, p. 3)

And yet, as Douglas Hofstadter puts it, ‘We just fall like a ton of bricks for the notion that there’s a “soul” in there …’ (Hofstadter & Dennett, 1982, p. 408). Nevertheless, the fact that the notion of soul, or with self-deprecating irony, ‘soulish things’, is a stubbornly enduring category, whether objective or metaphorical, suggests there must be a use for it: it is jealously protected. William James, in his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience, felt the need to assure his 1901 audience, people who were still coming to terms with the implications of Darwin and had recently been confronted with Freud, that examining the psychology of religion was not a destructive exercise. Such cold-blooded assimilations [psychological explanations] threaten, we think, to undo our soul’s secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance. (James, 1958 (1901), p. 26)

There is a gentleness in this assurance reminiscent of Frosh’s implicit rejection of the bleakness of the constructivist conception of self, or Zielke and Straub’s realization that, for the ‘diasporic’ individual at least, some conception of a

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core ‘self ’ is necessary, ‘after all’ (Zielke & Straub, 2008, p. 64). It also resonates with a frequently voiced, though poorly defined, sense of revolt against notions such as artificial intelligence or linguistic relativity, let alone ‘determinism’, which seem to threaten further Ramachandran’s ‘little specks of jelly in our heads’. Lucy warns ‘Anyone working on the relativity problem’ that the issues involved arouse ‘passions and prejudices’ (Lucy, 1997 p. 294). Echoing this, Edwards warns the researcher that when investigating questions of language and identity, ‘we need always remind ourselves that work here will take us into heavily mined territories of emotion’ (Edwards, 2010, p. 72). Work in distributed cognition and ecological psychology underlines the widely recognized fact that brains cannot develop normally in isolation; they require stimulation and interaction with other brains. This is demonstrated in the way in which language is acquired in human infants. If the more radical theories of distributed cognition and ecological psychology are accepted, language acquisition is one part of a rich and complex network of relationships in which Frosh’s question of how out there gets in here (Frosh, 2008, p. 347) does not arise for the simple reason that the organism and its environment form a single system (Jarvilehto, 1998). At the very least, although the ‘little specks of jelly’ remain in separate heads, they are never entirely alone. Language, like ‘soul’ or ‘subjectivity’, can seem at times a volatile commodity; the child who goes off to school speaking PL1 almost exclusively can come home at the end of term speaking mainly L2, as Richard Rodriguez and my younger son did. The voice can be a mercurial trickster; the evidence of the listener’s eyes is countermanded by that of their ears when they are surprised by a cockney tirade from Habeeba. Co-speech gesture, posture and affect are fleeting exchanges that are lost to the written word and not often captured on video. Language can have unlooked for effects of surprising strength on a person’s sense of self, even where there is no personal connection to a language; Claire Kramsch reports sometimes volatile reactions to learning a second language in classroom situations, though these can also be positive (Kramsch, 2009). Kramsch calls on the image of the trickster to emphasize a playful element found in learner diaries. ‘The desire for renewal and self-enhancement is closely related to the pleasure of dissimulation, and power that comes from seeing without being seen’ (Kramsch, 2009, p. 64). Such effects, negative or

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positive, can overwhelm the learner; they also add to the tally of subtle effects of language/languages, its/their acquisition and attrition. Kramsch also notes that heritage language learners can be put off by the de-somatized, academic study of languages that they have experienced in richer environments in the past, ‘they don’t recognise their grandmother behind the dry declensions’ (p. 14). Perhaps the vehemence of these reactions owes something to the habitually unexamined nature of our investment of subjectivity in language, or indeed the role of language in the formation of our subjectivity. Participants frequently answered questions on language usage or experience with general, intellectualized statements, or said they did not remember, but then, after a pause or a discursion into another area, a specific memory surfaced with Proustian clarity, re-evoking the emotion felt at the time.

