Multimodal Communication in Young Multilingual Children: Learning Beyond Words

Notes on Romanisation

The Revised Romanisation system has been used throughout the text. Korean names have been Romanised in a surname (space) first name format, where a two syllable first name may have a hyphen between the two syllables.

Where interviews have been conducted in Korean, I have provided the original hangul and English translation. While the Romanisations of in-text Korean terms have been provided, Romanisations of long interview transcripts will not be provided, as I believe that they will be of little use to non-Korean speaking readers.

Notes on Videos

The main body of evidence in this book is videos of my own family communicating together. I have uploaded most of these videos to YouTube and inserted the links into the text. However, for privacy reasons, not all videos are included.

List of Videos in Order of Appearance:

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual3

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual4

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual5

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual6

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual7

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual8

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual9

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual10

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual12

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual13

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual14

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual15

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual16

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual17

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual18a

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual19

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual22a

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual23

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual24a

https://tinyurl.com/multilingual25

Preface

This book shares the language journey on which my family has embarked and which it is still on. I used to think children learn their parents’ languages. I have since found that there are no teachers and no students; we all learn every day from each other. No-one speaks a perfect language, but our language arguably becomes perfect, tailored for our own unique needs.

My Korean-English family develops our own languages, mixing them together just as we cook food that is neither Korean nor English. In the process of tailoring our language, words matter, but so do gesture and prosody. We have learnt how different ingredients from each language carry particular nuances, be they emotional or attitudinal. It’s a bit like seasoning. You might add some sugar to a particularly sour sauce to tone it down, just as my children might add Korean address terms to create solidarity when talking to a Korean person, even if the rest of the sentence is in English. Different words and gestures bring new meanings, and my family negotiates these meanings every day.

Crossing languages and combining the resources that we have is comparable to making a jigsaw puzzle. As a multilingual family, we make meanings using the puzzle pieces between and beyond our languages and cultures. In this practice of mixing and sharing our languages, we grow and nurture them. We learn not only how to speak and express ourselves but also how to listen and care for others. This is not a journey that we make as a family alone. Our languages are also built through our encounters with others, such as friends, neighbours, relatives. In the AI era, virtual assistants also interact with and impact us. On this journey, we also face conflict with ourselves and with others. It is not just words and languages that we must take into consideration: the cultures that we belong to also matter greatly. Our free and border-crossing manner of communication can be misunderstood as being incorrect and broken. Although it may look broken at first glance, I want to suggest we have found the perfect language of our own. It helps us to find our sense of belonging and identity that enriches our lives. I hope this book provides some insight into multilingual families as they navigate and explore their multilingual and multicultural world through language.

1 Everyday Talk: Beyond Languages and Cultures

1.1 Introduction

Language is closely tied to identity. When my 12-year-old daughter introduces herself, she says, ‘My mum is Korean. My dad is half Danish, a quarter Scottish, and a quarter English, which makes me half Korean, a quarter Danish, an eighth Scottish and an eighth English’. My husband is English, but his family history is equally complex: his father’s grandparents were from Denmark, his grandmother was born and raised in Shanghai and his mother was Scottish. It’s not just us, most people’s family histories are complex and diverse. For instance, in our neighbourhood, Irene is from Catalonia and Theo is from Denmark, but both moved to England. Because of this, their son Luke can speak Danish and Catalan, although he speaks mainly English when he goes to nursery. Their family speaks more than three languages on a daily basis, though mainly English. Because of their family history, their version of English is a little bit different from ours, as they mix Spanish, Catalan and Danish words into their English. Our other neighbours, Henry and Tess, are from Hungary and the Philippines, respectively. Tess’s family is originally from the Philippines, but they moved to Los Angeles when Tess was a young girl. Tess then moved to the UK. Henry used to live in Budapest and speaks Hungarian and English, while Tess speaks English with a bit of Tagalog. Their son, Lorenzo, speaks English in nursery but can also speak and understand a bit of Tagalog and Hungarian, which he uses when they visit his grandparents. For my neighbours, English is the language that binds everyone in the family together, however, it is not necessarily the language that each member, particularly the parents, finds the most comfortable or familiar. Families like these exist all over the globe. Over the past 20 years, the percentage of students in UK schools whose first language is not English has almost doubled. In 2002, 10% of pupils spoke English as an additional language (NALDIC, 2012). As of 2021, 19.3% of pupils have been reported to have a first language other than English (United Kingdom Statistics Authority, 2021).

