Do bi- and multilinguals perceive themselves differently in their respective languages? Do they experience different emotions? How do they express emotions and do they have a favourite language for emotional expression? How are emotion words and concepts represented in the bi- and multilingual lexicons? This ground-breaking book opens up a new field of study, bilingualism and emotions, and provides intriguing answers to these and many related questions.
Do bi- and multilinguals perceive themselves differently in their respective languages? Do they experience different emotions? How do they express emotions and do they have a favourite language for emotional expression? How are emotion words and concepts represented in the bi- and multilingual lexicons? This ground-breaking book opens up a new field of study, bilingualism and emotions, and provides intriguing answers to these and many related questions.
Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation
352
Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation
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Overview
Do bi- and multilinguals perceive themselves differently in their respective languages? Do they experience different emotions? How do they express emotions and do they have a favourite language for emotional expression? How are emotion words and concepts represented in the bi- and multilingual lexicons? This ground-breaking book opens up a new field of study, bilingualism and emotions, and provides intriguing answers to these and many related questions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847699817 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Channel View Publications |
| Publication date: | 03/09/2006 |
| Series: | Bilingual Education & Bilingualism , #56 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Dr. Aneta Pavlenko is an Associate Professor at the College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, US. She has lectured widely in Europe, North America, and Japan, and published numerous scientific articles and book chapters on sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics of bilingualism and second language acquisition. She is an author of Emotions and Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and a co-editor of three volumes, Multilingualism, Second Language Learning, and Gender (Mouton de Gruyter, 2001), Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (Multilingual Matters, 2004), and Gender and English Language Learners (TESOL, 2004).
Dr. Aneta Pavlenko is an Associate Professor at the College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA. She has lectured widely in Europe, North America, and Japan, and published numerous scientific articles and book chapters on sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics of bilingualism and second language acquisition. She is an author of Emotions and Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), co-author of Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition (with Scott Jarvis; Routledge, 2008), editor of Bilingual Minds (Multilingual Matters, 2006) and co-editor of Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (Multilingual Matters, 2004).
Read an Excerpt
Bilingual Minds
Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation
By Aneta Pavlenko
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2006 Aneta Pavlenko and the authors of individual chaptersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85359-873-9
CHAPTER 1
Bilingual Selves
ANETA PAVLENKO
Do bi- and multilinguals sometimes feel like different people when speaking different languages? Are they perceived as different people by their interlocutors? Do they behave differently? What prompts these differences? These questions often pop up in conversations about bilingualism, but are rarely raised in the literature in the field (see, however, Grosjean, 1982; Heinz, 2001). Some scholars waive them away as naive and simplistic, others point out that we also perform different identities in the same language, when changing registers, contexts, interlocutors, or interactional aims. This is a valid point, because monolingualism is indeed a dynamic phenomenon. Even within the confines of one language, we continuously acquire new linguistic repertoires and behave and feel differently when talking, let's say, to our parents versus our children. At the same time, the argument that the study of bi- and multilingual selves is not worthy of scholarly attention or that it can be easily replaced with the study of multilingual identities is misleading and reductionist for at least two reasons.
The first problem with this argument is the sleight of hand by which it equates the notion of self-perception with that of performance, and the notion of self with that of identity. This substitution reveals a deep discomfort with the focus on something as intangible as 'feeling like a different person' and a preference for 'objective' identity performance data (conversations, texts, task performance) over 'subjective' self-perception data. I intend to show, however, that introspective data have both relevance and validity and can help us identify sources of bi/multilingual experience that are not directly observable in the study of identity performance.
The second problem with the argument is the framing of bi/multilingualism as an expanded version of monolingualism, rather than a unique linguistic and psychological phenomenon. In reality, acquisition of new registers in the same language is always facilitated by phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic overlaps. In contrast, acquisition and use of a new language, in particular one that is typologically different from one's native language, is a much more challenging enterprise that may be further complicated by the need to negotiate new and unfamiliar surroundings. These differences are especially pronounced in late bilingualism, when speakers are socialized into their respective languages at distinct points in their lives, childhood versus adulthood, and in distinct sociocultural environments.
