My cultural/linguistic autobiography
I was born and raised in Cameroon,
which is often referred to, as “Africa in miniature” to a banker father and
teacher mother. Both came from the same tribe but different ethnic origins, within
the same linguistic region. Cameroon has two geo-political linguistic regions
with a multitude of not less than 240 ethnic dialects/languages. I come from
the English-speaking region of the country thereby making this my L1 (first
language – mostly used). I grew up using English and Bakossi (dialect). Thinking
back to my childhood, it is quite amazing I ever learned to communicate with
normal people. The weirdest people in the world are so easy to talk to, but
peers and friends are sometimes the most difficult to communicate with. This is
the resulting build-up of my wide linguistic history with linguistics being a
science of human communication; stereotypically, the study of the structure and
variety of signals which carry complex grammatical and lexical information from
one individual to another.
My exposure to languages thus started
from birth although, it later became linguistically challenging growing up. My
exposure to languages besides my parents began with our house helps and
playmates. I also spent some years at university in the French-speaking region
of Cameroon and after some self-assessment, learned far too much about my own
speech and mannerisms. My collegiate English also became punctuated with some
pidgin words I picked up from the playground. From our interactions, my English
probably didn’t change theirs much but a lot of their words and style of
speaking found their ways into my lexicon. I noticed strong differences in how
my siblings and I spoke compared to our playmates/house helps. They would
rarely use the first person narrative, while we did so far too much. We used a
lot of questions as opposed to our mates who rarely asked questions. I suppose
our inquisitive nature came from our differing raisings and linguistic
background.
I do speak English, French, Pidgin
and Italian fluently, but, English as previously mentioned, is my dominant
language. My parents spoke to us in Bakossi and English predominantly. Being
multilingual has always been an advantage. However, I grew up strongly with
English because my father spoke a different variation of Bakossi to my mother’s
which made English usage constant. It always struck me as a child when I was
growing up that my mannerism, as in the way I spoke English, was different to
most of my peers. It was common to ascribe levels of education and social class
of a family, to the way individuals speak. This may have been or may not have been
the case. As often construed, individuals with “non-academic English” accents
are typically thought to be uneducated or from an underprivileged background because
they speak a non-standard form of English diced with pidgin. My siblings are
all college-educated but as is common, would sound out of place within our
city, in the midst of most of our peers.
Growing up in Cameroon exposed me to
many different cultures as well as languages thereby dispelling the worries of
learning other languages beside English. I had to learn how to balance the
languages around me and at the same time create my own identity. Balancing the
languages was sometimes harder for me because I used English more often than
French and Pidgin. Italian was picked up later in life, owing to time spent in
Italy. I found it hard adjusting to my social environment and therefore became
interested in looking through languages to see how people say things to each
other. I am also deeply interested in communication, as commonly put, and I
have the ability to convey emotions that don’t have a description. My
background has prepared me to cope and has also provided me with fundamental
values for the guidance of my behaviour. This leads me to discuss the strong
emotional element, like the expression of my emotions in the different
languages.
Bearing in mind that the purpose of
language is to communicate and express ideas, I intend to use Susan Fussell’s
definition as a guide in discussing the different linguistic and communicative
competence which I have developed as a result of my encountered difficulties in
communicating emotions. Communication of emotions in L2 and L3 languages does
however become even harder and more complex than L1 as I struggle with
communicative anxiety. “The interpersonal communication of emotional states is
fundamental to both everyday and clinical interaction. One’s own and others’
affective experiences are frequent topics of everyday conversations, and how
well these emotions are expressed and understood is important to interpersonal
relationships and individual well-being” – (Fussell 2002). However, my
emotional exchanges as a NNS (non-native speaker) has a more controlled processing
which involves word searches, expressions, grammar rules, pragmatic rules
including idioms and metaphors.
Over the past decades, linguists have
made substantial progress in understanding how emotions are expressed through
nonverbal mechanisms like facial expressions, gestures, postures and even tone
of voice. However, these mechanisms in themselves are insufficient in
expressing the full range of human emotional expressions. Reason being that
these mechanisms just do not provide detailed information about a person’s
emotional state although they can indicate what general class of emotions a
person is feeling. For instance happiness; if I am laughing, others may assume
that I am happy. The extent of laughter may infer the intensity of my
happiness, but the loudness of the laughter does not provide any information
about any particular experience of happiness. The intensity of the emotions
from within and the communication of these emotions are inextricably linked
within linguistics with one referring to other in most papers.
These nonverbal mechanisms thus can
only provide the expression of external emotions. It is also a known fact that
people will talk about emotions that occurred in the past mostly with friends
and family. These experiences are always a major topic of discussion in
therapeutic contexts. This is mostly how we as humans prefer to communicate
about emotions and feelings which we are not experiencing at the time of the
conversation. As can be seen from these synopses, I have tried to address a
variety of issues I encountered with communicating my emotions via the verbal
and nonverbal mechanisms. However, my contributions are not wholly based on an
empirical analysis but most of the emotions expressed do touch on the impact
and the interpretation of nonverbal signs. According to Fussell, an
understanding of the ways verbal and nonverbal cues are integrated has become
especially relevant today because new technology allows for communication
through media.
However, expression of emotion in a
second language is a paradigmatic issue. It is very important to think of the
grammar of a second language and its mechanics as matters of convention or
mutual agreement among the users of that language. Such an agreement is
necessary for that language to work because to communicate with the simplest
words, as an example, we will have to agree on their meaning. These conventions
within the grammar of that language come partly from a need to be clear and
accurate. And like other conventions, rules of grammar change continually.
Learning grammar, then, is not just a matter of memorising puritan laws laid
down by language teachers, but of attending to how that language is actually
used in the society pertaining to how it works, how it affects others and why
it works the way it works. Cross-culture research thus of any kind cannot
afford to ignore the problems posed by semantic differences between languages.