Today, our world is more multilingual than ever before. There are also more multilingual families than ever. According to Grosjean (2010), more than half of the world’s population is bilingual, although I would recommend taking these figures with a pinch of salt as it is extremely difficult to measure precisely. I have personally been surprised by the number of bilinguals that I encounter in my daily life in the UK. I was surprised to learn that pupils at my daughter’s small primary school in Oxfordshire speak over 40 different languages at home. My twelve-year-old daughter, who is now in Year 7, once told me that there are no real English people in her class. By this, she meant that none of the pupils in her class were monolingual in English. It’s an exciting reality: everyone speaks English at her school, yet everyone has a different linguistic and cultural background.

Each multilingual family communicates in their own unique way at home. Families mould and build their languages through interacting with each other. It is an on-going process that involves children, their parents and the wider communities of which they are part. This book aims to focus on how children and their families embark on a journey together, learning from each other and nurturing their language. For most multilingual families, the most convenient and comfortable way of speaking is to mix languages. The mixing phenomenon, which is coined either as code switching or translanguaging, is found not only in young children but also in their parents and wider communities they belong to. This isn’t transitional but is found consistently in everyday talk by multilingual families throughout their lifetime. Through this kind of language mixing, each family creates a unique language that is different from the languages that monolingual families speak. Language mixing is often viewed as incorrect language use, for instance, the use of Konglish in Korean societies (Kiaer, 2019a). Overseas Koreans and their children are often pressured by their Korean relatives and families to speak ‘proper’ Korean, meaning just Korean without any added English. Yet, mixing languages is the defining attribute of multilingual families that fundamentally enables them to build their life together. In doing so, they will better understand each other, find identities and a sense of belonging as those who share life trajectories between and beyond multiple languages and cultures. This practice is best understood through the lens of translanguaging.

Translanguaging characterises multilingual individuals’ language and literacy practices, insofar as they not only go back and forth between two languages, but also flexibly and creatively interweave various linguistic features from two or more languages in their language and literacy practices (García & Li, 2014). In households where more than one language is spoken, children seamlessly travel around languages and create borderless languages of their own. They are always translating, always experimenting and always learning, through dynamic multimodal interaction. However, they also know the differences between the languages, particularly their nuanced meanings and cultural norms. They translanguage creatively, using all the verbal and non-verbal resources available to them to create meaning. Flexibility and creativity are indeed at the heart of language practice, as we shall observe in this book. Hence, in this book, I will adopt the term translanguaging to further explain the practice of language mixing in multilingual families. Through research on Korean–English (henceforth KE) children and their family language, I will show the innovative dimension of their interaction that goes beyond just a verbal exchange. A KE child is a child who lives and speaks between and beyond Korean and English at home in their everyday life. Also, as I shall explore, language mixing or translanguaging on a pragmatic level requires a holistic understanding of languages and cultures. In this sense, as Zhu Hua and Li Wei have argued, I will move away from focusing on multilingualism from the perspective of language maintenance and language transfer, and instead view multilingualism as an ‘experience’ that needs to ‘be studied holistically and multidimensionally’ (2016: 665). Hence, this book investigates the complex linguistic tapestries of KE children from a holistic viewpoint, focusing on the ways in which these multilingual children communicate multimodally in various contexts.