The goal of the present chapter is to legitimize the question about different selves, to examine whether bi- and multilinguals indeed perceive themselves as different people when using different languages, and to understand to what sources they attribute these self-perceptions. To do so, I appeal to answers from 1039 bi- and multilingual web questionnaire respondents, to reflections of bilingual writers, and to studies in psychology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and anthropology. The triangulation of introspective data with the data from empirical and clinical studies of bilinguals' verbal and non-verbal behaviors will allow me to understand linguistic, psychological, and physiological processes that underlie the perception of different selves.
In line with the traditions of the field of bilingualism, I will use the term bilingualism to refer to research that examines both bi- and multilingualism. The term bilingual will be used to refer to speakers who use two languages in their daily lives, be it simultaneously (in language contact situations) or consecutively (in the context of transnational migration), regardless of respective levels of proficiency in the two. The term late bilingual will refer to individuals who learned their second language after puberty. The term multilingual will refer to speakers who use more than two languages in their daily lives. The term bilingual will, however, appear more frequently, because research to date has focused predominantly on bilinguals' selves.
Dual, Double, and Doubled Selves: Bilingualism and Schizophrenia
In bi- and multilingual communities, changes in verbal and non-verbal behavior that accompany a change in language are commonly taken for granted and do not elicit much interest. In fact, language boundaries can become quite blurred in contexts where code-switching and code-mixing prevail (cf. Auer, 1998). However, in traditionally monolingual societies, bilinguals are at times seen as people with two conflicting personalities whose shifting linguistic allegiances imply shifting political allegiances and moral commitments. Such views were particularly common in the first half of the 20th century. In the United States, during and after the First World War, language and educational policies targeted incoming immigrants and their children, forcing them to abandon their native languages in a show of loyalty to their new country (Pavlenko, 2002). A decade later in Germany, Nazi scholars began to equate bilingualism with Jews and other ethnic minorities and argued that bilinguals experience a pathological inner split and suffer intellectual and moral deterioration in their struggle to become one (Henss, 1931). They also referred to the 'bilinguality of feelings' and the 'mercenary relativism' of bilinguals who switch principles and values as they switch languages (Sander, 1934). Later on, North American scholars concerned with immigrant bilingualism linked continuing allegiance to one's primary ethnic community to the feelings of anomie, alienation, social isolation, nervous strain, and cognitive dissonance (Bossard, 1945; Child, 1943; Spoerl, 1943).
In the second half of the 20th century, the increased transnational migration, the revival of ethnic consciousness, and progressive educational scholarship contributed to the lessening of concerns and a greater understanding of the benefits of bilingualism. Nevertheless, the view of bilingualism as a problem of two incompatible identities, referred to here as the discourse of bilingualism as linguistic schizophrenia, has not vanished. In a treatise on bilingualism, Adler (1977: 40) warned that 'bilingualism can lead to split personality and, at worst, to schizophrenia'. Clarke (1976) likened foreign students in the United States to schizophrenic patients and argued that their learning of English is hampered by a clash of consciousness between the familiar traditional worlds they come from and modernity and progress they encounter in the United States. In bilingual psychoanalysis, schizophrenia persisted as a metaphor used to discuss problems brought on by culture shock, cognitive, linguistic, and cultural dissonance, and different social roles occupied by patients in their respective linguistic communities (cf. Amati-Mehler et al., 1993). From time to time, this metaphor also pops up in political discourse. For instance, David Blunkett (2002), British Home Secretary, recently remarked that the use of English – rather than the native language – in Asian British households would help 'overcome the schizophrenia which bedevils generational relationships' in immigrant families.
