Four Words for Friend Why Using More Than One Language

Matters Now More Than Ever

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 Marek Kohn

FOUR
WORDS
FOR
FRIEND
Why Using More Than One Language
Matters Now More Than Ever

YALE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

iii
Copyright © 2019 Marek Kohn

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

iv
 For Sue and Teo

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vi
 Contents

1 Other Words Are Possible 1

2 Babel: The Conspiracy Theory 20
3 The Rising Din 42
4 It Must Still Be In There Somewhere 63
5 Two Languages In One Head 81
6 Speakers In Search Of An Endpoint 102
7 Being Somebody Else 133
8 One Nation, One Language 151
9 Possible Words 188

Acknowledgements 216
Notes 219
Bibliography 228
Index 245

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viii
 B G a O S D Q N MD

Other Words Are Possible

If we are to make the most of languages, we

have to recognise that they are there to obstruct
communication as well as to enable it.

I have written this book in my second language. I would not be able

to write it in my first, Polish, which I never finished learning before I
went to school and moved decisively into the English speech commu-
nity. Millions of migrants’ children follow the same trajectory, leaving
the home language behind, and merging into the dominant one.
Having lost touch with my first language for many years, before devel-
oping a more recent commitment to repair the remaining ramshackle
structure and build upon it, I am an entirely typical ‘heritage speaker’.
My vocabulary is limited, my grammar improvised and to a large
extent guesswork. Yet the language is mine, and it is part of me.
Less typical, perhaps, is my conviction that my language history
makes me a particularly suitable author for a book on this subject. I
am very aware that not being able to do something properly is an
unusual attribute to claim as a qualification for writing about it. An
effortless polyglot might seem a more obvious person to go to for
insights into the plural use of languages. You should certainly go to

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 FOUR WORDS FOR FRIEND

one if what you are interested in is high-performance polyglotism.

That is indeed fascinating, but I feel it is a world of its own. Mathemat-
ical and musical genius are likewise fascinating, but they are not the
phenomena to focus on if we’re more concerned about how ordinary
people can count or hold a tune.1
My claim is based not on expertise but on another kind of knowl-
edge: often tenuous, fragmentary or occluded, but always present.
One of the most influential ideas in the science of bilingualism is that
both languages are continuously activated in a bilingual’s brain. The
awareness that arises from knowledge of more than one language
may also be continuously active. It forms part of one’s basic under-
standing of the nature of language, expression, thought and meaning.
Although it may go unrecognised in everyday life, it is still there,
embedded in one’s cognitive constitution. It colours the way one
apprehends the world. That is what I mean and try to explain when,
if someone asks, I say I’m bilingual.
This has been on my mind for almost my entire life. It’s why I can’t
take languages for granted. There’s nothing like losing something to
make one appreciate its value (though what that provides me with is a
motivation, rather than a qualification, for writing about this subject).
And there’s something compellingly strange about the enduring pres-
ence of ‘that language of the past that withers without ever leaving
you’. It leaves the sense that it is still up to something. You feel you
might manage to glimpse it at work if you could only turn round
quickly enough. That, I think, is why tropes about the pursuit of occult
or encrypted knowledge appear at certain points in this book.2
Not all of the first language’s effects are enigmatic. One in partic-
ular is clear to me. I know, from a lifetime’s experience, that even a
limited, unreliable and defective purchase on a language can provide
insight into the meaning contained in another language. It creates a
background awareness that knowledge and expression are always
contingent upon the particular framework of whatever language

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 OTHER WORDS ARE POSSIBLE

happens to be their vehicle. Any degree of familiarity beyond tourist

phrases will supply examples to sustain the recognition that words in
different languages rarely occupy exactly the same space of meaning,
even if they are reasonable translation equivalents. Their boundaries
do not align tidily, and they combine in different ways. Even a very
basic level of competence will be enough to highlight suggestive
structural differences in emphasis between languages, such as the way
that English capitalises the first-person singular pronoun, whereas
many other European languages prefer to capitalise second-person
pronouns. And it promotes a tacit awareness of the truth crystallised
by the linguist Roman Jakobson in his observation that ‘Languages
differ essentially in what they must convey, not what they may convey.’
English speakers learning Russian will discover that when referring
to a friend, they can’t simply call the person ‘my friend’, but have to
choose from among several words – four, typically, give or take – that
denote different degrees of closeness. They are obliged to testify about
how warm their friendship is. Languages set different distances
between people.3
Contrasts like these cast each language in a different light. One
language provides a perspective on the other. It heightens the constant
awareness that there is no one single way of saying something, or
understanding it: that whatever words are chosen, other words are
possible.