1.2 Researching Asian–English Multilingualism

The holistic and multidimensional approach matters particularly in studying young Asian multilingual children who grow in the English-speaking world as the languages and cultures they engage in are very different from each other (Chapter 5). Although the young Asian population and Asian–English families are growing in the English-speaking world, to date, the research on multilingual children and their family languages remains predominantly Euro-centric. According to a report published by the United Kingdom Statistics Authority, over one in five children now have a mother tongue other than English, and this figure has risen steadily over the past few years (UK Gov, 2021). The most spoken languages in the UK other than English are Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Arabic, French and Chinese. Notably, three quarters of the most spoken languages in the UK are Asian languages, and yet there has been very little linguistic study of non-European and non-American multilingual households. The situation is similar in other English-speaking countries. According to Canada’s 2021 census results published by Statistics Canada, there has been an increase from 9.7% in 2000 to 12.7% in 2021 in the number of people who primarily speak another language at home other than English and French, in particular languages from South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Among the top 12 languages spoken at home, the majority (nine) are Asian languages: Mandarin, Punjabi, Cantonese, Arabic, Tagalog, Urdu, Korean, Iranian Persian and Vietnamese. In the case of Australia, in the latest 2021 census, it was reported that the top five languages spoken at home in Australia, other than English, are Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese and Punjabi, all of which are Asian languages (Australia Bureau of Statistics, 2021). As for the United States, survey data on home language was collected by the American Community Survey (a subsidiary of the US Census Bureau) from 2009 to 2013, and I have included the top 20 home languages (excluding English and Spanish due to the relatively large number of speakers), 13 of which, namely Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Cantonese, Japanese, Urdu, Persian, Gujarati and Bengali, are Asian (US Census Bureau, 2015).

However, as Jean Mills (2001) among others points out, most studies on childhood bilingualism are dominated by accounts from middle-class, professional or academic parents from Europe or North America (2001: 387). Two decades have passed since Mills’ study and the situation has not changed much. Several other scholars have also echoed Mills’ views. Montanari and Quay (2019) advocate for a shift away from a ‘Eurocentric ideology’, which they argue has been the backbone of research on multilingualism to date (2019: 399). Lanza and Gomes (2020) note that scholarly debates on family language policy still largely adopt a Eurocentric approach and argue that documenting the ‘social reality’ of multilingualism and family multilingualism requires looking not only at Northern (Eurocentric) perspectives, but also at views from the global South (2020: 167). They also claim that, at least for the 20th century, discourses of multilingualism from non-Eurocentric regions (e.g. Asia, Africa and Latin America) have been ‘appropriated’ in Europe and North America before being recirculated back in those aforementioned regions (2020: 166). Understanding Asian–English multilingualism is not easily translatable in Eurocentric approaches due to complex, pragmatic aspects that are rich in Asian languages unlike English and other European languages. In Korean, for example, you cannot produce a grammatical sentence without knowing to whom you are speaking and where. For every utterance, one needs to know the relationship between themself and the hearer, otherwise one cannot be sure of how to even start talking. In this book, I hope to contribute to the diversity of this field by tackling pragmatic issues that are mostly relevant in Korean and further Asian–English multilingualism. This includes pragmatic adjustment and translanguaging to express emotions, attitudes and social interactions observed in KE children and their families. In doing so, this book aims to raise awareness on the necessity of researching Asian–English multilingualism.

1.3 How are Family Languages Made?

Making English polite

Family languages reflect the ever-evolving history and trajectories of each individual family, making every family language both unique and constantly changing. Despite sharing the same combination of languages, each family creates their own unique ways of expression to meet their daily needs. For instance, my children often add polite endings after speaking in English. Both of them started adding haeyo (해요) and haesseoyo (했어요) to English sentences. This practice started when they were learning English but is still happening on a daily basis. Haeyo roughly means ‘do’ and haesseoyo means ‘did’. Importantly, they are both polite forms that are used when a child speaks to an adult in Korean. In English, there is no register or style that shows politeness as in Korean. Korean children know this and develop their own ways of making English polite by putting polite endings after English sentences. One day Jessie said, ‘eomma, I need the loo – I’m desperate -haeyo’ (‘엄마, I need the loo – I’m desperate 해요’, ‘Mum, I need the toilet, I’m desperate’). Adding haeyo could be redundant from a purely information-sharing perspective, but this example shows that language is not just functional but also has an emotional and attitudinal aspect. My daughters also use the word jebal-yo (제발요 ‘please-politely’). This word has a politeness marker -yo at the end of the emphatic expression jebal (제발), which means ‘please’ or ‘I’m begging’ in desperate situations. These are a few innovative expressions that they use to this day. They were not taught these but came up with them themselves to bridge the attitudinal gap between Korean and English.

