A Multilingual Challenge: Speaking in different languages

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Speaking in Different Languages from Heart to Heart: a Multilingual Challenge

Last week, on July 18th should have been Nelson Mandela’s 96th birthday and on this occasion while I was going through his inspiring ideas and life stories, I came across a very famous quote of his.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

As soon as I read this, I instantly had an epiphany concerning the link built between our mother tongue and our heart. I asked myself whether there also exists a way to rebuild this kind of connection between our heart and the language or languages that we study and practice.  That is, reaching a point where no mental intervention is needed, meaning where we don’t feel the need to double-check everything in our heads. Even not having to focus on whether the things we intend to say are grammatically and contextually correct and making sure that we don’t jabber and we get straight to the point. Of course, after years of study and practice, this process becomes more automatic and the things we want to express in a foreign language come to a point where we don’t feel like we’re in a labour when we try to get across to the person we talk to. Eventually they are being brought out more naturally but despite that, do we really feel the same connection we have with our mother tongue for those languages that we have been studying and practicing all those years? For instance, could you say that you would feel more moved when someone tells you “I love you” in a foreign language that you know by comparison with the effort he or she exerts in order to say that to you in your mother tongue although this person doesn’t speak it? Or would it come out more naturally to you to swear in a foreign language when you get angry or injure yourself by mistake? Or would you be able to dream in a foreign language after immersing yourself for a while in a foreign atmosphere where only that foreign language is spoken?

This week on Monday, TermCoord organized a meeting with the intention of letting us, the trainees and study visitors coming from different linguistic backgrounds, gain a better understanding on our connection to our mother tongues, we got together and everybody shared their insightful and inspiring opinions about this matter. As I mentioned at the end of the first paragraph, almost all of us came up with an understanding and acceptance that when it comes to spontaneous reactions or emotional issues, we cannot help but resort to our mother tongue as if it is our medicine or antidote to deal with emotionally charged situations or reactional stimuli.

Apart from that, one of the inspiring outcomes from the meeting which stuck with me is that one of the interns, whose mother tongues are both Creole and Portuguese, told us how she attended a party where everyone spoke Creole, and yet as she told this very same story to her Portuguese friends, she began to tell it in Creole (probably due to her linguistic association with an event where the Creole was the dominant language) without even noticing it. This really impressed me because it is pretty rare to do this kind of thing without being conscious of it. I even wonder how that experience would be like, because code switching is a highly conscious linguistic activity for a person who only has one mother tongue. Indeed, no matter how swiftly he or she is able to do it between two languages, it still requires, for a non-native speaker, to be alert to a certain extent. Other than that, one of the interns told that when she was in Spain, she began to have dreams in Spanish (and just for the record, she’s extremely fluent in Spanish, you can tell that she had lived and breathed that language while she was in Spain) and again upon her return to her country, she had an experience in which she began to tell something in Spanish to her German family without even realising it.  So that linguistic experience she had been through was also reminiscent of the unconscious code switching that the intern whose mother tongues are both Creole and Portuguese had also experienced. And based on that, she obviously reached a point where she embraced Spanish, as if it’s her own by drawing on the opportunity for an in-depth linguistic and cultural immersion.

Based on my educational, occupational experience and linguistic background (I only speak on behalf of myself here), it’s difficult for me to say that I reached the point where I wholeheartedly (no pun intended) embraced the languages I study.  I can say that I speak and understand English, French and Spanish. I can read and write in all of those languages more or less but when it comes to delve into very deep issues about life or for example, or even spontaneous reactions and emotions, they come out automatically, without any conscious thought in my mother tongue which is Turkish. That’s to say I have to be comparatively more conscious and careful in order to transfer them into the other languages contained in my linguistic repertoire. However sometimes when I get disappointed or angry over something, it seems easier and more practical to swear in English (maybe it may stem from the fact that the curse words I intend to utter are longer in Turkish).

Furthermore, during this session, we were asked to talk about our multilingual experiences in our own mother tongue and then asked to translate it into English. After having this session of translating, one participant said in Spanish: “De que hablasteis en vuestras lenguas maternas llegó a mi corazón” (the things you said in your mother tongues, touched my heart), and in conjunction with this statement, I might be straight to the point to say that I really hate to watch a dubbed movie in my mother tongue for instance. I always prefer to watch it in its original language even though I don’t understand it (with subtitles of course). It feels very unauthentic and even ironic to watch a dubbed version: it is as if the movie does not really speak to my heart. Actually, there is an expression in my mother tongue, more like a slang maybe; when a person says something, but we have the impression that he/she sounds ingenuine, or the tonality sounds theatrical and unnatural. We may even feel that the words he or she chooses to use seem to be premediated. Indeed, then we simply say: “It sounds like a Turkish dubbing.”

So as a conclusion, maybe we may also add something to that brilliant quote of Mandela that, let alone the importance of talking to a person in his or her language, no matter which language you speak, the way you express yourself may also be vital as well when you want to get a message across. Personally, I think that if you let your heart speak, whether the things you say in a foreign language are grammatically correct or wrong, at least the person you talk to would know that you are genuine if he or she really is all ears.

 

 

 

By Nehir Guler
Student at MA Learning & Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts,
University of Luxembourg,
Study visitor at TermCoord