6 6 6 6

Languages exist both to enable communication and to obstruct it.

They establish perimeters inside which information is free to circu-
late, but across which it is unable to pass. This two-sided character
makes it impossible to take languages for granted. The relationships
between them need work, or at least thought, just as the relationships
between their speakers do. And all these relationships are intertwined.

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 FOUR WORDS FOR FRIEND

If we can get languages to work together, to flourish in each other’s

company, we will help their speakers to do the same.
Their speakers, ourselves: integrating languages, within communi-
ties or within individual minds, is a way to turn competition into
co-operation, suspicion into trust, antagonism into conviviality. It’s
not the only way, but it is a special one. At the most fundamental
level, it confounds the division between ‘us’ and ‘them’. It helps us get
the best out of human nature, and the most out of human culture.
Although languages can’t be taken for granted, many people are
able to use more than one without giving the matter a thought. Babies
whose carers speak two languages to them, or more, acquire each with
equal ease. Countless millions of people switch effortlessly between
languages throughout the course of every day, according to where
they are and whom they encounter. India, where languages flow into
each other and people move routinely between them, may be more
representative of language practices around the world than the United
States, in which English is dominant and monolingualism prevalent.
Even the United States may be more multilingual than it appears,
since although the Census Bureau records that about 20 per cent of
the population speak a language other than English at home, it does
not ask about any of the other ways and settings in which different
languages can be used. Bilingualism is as normal and natural as
monolingualism. Yet for many people who speak English and only
English, it seems little short of miraculous.4
One of the reasons for this is that they misunderstand the meaning
of fluency and are overawed by a bilingual ideal, that of the ‘balanced’
speaker who is equally fluent in each language. People tend to think of
fluency as a yes-or-no category – you are either fluent in a language or
you are not – rather than the continuum implied by the source of the
word. Flow may be smooth or restricted or interrupted; so may fluency.
It is a matter of degree. ‘Balanced’, or ‘symmetrical’, bilinguals are the
exception, not the norm. Bilingualism should not be defined by them –

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 OTHER WORDS ARE POSSIBLE

and especially not when people talk of ‘true’ or ‘genuine’ bilinguals,

implying that the vast majority are ‘false’ or, as one researcher labelled
them many years ago, ‘pseudo-bilinguals’. The linguist François Grosjean
defines bilinguals as ‘those who use two or more languages (or dialects)
in their everyday lives’. There is no need to specify the balance between
those languages, the extent to which each is used, or the user’s profi-
ciency in them. They are just part of everyday life.5
Pragmatic and open-sounding as it is, this definition cannot help
but tangle with other understandings of bilingualism. The most
familiar one sticks to the meaning of ‘bi’ and reserves the term for the
use of two languages. Any more than that is multilingualism, though
the word is most often used to describe the presence of a variety of
languages in nations, cities or communities, whether or not individ-
uals within them can speak more than one. ‘Plurilingualism’ has been
proposed as an etymologically sound term for the use of two or more
languages. It has also been invested with a significance that is similar
in spirit to Grosjean’s definition, but much more ambitiously inclu-
sive. Rather than posing the question of whether a person meets the
criteria necessary to be categorised as bilingual (and everyday use is a
criterion that discounts many deep seams of bilingual resources) it
asks what they are able to do with different languages. Instead of
looking towards ‘mastery’ of two or more languages, it looks at the
entire portfolio of language abilities that the person has at their
disposal. They may be able to sustain a conversation in one, employ
some useful basic phrases in another, understand what somebody is
saying in a third language despite being unable to reply in it, and
draw upon their overall body of linguistic knowledge to make infer-
ences about meanings in hitherto unfamiliar languages. In short, the
idea is to appreciate the value of all linguistic resources, however
imperfect or limited, and to make the most of them.6
This approach has been adopted by the Council of Europe for
language education across the continent. It is also the one I take in this