A Korean English child’s lexicon

One example that I came across in my observations was konbak sauce, a term coined by a young Korean–English child and adopted by his family. The word was coined by five-year-old Hyun-woo, who lives in the UK with his British mother and Korean father. One of his favourite sauces is Donkkaseu sauce, which his father introduced to him when Hyun-woo was around three years old. Donkkaseu is the Korean pronunciation of Tonkatsu sauce, a Japanese sauce made of fruit and vegetables that is a staple in Japanese kitchens. Tonkatsu sauce was first introduced around 1902, when Western food began gaining popularity in Japanese homes. The sauce was created to make Western dishes such as meat cutlets and other fried foods more appealing to Japanese tastes. The sauce later made its way to Korea, where it also achieved great popularity.

Because Hyun-woo was quite young when he first encountered the sauce, he found the Korean name for Donkkaseu sauce difficult to pronounce, so referred to it as konbak sauce instead. Hyun-woo used the term so frequently that the family had to adopt the term when referring to the sauce to ensure they were all talking about the same thing. This has confused the children’s grandparents (on both the British and Korean sides) as well as Korean friends, who at one point required a translation in order to follow the conversation during a visit.

The above diagram is my representation of a portion of Hyunwoo’s lexicon (Figure 1.1). He uses the word brother to refer to his brother. Calling one’s sibling using address terms is natural in Korea. Yet, Hyun-woo does not use the Korean word hyung but uses the English word brother. Although the main language for him is English, he has a substantial number of Korean words in his lexicon. Most of them are words that he uses to refer to people. He knows how to use the vocative particle -a/ya in Korean when calling his Korean cousins of a similar age. Some sensory expressions about hunger and pain are also in Korean. His mother, who is British, said she used those partial Korean expressions to her children when they were young to make the language environment for their father more inclusive. Besides verbal expressions, Hyun-woo also knows the meanings of waving and uses it to English people whom he encounters. Yet, he is a little hesitant to wave to Korean adults.

Figure 1.1 Lexicon of five-year-old Hyun-woo

Description

The image shows a black silhouette of a human head in profile, with a white brain diagram inside. The brain contains a mix of English and Korean words and phrases, representing a bilingual lexicon. Some words are accompanied by their Korean translations in parentheses.

Hyun-woo’s lexicon is in no way similar to that of any other child growing up in Korea or the UK. Each expression has developed as a consequence of life between and beyond Korean and English.

1.4 Translanguaging in Everyday Talk

Translanguaging is a dynamic meaning making process by which one employs diverse semiotic resources across the borders of language. Often, I think of translanguaging as being like cooking. Even if two people are cooking the same dish, they will tailor make the dish to suit their tastes. In intercultural homes, dishes often combine different cultural staples. In our home, we often eat rice and kimchi, but other side dishes can come from any of our other culinary inspirations. There are no borders between Korean and English regarding the food that we put on our table: having rice and bread at the same table is not uncommon. All food also needs to be catered to each individual’s needs. My children were brought up eating kimchi from a young age, so they like to eat spicy food, as I do. Yet, when their English granddad or dad’s family comes over, we add fewer or even no chillies. On the other hand, when their Korean grandmother comes to visit, we increase the spice. It all depends on the people and the occasion.

On the other hand, at home I cook Korean staple foods such as gimbap (seaweed rice roll). I make it with avocado, egg, red onions, sometimes with marinated chicken, and garnished with coriander. It is then dipped