6.6 Politics Another question posed in Chapter 1 for this research concerned its possible application to public discourse on multilingual multiculturalism. It is felt that the more nuanced understanding of individuals who experience life, as it were, at the interface of languages and cultures that this study offers can indeed inform this discourse. Some of the influences on an individual’s attitude towards being a non-speaker of PL1 are far from subtle; no member of a society remains unaffected by the generally prevailing social discourse. The general, intellectualizing statement with which participants often began their interviews usually had a public outlook; ‘I think language is a part of your culture’ (Habeeba) or ‘When I was younger it [bilingual education] wasn’t as stringent as it is now, there’s a lot of bilingual education so, there’s schools just for Spanish people and children’ (Aurelio). Given the chance, Aurelio would probably repair that statement. ‘Schools just for Spanish children’ sounds a lot like segregated rather than bilingual education, although the categories can be slippery. The term ‘multiculturalism’ having gathered too many negative associations in the public mind, politicians took a different tack, as noted in Chapter 2; ‘multiple’ came to suggest ‘fragmented’ or even ‘divided against itself ’, the terms

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‘integrated’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ have recently emerged; although ‘integrated’ (good) is very close to ‘assimilated’ (bad, apparently). As Adrian Blackledge has shown, language and majority language instruction has formed a useful plank in the political soapbox in addressing issues around immigration. Tim McNamara suggests that a close reading of Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other/Or the Prosthesis of Origin provides a more subtle perspective on the issue of language tests for immigrants: the modern use of the biblical shibboleth. Language, as argued earlier, is uniquely malleable to such uses. Furthermore, the applied linguist, as language teacher or advisor, is not infrequently drawn into political manipulations in these areas. Kramsch and Steffensen point out that [M]any researchers who work within an ecological framework have adopted a phenomenological stance … which provides them with a sense of educational responsibility and social justice. (Kramsch & Steffensen, 2008, p. 23)

Language teachers in multilingual/multicultural settings are acutely aware of the societies outside the classroom, those which in fact build the classrooms and pay the teachers. Official interventions of the type seen in many places dealing with populations that comprise varied cultural strands – promoting particular education regimes, constructing rules for access to services and legislating for or against use of a particular language – are very blunt instruments which often prove to be ineffective, or indeed counterproductive. Ill-considered legislative pronouncements can easily descend into farce. The much heralded, much derided ‘Life in the UK’ tests for British citizenship applicants are a case in point. Implicitly presented as an appeasement to elements in Britain who wish to severely limit immigration of all kinds, the cornerstone of these tests is represented as being English language proficiency. However, in line with policy from a different part of the legislative forest, a candidate for British citizenship can demand to take the test in Scots Gaelic1: far less than 1 per cent of the UK population are L1 speakers. But such farce easily becomes tragedy. A typical illustration of unintended effects of political intervention comes in a recent contribution to Scott Thornberry’s blog for English teachers, The ABC of EFL (Thornberry, 2013). A discussion of Barcelona public elementary schools offering primary education in Catalan elicited a large number of

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comments, both in support of and against the policy. A Romanian contributor drew readers’ attention to the reach of such policies with a description of the pathetic difficulties his L1 Hungarian child was having in her Romanian elementary school, where Hungarian is proscribed. The political is seen to be very personal, here: and vice-versa. In broad terms, it should be noted that, while majority community language skills are necessary for the new immigrant and classes are useful, attempting to work ‘against’ L1 or PL1, for example by demanding that people use a foreign language to speak to their own children at home – as Richard Rodriguez’s teachers and the ex-home secretary David Blunket famously did – is ultimately wasteful of a human resource. Also, while a language can identify a group, and that group may suffer, or even be the cause of, social problems, changing the language will not address the underlying problems. Supporting bilingualism in families, aside from its other recognized benefits, would result in fewer second and subsequent generation immigrants regarding themselves as in some way lacking, of being failed bilinguals possessed of a culturally arid hybridity. People with a positive self-image, after all, tend to cause fewer social problems in the long run.

