Recently,
I read an article by Z. S. Bond, Verna Stockmal, and Dace Markus called “Sixty
years of bilingualism affects the pronunciation of Latvian vowels.” These
linguists were studying how linguistic policies in Latvia’s history are
affecting how speakers use the language today. The Russian language was
unofficially imposed on Latvians when Latvia was a part of the Soviet Union,
meaning that while there was no official penalty for not knowing the language,
a person would have needed to know Russian in order to survive. This caused
almost universal bilingualism in Latvia, which is still affecting the way
people speak Latvian, which is not the official language of the country.
What I found to be really
interesting was the points the article brings up about bilingualism and its
effect on the speaker’s first language. The article cited other studies done on
the interaction between speakers’ first language (L1) and second language (L2).
I was fascinated because out of many L1/L2 combinations, almost every single
study showed some effect of the speaker’s L2 on their L1. This really got me
thinking about how the languages I know change the way that I speak English (my
L1).
I’m not a very good phonetician, so
I wasn’t able to look at how my L2s affect my sound production and I don’t pay
attention to my phonology enough to speak to that. However, I do recognize that
my English is affected syntactically and lexically by the other languages I
know. I speak English, Spanish, and French and also know Latin. The strongest
influences on my use of English are probably Spanish and Latin. Latin
influences my writing style more than Spanish, while Spanish influences my
speaking style more than Latin.
In
my writing, the passive voice is utilized quite often. I also use a lot of
phrasings that I get when I translate Latin into English. Because Latin is so
heavily inflected, I often end up having to get creative to make my
translations make sense in English. I think it might be more of a stylistic
thing, or maybe Latin has rewired my brain to express ideas differently, but I
often realize that I’ve used Latin-influenced phrasing after I’ve written a
sentence and can’t think of any other way to put the idea expressed into words.
Spanish definitely influences my
speaking style in English. I often use expressions such as /¿no?/ at the end of
a declarative sentence to confirm with my interlocutor that what I’ve just said
is correct. An example of this would be “Our second blog is due November 30
¿no?” to mean the exact same thing as “Our second blog is due November 30,
right?” I use this construction often, and part of the reason I do is to
communicate my Spanish-American identity. That’s a more deliberate use of
language mixing. One thing that happens in my speech that I don’t pick up on
until after the fact is saying “eee!” as an interjection. The contexts in which
I use this expression are varied, so I can’t break it down for you as easily as
I broke down /¿no?/, but if you listen carefully when I’m talking, you might be
able to pick it out.
Looking at how my L1 is affected by
my L2s, I try to figure out exactly what is going on to cause that cross over
of one language into the other. There are a lot of possible explanations. I
could be doing it to communicate my identity as a Hispanic person, or as a
classicist. Maybe these languages provide my brain with a way of expressing
ideas that just works better than the other ways my brain knows how to express
itself. All I know is that my English is strongly influenced by my background
in Spanish and Latin. Do you guys have any L1/L2 crossover in your language
use? If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
Here’s a citation for the article in case you want to read it:
Z. S. Bond, Verna Stockmal and Dace
Markus (2006). Sixty years of bilingualism affects the pronunciation of Latvian
vowels. Language Variation and Change, 18, pp 165-177.
What an interesting article Rios! You bring up an excellent point. Growing up in Paraguay, I could also witness the effects of large scale L1/L2 interactions. Paraguay has two official languages, Spanish and Guarani. Spanish was unofficially imposed during colonization, although Guarani remains the language that 95% of the population speak natively. From growing up there, I witnessed very interesting effects that both Guarani had on native Spanish speakers and Spanish on native Guarani speakers.
ReplyDeleteTo give a concrete example of Guarani influencing Spanish, we can take the word "Concepcion", which means conception. Now because Guarani doesn't allow for an "s" to follow a "p", most speakers would alter the pronunciation to "Conceccion", which would be the equivalent of pronouncing "conception" as "concection".
In the converse case, we can see something even deeper. It turns out Guarani has no articles, yet native Guarani speakers with high exposure to Spanish very often find themselves using Spanish's "la" as a crutch to tie in sentences together. "Mo'o pio la vakapipopo?" is the canonical example. ("Where is the ball?", where "the" is borrowed from Spanish.)
What I find most fascinating about this is that we can see gradual linguistic changes because of this, even the generation of new dialects. Forces like these allowed Paraguay's two languages to gravitate towards each other, serving as a force of inclusion and identity development.
Agreed! The experiences you described in which your second language influences your first language reminded me of a more immediate (in a temporal sense) effect of bilingualism. English is my first language, but ever since learning Spanish I've noticed an interesting phenomenon that occurs when I switch between the two. Whenever I've been speaking Spanish for a while and then switch back to English, I notice that I inadvertently speak English with a bit of a hispanic accent. It usually wears off after a while, but the really interesting thing is that this does not occur both ways. I mean, I obviously speak Spanish with an English accent, but I have not noticed an effect where I have more of an English accent when I switch from English to Spanish that gradually wears off. It seems that maybe, like the findings in the article, this is a phenomenon of L2 influencing L1 (and not the other way around). I wonder why it is that the L2 seems to have more of an effect on the L1? This is a really interesting question to explore!
