solecism, etc
After a reading in Dublin, a squat old man, in a chunky cardigan as gray as his hair, went up to the mike, ostensibly to ask me a question. He uttered a line that has since been simmering in my head instead.
“You have such a unique voice, it’s almost like a different kind of English.”
I’m quite the lax grammarian - a quirky thing to be, when you’re a writer. I’m much stricter on others, especially when teaching or editing (and in business, of course), but for myself, I’ve always been more concerned with the demeanor of language rather than the rules that should govern it. I suppose this partly has to do with growing up bilingual, and speaking Tagalog, a language so dynamic and so fluid, that it has hardly any rules at all.
In Tagalog, sentences are constructed by feel rather than by grammatic law. Spelling allows for variety. And we routinely make up words; we pepper conversations with strings of sounds that can only live in specific moments, words that will likely never be useful again. Disposable units of language like choogoog, Numonora Aunor, chumecheke. And sometimes I think this is because we find that there are experiences and emotions so endemic to a moment, or a place, or to certain groupings of individuals, that the right terms for them have simply never come up before.
I wonder if this isn’t how words like kilig or gigil came to life, words that don’t seem to have analogues in other languages. And more questions: if a language lacks these words, what happens to the emotions/things that these words define? How are they perceived? What is subtracted or altered in a person’s world view? While I’m certain the things being defined still exist, I find myself intrigued as to how they might be comprehended and processed, since there isn’t any space in the cultural vocabulary for them.
And on the flipside, what happens to a culture when you layer a completely new language on top of it?
Everyone I know in the Philippines is bilingual, albeit to varying degrees. Even my nanny, who never moved beyond sixth grade, spoke to me in English sometimes. Both English and Filipino (the politically correct term for Tagalog) are mandated mediums of instruction in all schools across the Philippines; both are official languages. In fact, English is still the language of both business and law, and with labor being the primary national export, it’s not surprising that the country is actively encouraged to be bilingual.
Sadly, that’s not always a good thing, because in less than ideal learning environments, bilingualism can skew. When competency in the foundational language isn’t strong enough to take on the additional layer of a second language, fluency in both languages begins to deteriorate. You end up not mastering either, speaking instead in a sustained form of code-switching. And when forced to a monolinguistic structure, you find yourself floundering. The duality of linguistic systems in your head turns inhibitive, dissuading you from becoming a true participant in more advanced levels of conversation/communication. Instead of adding another dimension to how one might perceive the world, bilingualism becomes subtractive.
It’s a problem we’re seeing more of. We have speakers who can grasp advanced level literature and absorb complex lectures in either language for instance, but who might struggle with getting their own points across, especially when the convolutions of their thoughts begin to outstrip their control of language. One can only imagine the frustration inherent in that kind of intellectual confinement.
I don’t know which language I learned first, to be honest. It’s as if my mental processes have always had this duality; English and Tagalog were always double-helixed in the DNA of my mind.
Maybe it’s the lack of a clear allegiance in terms of a foundational language that has allowed me this unhampered access to two linguistic/cultural paradigms, without one language eating into the other. I regularly use words that have no correlation in the other language, and I’ve been known to pepper my conversations with borrowed terms, but I can still speak both languages without code-switching, because in my mind, they’re still separate and distinct. The learning of one was not hinged on the foundation of the other, so they never had the chance to turn parasitic. And happily, instead of being subtractive, bilingualism has absolutely made my internal landscape that much richer. It means I have an instinctive, intuitive understanding of words like cynical, and angst, and nostalgia, even though they don’t exist in the Tagalog lexicon. And I understand all the nuances curled up in the universe of kilig, or nabati, or tabi po.
My friend and I were talking about this, and I told her that because I was privileged enough to have grown up in a space that was populated with people who had the same linguistic abilities, it was easy to develop a third language - a language that was not only an aggregation of the other two, but more importantly, actively worked to fill in their gaps, and even flourished this way. In slightly mathematical terms, instead of a third language that reduced the first two to their least common denominators (which is a much too simplistic way to explain subtractive bilingualism, yes, I know), this one throve on expanding from highest common multiples.
I can’t help thinking that all of this has contributed to how I speak and write, and how my voice has developed. Hah. Yes, ultimately, this is just me trying to console myself. (Hey, it’s my blog, I can write whatever I want.)
Because maybe transposing some ‘Tagalogness’ - and this pertains less to words than, as mentioned before, the demeanor of the language itself - into my English isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe I do speak a different kind of English, but maybe there’s space in the literary world for that. Maybe there’s a niche for an imagination that has celebrated and explored these kinds of linguistic ‘gaps’.
Or maybe I should stop being so damn sensitive and just move on. Whelp.
bilingualism i'm being overly sensitive rambling incoherently finding excuses will move on now non-fiction
Originally published on Tumblr, January 2013.