6.7 Summary of discussion points Themes that emerge from an analysis of the interview data have been shown to connect with insights developed in the disciplinary areas of language attrition studies, psychosocial studies, sociolinguistics, cultural memory studies and distributed language studies. The influences selected in HoC 3 aid the analysis to step back from the specific objects of study represented in HoC 2, to take into account the wider environments in which the experience of not fully sharing one’s parents’ first language is lived. The aim is to include the emotional without straying into the world of psychology and psychiatry, where ‘patients’ have ‘problems’ which require treatment. Fiction, poetry and visual arts portray lived experience and also claim a valid reaction to it. The non-technical, non-fiction selections support these reactions and those described in the interview data, almost in the manner of a witness. The imaginative philosophical handling of related phenomena represented by the

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Derrida and Benjamin selections open the analysis to leaps of imagination not permitted to the sober constraints of HoC 2. The five emergent themes identified are claimed to be features of life experience for people whose language profiles do not fit those usually studied under the heading ‘L1 attrition’ because they have either not in fact acquired PL1 or acquired PL1 in an incomplete form and moved away from its use well before the age identified by language attrition studies as being important for the full acquisition, and thus retention, of a ‘first’ language. Yet, a network of connections, of varying density, is felt by informants to exist. Furthermore, it is claimed that this is not simply a matter of the elected identification with a ‘mother tongue’ for extra-linguistic purposes, but that it is possible to describe a spectrum of real connection with a PL1. It is also suggested that the findings of negative and positive experiences occasioned by not fully sharing PL1 have implications for families who would like to maintain bi/multilingual lives and also for public policy towards increasingly mobile populations.

6.8 Limitations to this research The primary data for this study was limited to the transcribed recordings and field notes of the interviews, plus some minor follow-up contact with participants. It was decided at an early stage not to attempt video recording of the interviews. Apart from the practical and financial problems involved, it was felt that such an intrusive procedure would inhibit conversation. Neither was it possible to observe the participants in interaction with their families or in situations when PL1 was being spoken in their presence. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that non-verbal components of the ‘communicative move’, the somatic context or ecology of communication between family members who have significantly varied language resources at their disposal, together with their differing acculturations, may take on a greater role, or have more conscious attention brought to bear on them than is the usual case for families with identical, or closely aligned, language resources be they mono- or multilingual. Video recordings of unrehearsed family interactions would provide a rich source of data. It is interesting to speculate, but there are obvious and

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formidable obstacles to such recording. Possible serendipitous and anecdotal sources might be found in private recordings of family gatherings: masses of such material are posted on the Internet. Such sources could prove worth the time and effort that would be necessary to uncover them. Enfield (2009) notes that little research has yet been undertaken into cross-cultural comparison of speech with gesture; however, research undertaken in distributed cognition on problem-solving in work situations (Pedersen, 2012; Steffensen, 2012) has indicated that gestures, movements and bodily orientations play a significant role in task resolution. Furthermore, these take place on a pico-scale of speed, faster than the interlocutors can be consciously aware of, that can only be revealed by observing slowed-down video recordings. Again, it is interesting to speculate what might be discoverable in the dense environment of intrafamilial communication. This is a possible future direction for research.

6.9 Concluding reflections: ‘The ornaments of forgetting’ (Benjamin, 2005, 1929, p. 238) This phrase ‘characterizing memories’ is taken from the Walter Benjamin essay On the Image of Proust (Benjamin, 2005). Benjamin wrote his critique in 1929, an era that has become quite fashionable to look back to as we explore methodological roads not taken. There is a renewed interest in scholars, such as Sapir, Pierce and the early phenomenologists, that is reflected in the works of scholars such as Friedrich, Straub and others cited here, which has also been influenced by this trend. Benjamin finds Proust’s famous mémoire involontaire to be ‘much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory’ (Benjamin, 2005). According to Benjamin, Proust, writing through the night, weaves his story with a woof of remembrance and a warp of forgetting. Unlike Penelope, who unravelled her work by night, according to Benjamin, it is ‘purposeful’, business-like attention to daytime activities that unravel our memories, which may then spring up, unlooked for, when we are in a relaxed frame of mind as ‘ornaments of forgetting’. Benjamin goes on to declare that ‘An experienced event is finite … a remembered event is infinite, because it is merely the key to everything that happened before and after it’ (Benjamin, 2005 (1929), p. 238).

