this is ina

A recent post on “Kottke”:http://www.kottke.org/03/09/030911bilingual_co.html got me thinking about bilingualism and codeswitching. Codeswitching is generally defined as the phenomenon wherein a bi- or multilingual speaker shifts from one language to another in the course of a conversation. [definition c/o "A.Bertram":http://www-personal.umich.edu/~weyrbrat/codeswitching.html]

I’m bilingual, and although I was born in the Philippines, my first language is English. I spent my early years abroad with my family in international schools where English was the means of communication. I could understand Tagalog easily, but I could not speak it. I had to relearn Tagalog when we moved back to the Philippines to settle there for good (or so it seemed at the time ).

Personally, I codeswitch (i.e. speak in Taglish, but the term codeswitching seems so much nicer ) depending on the situation. I can rattle off sentences in straight English, or speak pure Tagalog when the need arises, but I usually find myself speaking English with a few interjected Tagalog words, or Tagalog with a few interjected English words. The subject matter has no real bearing as to what language I’ll use, it depends on whom I’m speaking to. I’d usually speak to someone’s stronger language. If I’m comfortable with the person, and I know the person is strong in both languages, I’m free to speak a mixture of English and Tagalog, sometimes switching mid-sentence if a more appropriate phrase comes to mind. Its not about brevity, its about how to best be able to convey your ideas.

I think the beauty of knowing more than one language is about having a wider range of ideas with which to express yourself. Certain words in one language may have only a rough translation in another, and will not be able to convey the idea as well as the original. This brings to mind Orwell’s 1984, where Newspeak was the language officially sanctioned in that dystopian world. For those that haven’t read the book, in Newspeak, instead of a language growing with time to include new words and forms of expression, the proponents of Newspeak prided themselves in publishing a thinner dictionary each year, by combining similar words and eliminating words that described undesirable concepts. Words such as freedom were stripped of their original meaning, or dropped from the language altogether.

Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent. Let’s get back. Being bilingual or multilingual is a huge advantage in having the vocabulary to describe a wider range of concepts and ideas that may not even have appropriate words to articulate these fully in one language. When relearning my mother language, it was like discovering a whole other world of descriptions and ideas that were not available to me previously. It would be wonderful to learn a few more languages and widen my horizons even more.