Learning a foreign language, to me
has been very critical because it has aided me to communicate within different
communities with different cultures, and in different dialects. For instance
when I emigrated from England to Italy, learning the local language became an
important tool in my integration in the community. The ability to use Italian
was very powerful as it enabled me to convey emotions, mitigated the
distinction between what I already knew about the language and what I did not
know. Although some of the locals could speak English, it was also pertinent
that I learn their language as a demonstration of interest and a commitment to
my new community. But I was confronted with another quagmire during my sojourn
as learning and using Italian felt like who I was had been taken away. As
earlier mentioned, every language has got its own grammar rules which need to
be in convention with the culture as that defines that community.
It is a known fact that language and
identity are in tandem. Its most important tenet is that any speaker of that
language needs to develop a relationship with at least that language for social
and emotional development to occur normally. The ideology behind this is a
systematic construct on particular ways of using that language and of its
baggage invested in certain moral, religious and most importantly,
socio-political values, which in turn gives rise to most assumptions about that
particular language. An example of this would be classical Arabic used in the
Holy Koran as a language of ideology and it has always been correlated with
Islamic practices. Language ideologies involve interpretations and judgements
about grammar, accent and vocabulary. Again, just as aforementioned, my
experience with languages has led me to understand that certain aspects of
social identity and status are very much judged by its differing social speech
styles.
It is also notable that communicating
emotions in a foreign language can easily lead the speaker into a concurrent
usage of more than one language or better still, language variety, if engaged
in a conversation. My personal experience in Italy was more like living in a
diglossic situation whereby, I felt obliged to choose a code, depending on
where, what and with whom I was having a conversation. I had Pidgin, English,
French and Italian and spoke Italian in class but English at home while with
friends, I spoke French. This tendency of aligning the syntaxes of the
languages is known as code-switching. It is common though for me to switch from
French to Italian between my nouns and adjectives as they both share a common
language rule rather than switching from English to French. Reason being that,
French adjectives would usually follow a noun and increase the difficulty in
syntactic alignment at the boundary of the sentence sub-structures of English.
There is an expectation in language
choice and a perception on individual’s usage of languages. Michael Burgoon, a
retired professor of medicine, carried out a research on this expectation of
language behaviour. According to him, these language behaviours falls within
expectations determined by a source’s perceived credibility. Therefore, his Language
Expectancy Theory is based on language persuasion. It is the assumption that
language is a rules-based system, that people develop with expected norms as to
appropriate language usage in given situations, and that unexpected linguistic
usage can affect the receiver’s behaviour resulting from attitudes towards a
persuasive message. This theory views language expectancies as enduring
patterns of anticipated communication behaviour which are grounded in society’s
cultural and psychological norms. People develop both cultural and societal
expectations about language behaviours which affect their acceptance of
persuasion.
Languages differ in how they
represent experience, so the languages I learned would have affected the way I
communicate my emotions or talk about objects and events. According to Eve
Clark, when we first acquire a language as a child, we build on what we know as
in the conceptual information that discriminates and helps create categories
for the objects, relations and events we experience. This provides a starting
point for language from the age of one onwards. Linguistic researches on
acquisition across a range of languages, creates the picture of what children
know and which categories their language picks out depending on the map each
unfamiliar word and construction would align to a relevant conceptual
representation. This again can lead to a form of social dynamic where we may
invent contemporary forms of conceptualization and expressions as part of a language-game
which in itself designates other forms of simpler language.
This leads me into that area of
sociopragmatics which basically is the study of language use in a social
context. Aptly put, “. . . the ability to act and interact by means of language”
(Kasper and Roever, 2005). This is an ability to have online control and
offline knowledge of the linguistic and the cultural aspects of sociopragmatics
of an L2. When I began learning Italian, I would miss requisite politeness
markers in my utterances and it would be difficult to determine whether this
was as a result of sociopragmatic deficits whereby these markers are known but
I would not be aware those markers needed to be used in that situation. But I
may have been subjective and chosen not to follow these pragmatic rules because
I did not want to lose the person I was. I did not want a total loss of
connection with my language and my identity although this newfound language was
a source of freedom to me.
This highlights a shift in my
communication in language emotions and this introduces an intentional component
into which this basic concept enters. I am assuming here that this shift of
language emotions is double-edged and can sustain the two communicative
functions whether it is internal within the brain or external among
homo-sapiens, so as to bypass all complex inferences. By implication, it is a
signal that sets up characteristic emotional modes within species. In humans, happiness,
fear, anger and sadness exert a modifying influence such that it is
proportional to that cognitive evaluation caused by that emotion signal. In the
absence of this signal, the content of the emotion fails to impinge on
consciousness thereby rendering the shift meaningless. My view here is a
demonstration of how some sociocultural aspects of the communication of
emotions and the human physiology in emotion come together as part of an
integrated system.
Based upon these experiences, I have
come to the conclusion that without knowledge of a language, we are completely excluded
from that society and its culture. Locals are more receptive if their language
is spoken by a stranger or if at least an effort is made to speak the language.
Language is what makes us human as I have tried to show in this paper. Language
is the only medium we as humans, use in sharing our thoughts and emotions with
the rest of the world. I was struck with profound melody and meanings when I
began learning another foreign language. It is a moment I will always cherish
as I was not stubborn to ignore the opportunity. To me, Italian is just plain
sexy and I am not insinuating one-liners when one is out on the streets but
actually knowing the language and applying it tastefully is undeniably
attractive. Some say it implies education, refinement, good taste and it makes
you standout against competition. However, the task of learning another
language appears to be daunting but the reward is immeasurable.