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This resonates with, has an almost Benjaminian ‘correspondence’ with, an observation Stephen Cowley makes concerning language acquisition, that this process is not so much one of learning words and meanings as orienting to the whole package of sensory experience of which utterances form a part. ‘Linguistic behaviour has effects that include phenomenological experience of wordings [utterances] that are defined as readily repeated aspects of vocalizations that, for speakers of a community, carry historically derived information’ (Cowley, 2011, p. 186). Rączaszek-Leonardi’s concept of symbolic structure being formed by the utterance building up its own history in the mind (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2009) is of a piece with these ideas. Language contact situations of any kind can result in fragmented language histories which feature incomplete acquisition, language attrition and eventual shift. As already discussed, there are aspects of language acquisition and language use the effects of which the speaker is not consciously aware of, although these may become evident when there is some sort of break in an expected pattern. Inability to fully engage with a parent’s first language, while at the same time being engaged with the culture of that language, its somatic ecology and brought up in the affection of its speaker, can be seen as such a break in pattern. Linguistics studies patterns in language and has methodologies to discover and describe them. To examine a relationship with a language which centres on awareness of not fully sharing and inhabiting it, different perspectives are required. In a sense, this book is at the mercy of its informants; a decision was made to trust them to have a conversation about their life experience of language use. One of the beginning assumptions for the current study was that things that stand out in the memories of people of middle age and older are things which have stayed with them because they hold some continuing importance. Regardless of serendipitous factors of reinforcement, these things have been retained while much else has been forgotten. As already noted, all participants made some effort to intellectualize and generalize notions concerning bilingualism, but the analysis focuses on the memories that emerged quite spontaneously and were generously shared with the author. Also, as previously noted, the participants were not recruited as such, but requested to take part in this research, feeling it to be a facet of

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their experience that has not received sufficient attention. Indeed, it has been the writer’s invariable experience that, after presenting or discussing ideas explored by this investigation in any forum, people have taken me aside to relate their own personal experience of felt lack of PL1, or that of someone close to them. There is an impression that the issue of what happens when someone who might have grown up bilingual but does not is overwhelmed in a celebratory discourse on multilingual multiculturalism and that the term ‘heritage language’ has been coined at least in part to participate in this discourse. Block’s term ‘the metaphor of LOSS’ addresses an aspect of this, the unproductive conceptual cul-de-sac constructed by insisting on the metaphor of the extinction of biological species to describe processes of language shift. These discourses tend to have a hysterical edge. It has been argued that there exist populations which fall between the gaps in disciplinary definitions of monolingual and bilingual – people who do not have sufficient control of PL1 to claim that they are bilingual, who in infancy were exposed to PL1 to some extent but for whom the language environment became impoverished to the point that development ceased at some incomplete stage of acquisition, or for whom the processes of L1 attrition had set in before they had reached the age range identified as likely to result in retention of L1, but who nevertheless feel strong affiliations to PL1. Such affiliations have been described on a spectrum of separation/connection, ordered according to the degree of involvement with PL1.

6.10 Disciplinary boundaries and obsolete folk categories In order to arrive at these conclusions, a perspective which steps away from disciplinary boundaries in applied linguistics has been taken up. As already mentioned, there is a celebratory attitude concerning multilingualism evident not only in popular but also in academic discourse which tends to ignore, or effectively denigrate, the individual of a migrant background who does not become bilingual. Areas of study that include language teaching, bringing up bilingual children and cognition and the bilingual brain are, of course, valuable and exciting. They are also areas to which quantitative and laboratory methodology can, to varying extents, be applied; there is a strong bias towards