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ReplyDeleteHaving grown up speaking two languages the idea of language crossover is definitely familiar. I agree that while I don't find the my pronunciation of english words is affected after speaking amharic for a period of time, having one language in mind definitely affects my word choice in the other. For example let's call language 1 english-because I'm most comfortable speaking english-and language 2 amahric. I find that after switching to language 1 after speaking in language 2 for a few hours I will completely blank for a a descriptive word in language 1 despite having a much wider knowledge of the language. Does that happen to anyone else?
While I dont have enough experience to speak about what happens when you have language crossover because I simply never got good enough at any second language despite attempts to learn Spanish and Japanese, I can say that this bring up interesting questions of the power of learning languages in a certain order. You cited examples here about how L2 and L3 can affect someone L1. Leaving you with examples of how your English has been altered by Spanish and Latin. But what were to happen if you learned Spanish first, Latin second and then English? What would the effects be then? Is there any sort of systematic effects that come from certain second languages on specific first languages? This seems to bring out a whole realm of possibility of showing how languages interact within the brain and how that can alter and change how language in general is produce or understood.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately I’m not quite fluent in a second language, though there was a time in which I spoke Spanish conversationally with a fair amount of ease. What I found was that the most interesting way that speaking a second language affected my first language was drawing the parallels in meaning, rather than crossover in production. Maybe this was because English and Spanish are both romance languages, but I definitely became fascinated with finding interesting parallels between English and Spanish, or even discovering what must be a leftover morpheme from Latin or Greek. However, this may be more of a phenomenon because I learned Spanish in the classroom instead of being raised speaking it.
ReplyDeleteDuring my senior year of high school, my Spanish teacher made a very similar point. She remarked on her use of “okay” in Spanish. As she explained it, Spanish doesn’t have a word that can accomplish as much as the word okay can; it can express agreement, understanding, an intention to take action, or be used as a pause in a sentence. As a result, she’ll often mix “okay” into her Spanish. I believe this is one reason why you might find your L2 making its way into L1. When you compose sentences, you put together the words that you think will express what you want to say. So if you have a word that can better express your point in your L2, it seems reasonable that that might be the word you choose even though it isn’t strictly part of the L1 lexicon.
ReplyDeleteSomething I would like to know about is the way that systematic suppression of language has influenced the ways that language are spoken. More specifically, how do languages that have been repressed react to being made taboo? My thoughts here might be that languages actually change less once they are repressed by the government. Hebrew, for example, has remained relatively consistent throughout history, despite the persecution and discrimination that Jews have faced throughout history. I am curious if there is any more research here, and I would wager that the L1/L2 interaction, while clearly is influential at the human-level, might also be varying at the system-level, as a function of power structures that advocate for that language.
ReplyDeleteYour post is fascinating because it begs a question related to the chapter 10 readings. Just as your L2 influences your L1 I wonder how many of us are aware of how much our A2 influences or A1; A standing for "Accent." Each of us has our own idiolect. And we all speak with an accent usually based on the the region in which we were raised. Many people, however, come from backgrounds slightly dissimilar to where they find themselves later in life. Particularly those of us fortunate enough to attend institutions like Stanford. Therefore, the accent we use when we go home and hang out with our high school buddies is probably very different than the accent we use when we spend time with our Stanford friends. I wonder if we can coin the term "bi-accentism." And I wonder if the findings of bilingualism and its effect on the speakers' first language can be easily transposed onto to the possible affects of "bi-accentism" and its effect on the speakers' first accent. I for one can attest, being from the inner city, south side of Chicago, that there are clear parallels. I wonder how many others feel the same.
ReplyDeleteI wish I was more fluent in a second language--I have a conversational grasp of Spanish, but I’m not fluent. While I was at the peak of my Spanish-speaking ability, one trend I noticed was my inclination to opt for a Spanish word or phrase in my writing if it was shorter than the English translation. I remember writing essays on AP tests at the end of my senior year, trying to churn out as much content as I could as quickly as possible, and feeling deeply annoyed that I had to write “there are” or “there were” instead of “hay” or “hubo” in Spanish--the temptation to write three short letters instead of two words was strong.
ReplyDeleteCoincidentally, yesterday I had a conversation with a friend who grew up studying French. Her native language is English, but she likes to joke that her English skills have declined as she’s grown more proficient in French, because she so often tries to inject English translations of French phrases into conversation.
