I enjoy reading the (auto)biographies of multilinguals. The current issue of Begegnung (“Encounter”), the magazine of German International Schools, has a feature about one of my favorite actors, Jasmin Tabatabai. Jasmin has some interesting things to say about growing up bilingual and bilingual education. The daughter of an Iranian father and a German mother grew up bilingually in Tehran: German was the language she used with her mother and in which she was educated at the German International School there and Persian was the language she used with her father, her siblings and her extended family. At the time of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 the family and the then-12-year-old Jasmin left Iran for Germany, where to this day she speaks Persian with her siblings and went on to become one of the top German-language actors of our time.
In the feature article Jasmin speaks about the good fortune of having grown up with two languages and tells how much she loves both languages and cultures. The journalist must have asked the usual dumb question about whether growing up bilingual hadn’t made her feel “conflicted” (the German word they use is zerissen (“torn apart”) and I like her answer: no it’s normal in the same way that you love your mother and your father and no one ever asks whether having two parents makes you feel conflicted!
Although it might seem like a contradiction, Jasmin goes on to say that she is not raising her own daughter bilingually but in German only. The child is “of course” exposed to Persian and English (presumably it’s impossible to grow up in Berlin or anywhere else in the world today without being exposed to English …). So, the child is actually growing up multilingually with German as the main language. While growing up with German and Persian was special in Jasmin’s generation (she’s 42), being in a multilingual environment is so normal for her daughter (who is 6) that it doesn’t even count as growing up bilingual anymore! (which brings me back to one of my arguments why sociolinguistics needs a paradigm shift)
I like the normality of it all! At the same time, Jasmin is scathing about fellow-Germans who speak English with their children in order to raise them bilingually and all they teach them is “English with a German accent.” I couldn’t agree more – rearing children is hard enough without trying to do it in a foreign language …
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Thanks for that, Emily! I actually felt sorry for Westerwelle when I read all those mean comments about his English on the YouTube clip you sent. I’d prefer it if there was the same level of public debate about the content of his message than the form in which it’s delivered… I don’t even think his English is particularly bad once he gets started. It’s certainly no worse than the English of the guy who asks the question … interesting case of the construction of linguistic inferiority aka language shaming in action.
Good on him to refuse to speak English altogether in another press conference! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laUJzGMUEI4
Hi Ingrid!
I’ve been thinking about multilingualism in Berlin (as an L1 English speaker living in Berlin) and the link to the assumption that you’re exposed to English (at the very least!) to the degree that it’s not even thought of as ‘bilingualism’ anymore. What I’ve found particularly interesting lately is the general outrage/embarrassment that’s surrounded the recent instatement of Guido Westerwelle as German Foreign Minister. The scandal has been that his English has been publicly judged as entirely insufficient (and in fact many people are saying he “can’t” speak English). You can hear Westerwelle’s English use here (as well as read some of the comments, in which lots of people say ‘how embarrassing’!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSS7tEme8U0
At 1:55 he switches briefly to German (“and the- the Aufschwung ist da”) and the crowd laughs (and I don’t think they’re laughing at the content…). I went to see a popular Berlin comedian last week, Kurt Krömer, (and was pleased by how much I understood :-)!, and there was a joke about Westerwelle’s English in the show.
I can’t help compare this ‘of course he should speak highly proficient English’ to the reception of other languages spoken in a similar context in Australia. During the last federal election much fuss was made about the ability of now prime-minister Kevin Rudd’s Mandarin proficiency. In particular, the then foreign minister, Alexander Downer, claimed that Rudd was merely ‘showing off’ and that Downer himself also spoke French, but didn’t feel he had to flaunt it. [You can hear Downer speaking French at the beginning of this interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RduckEDWj3c%5D
You can hear Downer talking about languages and Rudd during an interview on Radio National in 2007, just prior to the election (start at 4:28):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2BcLgfldNY
My favourite snippet in the above clip is: “though there are thousands upon thousands of Australians, there are tens of thousands of Australians who can speak foreign languages…”. I wonder if that does or doesn’t include the over 4 million people in Australia who reported speaking a language other than English in the home in the 2007 national census? [There are also some further wonderful comments in this article: http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Downer-takes-swipe-at-Rudds-Mandarin/2007/09/07/1188783483181.html, where Downer plays one-upmanship by noting that he learnt French in two months, while it took Rudd two years!]
What would a Sociolinguist 2.0 do (WWS2D?) in studying these public attitudes? How do they fit into the paradigm shift? Maybe a discussion would fit nicely into a chapter on monolingualism in a Sociolinguistics textbook? ☺
Thanks so much for your enlivening blog posts!