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such methods across the social sciences, with a concomitant tendency to ignore questions which cannot be answered using them. Another claim I want to make here is that since losing contact with PL1 is unlikely to be a matter which is predictable, a close and controlled scrutiny of the process is not possible; it has to be investigated in retrospect, accepting that a huge number of variables will inevitably have impacted on it; therefore, informants have to be taken on trust to a large degree, although individual insight can be compared with a variety of other sources. An imaginative stance is required in order to appreciate the subtlety of possible connections with PL1. Indeed, ‘PL1’ is merely a notional label of convenience. This discussion has made evident that the category ‘first language’ is far from uncontested, while theories of distributed cognition/language add scientific weight to Friedrich’s mischievous suggestion that ‘language’ may be ‘an obsolete folk category’ (Friedrich, 1986, pp. 142, 143). Furthermore, it is claimed that it is possible to include an imaginative stance in an analysis that claims to be empirical, via methodologies such as that developed by Jürgen Straub for cross-cultural psychology and adapted here. The range of sources enhances aspects of ‘thick description’ that the qualitative study may consider. By systematic inclusion of horizons of comparison which may impinge on both researcher and participant to the research, as regards subject specific knowledge, wider social factors of relevance, more serendipitous factors of influences from wider reading, art and philosophy and the life experience of the researcher, unquantifiable aspects of behaviour and interpretations of lived experience may be brought to bear in the analysis. This furthers the project of attempting, in studies of language variation, to develop a framework that can consider the widest possible range of influences on language acquisition, use and attrition, as recommended by Roger Anderson in 1982. Theories currently being developed in the fields of distributed cognition and distributed language, that language acquisition and use form an integral whole with their somatic environment, add a further dimension to the possibilities of examining language in use. This environment extends, in the words of Kramsch and Steffensen, from a psychological ‘micro-ecology’ to a sociological ‘macro-ecology’ (Kramsch & Steffensen, 2008, p. 17). Cultural memory could be considered part of a ‘macro-ecology’.

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6.11 An increasingly complex environment It is generally recognized that contemporary trends in increasing mobility and the ubiquity of Internet communications technology is producing an increasingly complex landscape of language contact. Categorization into mono or multilingual, native or non-native speaker is inadequate to describe observed situations. More, and more widely differing, languages in contact, more incomplete language acquisition, of either L1 or L2, and the improvisations associated with lingua franca lead, depending on your point of view, to a richly creative bricolage of means of self-expression, or a bewildering babel that offers little support for identity and in which ‘all that is solid melts into information’ (Connerton, 2009, p. 124). Increased use of lingua franca and technologically mediated channels of communication inevitably strip out some subtle associations along with, more solid, observed affect and gesture. Investigation of possible ‘PL1 differential’ effects may be of interest here, for example whether a non-PL1 speaking individual is more or less successful in mediated communication with an interlocutor from a PL1 speaking community than someone with no prior connection – or emotional baggage – with that community. It has been observed that multilingualism is the norm for more countries than is monolingualism; however, it is the traditionally monolingual Anglophone nations which are currently dominant in economic and political spheres; English is (was?) also the ‘first language’ of the Internet. These factors have led to a hegemonic influence for English as a lingua franca. Much research in language shift has been undertaken in the United States, where the ‘melting pot’ paradigm of assimilation to English has traditionally prevailed. L1 English speakers often display parochial attitudes towards other languages, as noted by Kramsch and Edwards. All participants consulted here oriented from PL1 to either English or French, for which similar attitudes prevail. This surely has an influence on the likelihood of PL1 being acquired and retained to result in ‘balanced’ bilingualism. It would be interesting to compare incomplete/non-PL1 acquisition in migrants in environments for which there is less emphasis on monolingualism in the host community.

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6.12 Summary of conclusions I draw conclusions in several of the areas studied. From the perspective of language attrition studies, it is possible to study effects that extend beyond the attrition of an established L1 and to recognize some effects of incomplete L1 acquisition via the systematic analysis of qualitative data. Consideration of methodological approach is central, here. I have argued for an expansion in the factors considered as contingent on the experience of language in use. The broader effects can include challenges to the formation of a subject position that may lead to a sense of inauthenticity and ambivalence, with a concomitant need to assign responsibility, or blame, for this situation; these feelings are subject to change over time. Notwithstanding the factors noted earlier, it was observed that a sense of genuine participation in PL1 can be experienced on the basis of very little language ability. It is claimed that such a ‘macro-ecology’ for language can include a cultural memory studies perspective in which language can be regarded as much a cultural artefact as literature, its influence not limited to people with complete fluency. This is particularly important in the case of cultures which ‘travel’ with migrating populations. There are wider social and political implications of recognizing the complex and subtle systems of attachment to and influence from PL1 and its associations. These include reinforcement of claims for positive effects of supporting bilingualism in the family. Implications also exist for both proponents and opponents of bilingual and ‘heritage’ language education schemes; however, these are outside the parameters of consideration here. Additionally, the findings of this study may support those who seek to bring coherence to public language policies. In particular, such policies should recognize the fact that the complexity of multilingualism and factors associated with language contact and change means that language instruction in itself is very far from being an apt tool for the rapid manipulation of social issues around immigration. The above can be defined, in terminology used in cultural memory studies, as ‘public’ factors. Individual experience can be termed ‘private’; for the individual whose lived experience includes language attrition/shift, the more detailed appreciation of issues surrounding language shift and of the ways in