Interestingly, the discourse of schizophrenia is not confined to negative descriptions of bilingualism by reactionary scholars or politicians. It also appears in bilinguals' own reflections and in particular in the work of translingual writers, that is, writers who write in more than one language or in a second language (Kellman, 2000). These writers display a unique sensitivity to intrinsic links between languages and selves and are painfully cognizant of the fact that in different languages their voices may sound differently even when telling the 'same' stories. For instance, a childhood French–English bilingual Julian Green recalls that when he decided to write about his early years in English, rather than French, his memoir took a whole different shape. Whereas the subject remained the same, the rhythm, the choice of words and details, the author's stance, and the pattern of disclosures and omissions varied between the two languages:
I was writing another book, a book so different in tone from the French that a whole aspect of the subject must of necessity be altered. It was as if, writing in English, I had become another person. I went on. New trains of thought were started in my mind, new associations of ideas were formed. There was so little resemblance between what I wrote in English and what I had already written in French that it might almost be doubted that the same person was the author of these two pieces of work. (Green, 1941/1993: 62)
A similar experience is recounted by Tzvetan Todorov (1985, 1994) in his essay Bilingualism, Dialogism and Schizophrenia. Todorov arrived in France from Bulgaria as a young man and eventually became a prominent French scholar and intellectual. Eighteen years after his departure from Bulgaria, he was invited to come back for a conference on Bulgarian studies. In translating his conference paper about nationalism from French into Bulgarian he noticed the following:
I had changed my imagined audience. And at that moment I realized that the Bulgarian intellectuals to whom my discourse was addressed could not understand the meaning I intended. The condemnation of attachment to national values changes significance according to whether you live in a small country (your own) placed within the sphere of influence of a larger one or whether you live abroad, in a different country, where you are (or think you are) sheltered from any threat by a more powerful neighbor. Paris is certainly a place that favors the euphoric renunciation of nationalist values: Sofia much less so. ... [the necessary modification] required that I change an affirmation into its direct opposite. I understood the position of the Bulgarian intellectuals, and had I been in their situation, mine probably would have been the same. (Todorov, 1994: 210)
Struck by this new awareness, Todorov no longer knew how to proceed. Should he act as if only his present opinion, informed by his French context, counted? Would that amount to a denial of his Bulgarian background? Or should he speak as a Bulgarian intellectual, although that would mean a denial of the past 18 years of his life? To theorize his experience, Todorov appealed to Bakhtin's (1981) notions of dialogism and polyphony that refer to the presence of several independent and often conflicting voices within a single text. These notions have often been used in positive descriptions of bi- and multilingualism. Todorov challenged this unquestioning celebration of heterogeneity and drew attention to the darker side of immigrant bilingualism, which may also motivate internal conflict, mental distress and, ultimately, silence.
Todorov's (1985, 1994) essay, together with Hoffman's (1989) memoir about second language learning, Lost in Translation, offered a striking illustration of the drama of duality, embedded in bilingualism, and inspired scholars to examine how this experience is reflected in fiction, memoirs, and reflections of other translingual writers (Beaujour, 1989; Besemeres, 2002; De Courtivron, 2003a; Kellman, 2003a; Pavlenko, 1998, 2001, 2004a; Pérez Firmat, 2003; Stroiñska, 2003; Valenta, 1991). These explorations reveal that the dominant metaphors and tropes that appear in bilinguals' reflections on language – tongue snatching, border crossing, borrowing, bigamy, betrayal, bifurcation, fragmentation, multiplicity, split, gap, alienation, dislocation, and double vision – reinscribe the feeling of duality and invoke the discourse of schizophrenia that also informs Todorov's (1985, 1994) and Hoffman's (1989) discussions of bilingualism. These metaphors convey an array of emotions: guilt over linguistic and ethnic disloyalties, insecurity over the legitimacy of a newly learned language, anxiety about the lack of wholesome oneness, angst over the inability to bring together one's incommensurable worlds, and sadness and confusion caused by seeing oneself as divided, a self-in-between, a self in need of translation. It is this painful and perhaps even violent facet of bilingualism that propelled a French-Spanish writer Claude Esteban to admit:
... having been divided between French and Spanish since early childhood, I found it difficult for many years to overcome a strange laceration, a gap not merely between two languages but also between the mental universes carried by them; I could never make them coincide within myself. (Esteban, 1980: 26; translated by Beaujour, 1989: 47)
It is important to note here that, whereas in the early 20th century the notion of inner split was used as an argument against bilingualism, Todorov and others do not argue against bilingualism per se. Rather, these writers discuss the split as a source of both anguish and creative enrichment, the latter stemming from the ever-present relativity of one's stance and perspective (cf. Hoffman, 1989). One can also legitimately ask whether the perception of a linguistic and psychological split is unique to translingual writers for whom the relationship with their multiple languages is by definition a challenge or whether individuals from other walks of life also feel that they have multiple selves?
