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.