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which the effects of PL1 can persist with positive effects for well-being may counter the pervasive attitude that regards them, and leads them to regard themselves, as ‘failed’ bilinguals. Several of the authors quoted in support of my conclusions mention the pace of contemporary life, how the enormous scope for movement and communication challenges identity. The formation of a sense of self takes place on a slower time scale and the effects of a change of language on subjectivity, taking into account all the cognitive and cultural factors with which language is freighted, are vast, perhaps incalculably so and, to paraphrase William James, explanation of their origin can fail to explain their significance. Recognition of the importance of even a liminal involvement with a language for individuals transitioning or ‘living between’ languages and cultures can recruit such involvements as positive and productive factors for private and public life.

App e ndix 1

Transcription symbols [

Left brackets indicate the point at which a current speaker’s talk is overlapped by another’s talk.

(.)

A dot in parentheses indicates a tiny gap, probably no more than one-tenth of a second.

(())

Double parentheses contain author’s descriptions rather than transcription.

::

Colons indicate prolongation of the immediately prior sound. The length of the row of colons indicates the length of the prolongation.

____

Underlining indicates loudness/stress.

App e ndix 2

Interview Schedule Research question: What is the effect on second /third generation immigrants of not speaking the first language of their parents/grandparents? Is it a problem and, if so, in what way? Questions breakdown into four areas: 1. Family background: • parents’ language(s) • reasons for emigration • parents’ occupations/education • siblings and their languages • present relationship with parents, etc. 2. Participant: • age now/on arrival • education level • occupation • early life/school and contact with minority/majority communities • marital status (endogamous/exogenous) • partner’s language(s) • children’s ages/languages 3. Language: • Do you speak/understand any __? • Did you when young? • Why do you think you didn’t learn/lost L1? • (When) Is this a problem? • Why do you feel that way?

174

Appendix 2

4. Other factors: • • • •

visible difference issues gender issues employment issues host country perceptions of ‘home’ country, or other factors that may affect the status of minority community.

Notes

Chapter 1 1

Conference at Stewart House: 14 February 2009.

2

ARELS, UCLES, Pitman and ESOL Skills for Life.

Chapter 2 1

Multilingualism, fluency in more than two languages, will not be specifically addressed here.

2

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs/.../3627c5d6

3

It is interesting to compare the Möbius strip image with cultural memory studies’ characterization of ‘collective memory’ as proceeding, ‘from an operative metaphor. The concept of “remembering” (a cognitive process which takes place in individual brains) is metaphorically transferred to the level of culture’ (Erll, 2008, p. 4), which does provide a heuristic that allows interaction between them, not just tension.

4

Not that linguistics, too, does not duck this question in that much analytic work has been built up by positing the existence of a typical speaker, the entity Paul Friedrich terms ‘the generic individual’, a theoretical point between the ‘communal’ and the ‘unique individual’ (Friedrich, 1986, 123).

5

The approach to culture begins when the ordinary man becomes the narrator, when he defines the place (shared) of discourse and the space (anonymous) of its development.

6

The terms ‘cultural’ and ‘collective’ memory are often used fairly interchangeably in the literature.

7

Proust’s madeleine is a recurring theme in this literature.