Present Study
Research questions
The goal of the present study is to answer this question and to expand the scope of inquiry from experiences of immigrants and expatriates who learned their second language later in life (cf. Ervin-Tripp, 1954, 1964, 1967) to multilingual speakers with diverse learning trajectories, in particular those who learned two or more languages from childhood. Three questions are posited in the study: (1) do some bi- and multilinguals feel that they become different people when they change languages; (2) how do they make sense of these perceptions; and (3) what prompts some bi- and multilinguals to see their language selves as different, while others claim to have a single self. Notably, I do not aim to provide a definitive answer to the question of bi- and multilingual selves. In view of the richness and complexity of people's minds and diversity of their linguistic trajectories and experiences, a uniform answer is neither possible nor desirable. Rather, I want to understand the key influences that shape individuals' perceptions of the relationship between their languages and selves. In order to do so, I will look both at the attributed sources of self-perceptions and at discourses of bi/multilingualism and self the participants draw on in framing their answers.
Research design and participants
The data for the study were collected through a web questionnaire 'Bilingualism and emotions' created by Jean-Marc Dewaele and myself and maintained on the Birkbeck College website from 2001 to 2003 (Dewaele & Pavlenko, 2001–2003). The questionnaire contained 34 closed and open-ended questions and elicited the following sociobiographical information: gender, age, education level, ethnic group, occupation, languages known, dominant language(s), chronological order of language acquisition, context of acquisition, age of onset, frequency of use, and self-rated proficiency. In what follows, I analyze participants' responses to one open-ended question: 'Do you feel like a different person sometimes when you use your different languages?' Owing to limited space, I will not discuss the relationship between participants' answers and sociobiographical information, leaving this issue for future consideration.
The questionnaire was advertised through several listservs and informal contacts with colleagues around the world. It allowed us to gather an unprecedented amount of data from a large and diverse population of bi- and multilingual speakers of different ages and from a variety of linguistic backgrounds. A total of 1039 bi- and multilinguals contributed to the database (731 females, 308 males). The ages of the respondents ranged between 16 and 70 years of age (mean = 35.6; SD = 11.3). The respondents were generally well-educated: high school diploma or less, 115 (11%); Bachelor's degree, 273 (26%); Master's degree, 308 (30%); Ph.D., 338 (33%); five participants chose not to answer the question. A majority (n = 837; 81%) reported working in a language-related area. In terms of the number of languages spoken by each individual, the sample consists of 144 bilinguals (14%), 269 trilinguals (26%), 289 speakers of four languages (28%), and 337 speakers of five or more languages (32%), with 157 people bilingual and 19 people trilingual from birth. Seventy-five first languages (L1s) are represented in the sample, with the number of speakers of each language as the L1 as follows: English = 303; Spanish = 123; French = 101; German = 97; Dutch = 76; Italian = 52; Catalan = 32; Russian = 29; Finnish = 28; Portuguese = 20; Greek =15; Swedish = 15; Japanese = 11; Welsh = 10; and 61 other languages with fewer than 10 speakers, among them Arabic, American Sign Language (ASL), Basque, Bengali, Bosnian, Breton, Burmese, Cantonese, Danish, Duri, Farsi, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latin, Latvian, Malay, Mandarin, Navajo, Norwegian, Nugunu, Oriya, Polish, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Sindhi, Slovak, Slovene, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. More than half of the participants declared themselves to be dominant in L1 (n = 561), a smaller proportion reported dominance in two or more languages including the L1 (n = 373), and about 10% reported dominance in a language or languages other than the L1 (n = 105).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bilingual Minds by Aneta Pavlenko. Copyright © 2006 Aneta Pavlenko and the authors of individual chapters. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
Preface
1. Bilingual selves Aneta Pavlenko
2. Language and emotional experience Mary Besemeres (Australian Research Institute)
3. A passion for English: Desire and the language market Ingrid Piller (Basel University) and Kimie Takahashi (The University of Sydney)
4. Feeling in two languages Michèle Koven (University of Illinois)
5. Expressing anger in multiple languages Jean-Marc Dewaele (University of London)
6. Joking across languages Jyotsna Vaid (Texas A&M University)
7. Translating “guilt” Alexia Panayiotou (University of Cyprus)
8. Envy and jealousy in Russian and English Olga Stepanova Sachs and John Coley (Northeastern University)
9. Cognitive approaches to the study of emotion-laden and emotion words in monolingual and bilingual memory Jeanette Altarriba (University at Albany)
10. When is a first language more emotional? Catherine Harris (Boston University), Jean Berko Gleason (Boston University) & Ayse Aycicegi (Istanbul University)
11. Bilingual autobiographical memory and emotion: Theory and methods Robert Schrauf (Penn State University) and Ramon Durazo-Arvizu (Loyola University)
Afterword