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 FOUR WORDS FOR FRIEND

book, although I prefer simply to talk about using more than one
language. There are many ways to use language, all of which may be
significant and valuable. You may use one just for exchanging pleasant-
ries, but the importance of pleasantries should not be underestimated.
You may be spoken to in one language and reply in another: it still
adds up to a conversation. (This works best with languages that are to
some extent mutually comprehensible, such as Danish, Norwegian
and Swedish.) Particular forms of language use don’t have to be regular
or frequent to be important in a person’s life. Some people read novels
or follow movie dialogue in languages they are unable to speak. Others
correspond with relatives abroad in languages they have no occasion to
speak out loud. Making the most of languages is not a matter of
becoming able to conduct one’s entire life in alternative tongues, but of
drawing upon languages that come to hand in particular settings.
It takes more than a positive attitude, though. In many settings,
limitations loom larger than capacities, and perhaps nowhere more so
than in families, where languages are subject to the most intense
emotional demands. Answering a question in a different language
from that in which it is asked is one thing between strangers, quite
another between close kin. Among strangers, it represents makeshift
understanding; among family, fundamental division. ‘Family meals
are utterly disjointed,’ admits one mother, describing how she speaks
Bengali to her daughter, who replies in English, which is the only
language spoken in the home that her husband understands. In a TV
soap about Polish migrants in London, the nastiest character is the
adult daughter who answers her warm-hearted mother in English.
Interested only in money, the younger woman has turned her back
not only on her mother tongue but also the values that were embedded
in it. One thing about soap opera characters is that they convey simple
truths: in this case, the sense of rejection that is impossible to alto-
gether avoid when somebody answers you from the other side of a
language border.7

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 OTHER WORDS ARE POSSIBLE

These mood swings are inherent in the use of languages. The

possibilities are endless, and so are the difficulties. An infant has the
potential to enter any language; a child may feel obliged to choose one
over others. Adults remain perfectly capable of learning new languages,
but life’s other demands pile up on their desks and get in the way.
Many children and adults are highly fluent in a language, but are
discouraged from using it because it lacks prestige or economic value,
or because too few people around them understand it, or because it
provokes hostility from speakers of other languages, or because there
are laws restricting where and how it may be spoken. Using more than
one language involves not just gaining languages but also hanging on
to them. It involves choices not just for individuals but for the commu-
nities and nations of which they are part. Grammar, vocabulary and
pronunciation aren’t the half of it.
In order to make the most of languages, to use them fruitfully, and
to pursue the ideal of their integration, we have to find paths that take
us around these obstacles and across these borders. This book doesn’t
provide maps. It picks a way through the terrain, looking out for the
intriguing and the unexpected, but does not survey the whole of the
landscape. It doesn’t offer guidance on optimal ways to learn languages
or to raise children in bilingual homes, though it makes observations
on these matters. Many excellent sources of such advice are readily
available. Instead, it offers ideas and information intended to help
readers think about the use of languages, and to understand their rela-
tionships with languages better. Four Words For Friend is not intended
to give direct answers to questions like whether taking a language
course is a good use of one’s time, or whether to send bilingual children
to Saturday schools where they are taught in the languages they don’t
hear in their weekday classes. It is, however, written with the hope that
the perspectives and context it provides might be of some value to
people facing such questions, and of interest to a much larger circle of
people drawn to the compelling contradictions of language use.8

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 FOUR WORDS FOR FRIEND

Finding paths through language territories may not require maps,

but it does require guiding principles. This book follows several; one
is that paths are worth finding. The use of more than one language
is a good thing: not always, not necessarily, not inherently, but in
most circumstances and in spirit, it is good. There are many reasons
for this, but the underlying one is that it favours a complex of goods:
openness, interconnection, inclusion, mutual exchange and the
sharing of knowledge.
Another is that the two-sided character of language must always
be recognised. It is the place from which the path has to start. We will
get hopelessly lost if we lose sight of the truth that language exists
as much to prevent communication as to make it happen. This is not
really a paradox: the design logic of enabling information to circulate
within a group, while restricting its ability to enter or leave, is all too
easy to grasp. There you have it: the two sides of human nature, inward
community and outward exclusion, the latter the engine of the former.
Sympathy is generated by drawing limits around it. To transcend this
design, to liberate those better angels of our nature, we need to treat
the dual character of language as a contradiction that must be resolved,
or at least mitigated.
The third basic principle, that all of a person’s linguistic resources
should be valued, helps to ease the conflict. Under this principle,
languages are treated with due respect, but not with undue deference.
A language is regarded not as an edifice within which a community is
housed and to which individuals may aspire to gain admission, but as
an assembly of elements which individuals are free to use as they
wish. This does not mean that maintaining its integrity and sustaining
its vitality are unimportant. Quite the reverse: the better shape a
language is in, the more use its elements will be. A healthy language
will keep its identity while encouraging a rich variety of relationships
to flourish across its boundaries, in different combinations, balances,
modes and registers, at different levels of proficiency. Its perimeter