176

Notes

Chapter 3 1

Kerouac did, in fact, subsequently write, but never published, in Quebecois.

2

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/feminist_art_base/gallery/zineb_sedira. php?i=691

3

http://www.damonart.com/linkimages/l_whiteread_house_1992.jpg. There are many images of this work available online; this is a particularly detailed view.

4

http://collectie2008.boijmans.nl/en/work/2939%20%28MK%29

5

Published in French in 1980, the title is left in the original in the English translation.

6

Algerian novelist, friend and fellow delegate to the conference at which a version of Monolingualism of the Other was read.

7

In the Jephcott translation from the German, ‘The answer to the question “What does language communicate?” is therefore “All language communicates itself ” ’ (Benjamin, 1996b, p. 63).

8

In regard to the protective possibilities of the trickster role, Kramsch notes of L2 acquisition that one can become ‘a trickster of language … The desire for renewal and enhancement is closely related to the pleasure of dissimulation, and the power that comes from seeing without being seen’. L2 learner diaries speak of the L2 as a ‘secret code’ (Kramsch, 2009, p. 64).

Chapter 4 1

Here and elsewhere the participants are presented in alphabetical order by pseudonym.

Chapter 5 1

It was around the time of her marriage that Habeeba first assumed the hijab. This topic was not pursued at the interview.

Chapter 6 1

Official embarrassment over this is possibly indicted by how difficult it is to find the information. One must go to the official Web site for the tests, then enter ‘Can I take the test in Welsh?’ in the search box; the answer is yes, and in Scots Gallic, too.

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Index

ambivalence, 135 Benjamin, W. 90–100, 165 Block, D. 2, 20, 33, 37, 47–9 Bot, K. de 14, 32, 62, 153 Brumfit, C. J. 101, 104–6, 154 conversation analysis 107 Cowley, S. J. 72, 88, 104, 146, 151, 157, 166 cross-cultural psychology 8, 58, 63, 168 cultural memory studies 8, 57, 59 Derrida, J. 90–100 distributed cognition 10 distributed language theory 11 dynamic systems theory 6, 35 Edwards, J. 7, 17, 45 emergent themes 134 Enfield, N. J. 151 Erll, A. 8, 9, 60, 61, 66, 101 feelings of genuine participation 135 fiction 76 Fishman, J. A. 45–49, 55, 82 Friedrich, P. 39, 75, 101, 165, 168 Geertz, C. 18, 75, 103 Gilroy, P. 31, 46, 47, 50, 79, 152

inauthenticity/imposture 135 incomplete acquisition 5, 6, 14, 153, 166 interpretive sequential analysis 107 Kerouac, J. 13, 82, 119 Kramsch, C. 53, 160–2, 168 Kravchenko, A. V. 11 language attrition 2, 4, 155 Li, W. 2, 5, 37, 42, 49, 50 Linell, P. 10, 68, 69, 182 linguisticanthropology 102 linguistic relativity 31, 38, 39, 41, 62, 70, 74, 158, 160 loss 14 Lucy, J. A. 39, 41, 160, 182 McNamara, T. 99, 162 Marian, V. and Neisser, U. 39, 41 Moussaoui, Z. 47, 83 multiculturalism 14, 38, 47, 151–2, 161, 167 non-fiction 81 nostalgia 49, 152 Pavlenko, A. 37, 39, 41, 153 poetry 79 politics 161 qualitative approach 104

heritage language 15 Hofstadter, D. R. 67, 159 horizons of comparison 101, 168 Hutchins, E. 10, 67, 69, 70, 73, 98

racism 14, 27, 42, 44–7, 50 Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 11, 70, 71, 166 Rodriguez, R. 86

identity group 16, 55, 57 and migration 12, 56, 58

Sapir, E. 38–9, 44, 75, 102–4 Schmid, M. S. 4–6, 36 shift 14

Index Slobin, D. I. 39, 41, 69 spectrum of separation or of connection 150 Straub, J. 63, 75, 106, 156 supporting bilingualism 163

trickster 95, 96, 97, 160 ventriloquism 25, 97 Verschik, A. 15, 35–6, 42, 153 visual arts 88

187