I don’t think I’ve experienced the kind of L1/L2 interaction that Latvians in the study have, since I’m not very proficient in my L2s (French and German). However, I’ve definitely noticed some interaction between my L1s (English and Cebuano). English is an SVO language, but Cebuano is a VSO language. Whenever I have to do any effortful thinking, I tend to do it in English. In situations where I want to convey my thoughts as clearly as possible to my grandmother, who is more fluent in Cebuano than English, I will try to say things in Cebuano only. But since my thoughts seem to float to my consciousness in English syntax, what automatically comes out of my mouth is a Cebuano sentence with SVO syntax.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I’ve noticed myself re-purposing the Cebuano word ‘ug’ whenever I want to say ‘about,’ since I’m not very familiar with the Cebuano word for ‘about.’ When I checked just now, there *is* a Cebuano word for ‘about’ (it’s ‘mahatungod’), but it occurs too rarely in the Cebuano I speak at home for me to have absorbed it into my mental lexicon. Formally, the Cebuano word that I end up using, ‘ug’, functions as a linker of verb predicates and determiner phrases and as a conjunction, so I’m not entirely sure why it has become my crutch word of choice for ‘about.’
Very interesting, Aaron!
ReplyDeleteAfter speaking Hebrew (L3) for 6 years, I found myself dropping contextualizing words in English (L2). Hebrew does not the indefinite articles "a" and "an" (one would say, "would you like piece of pita" instead of "would you like a piece of pita") and lacks "is" verbs (like "to be" ... one just says "I sad," not "I am sad").
Interestingly, this did not directly translate over for me, in that I did not begin dropping the is verb without any contextualizing morphological changes. However, the clarity of my English did suffer as I began restructuring my sentences as a way of avoiding explicit context, as if I had grown too lazy for English. For example, I would say, "I'd love the pita" instead of "I would like a piece of pita." Perhaps this is a strange case, but it seemed as if my English became more efficient!
Crossover between languages is such an interesting topic! I speak both English and Spanish but do not necessarily know which was my first language because I was learning them both at the same time. I would presume that learning them both at the same time would increase crossover but I actually don't mix both languages all that much. Similar to how you use "no?" at the end of sentences, sometimes a Spanish phrase or saying will pop into my English conversations. A silly one that always comes out of nowhere and even surprises me is "¡Ay, caramba!" Sometimes when something super surprising happens, I will instinctively say that phrase without thinking. It sometimes makes for an awkward situation but it is interesting how quick I am to just say that phrase. I do wonder why it seems more instinctive than saying "omg!" for example. My only thought is because I heard it a lot growing up.
ReplyDeleteAlthough my French does not affect my speaking very much (although sometimes I say "avec" instead of "with" if I have been in "French mode" for a while), I have noticed it effecting my writing, like how Latin effects yours. In French the word "que" occurs after some verbs to link to sentences. For example, "Je pense que..." means "I think that..." In my writing I often use "that" unnecessarily. For instance, if I wanted to say "I think I love you" in French it would be "Je pense que je t'aime." As a result, I would probably write "I think that I love you." It has gotten to the point where I can't even tell when I need "that" or not anymore. I basically just add "that" whenever I would use "que" in French.
ReplyDeleteI can definitely attest to the phenomena you're experiencing, Rios. Although I cannot statistically quantify it, I definitely feel like learning to read Latin poetry and prose has made my placement and structuring of relative clauses in my English writing much more flexible. Beyond this, I've picked up the expression "aiyaa" for "Oh dear" from a year of Chinese, perhaps moreso to express Asian American identity than because I have 1 year of proficiency in Chinese, and I use the Filipino (and, from my understanding, incidentally also Korean) expression "[:õ]" when speaking to family and Asian American friends in place of "mhm". Perhaps what's more surprising to me, though, is how I don't have L1 level proficiency in Chinese or Tagalog, but I've nonetheless still managed to adopt elements of the linguistic culture from the people and environment around me. Language seems to truly transmit itself as both communication and culture.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting post! Much like Cristian, I come from a country where there are many official languages -- 24 to be exact. While Spanish is with no doubt the most ubiquitous (and the only one I speak), the other 23 still tremendous effects on how people speak throughout the country. These changes are more apparent when one travels to the rural areas. In those areas, many people use incorrect phrase structures in Spanish as they translate the phrase structure rules from their native indigenous languages. Also, even when communicating in Spanish, it is not uncommon to hear strange words that wouldn't be found in the dictionaries of the Real Academia Española. What happens is that speakers of the indigenous languages incorporate some of the lexicon from that language into their use of Spanish, specially when referring to phenomena related to weather and agriculture. I find it fascinating that such a small country can have such linguistic variety, and I definitely agree with the point that speaking different languages changes how you speak each individual language.
ReplyDeleteThanks for such an interesting post, Rios! Growing up in Brazil where I only spoke Portuguese and then moving to the United States where I learned English at a young age has definitely led me to experience L1/L2 crossovers in my language use. I find it really interesting that you sometimes use /¿no?/ at the end of declarative sentences, because I do the same! Now, I don’t know if I just do that because I am literally translating the expression /não?/ from Portuguese to English which is essentially the same as /¿no?/ in Spanish, or if it’s just me saying /¿no?/ from the Spanish I have learned in high school. I have also often times structured declarative sentences in English following a verb-object-subject order which is a very common way to phrase sentences in Portuguese, causing people to give me weird and confused looks.
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