Lecture 3: When Languages Collide

Today we are going to talk about what happens when speakers of different languages meet.

Let’s take for example English: PUT ON BOARD

Can anyone tell me all of the countries in which English has official status?

We can view the English-speaking world in terms of three circles:

1. Inner circle: U.S. Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand

2. Outer circle: the places where English has a long history of institutional use: India [3^rd largest English speaking population in the world], Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, etc. In the case of this outer circle, the use of English is partly a response to Britain’s earlier conquest of some of these regions.

3. Expanding circle: China, Japan, Korea, and probably Ukraine.

Now, you can see by this model that English is spoken by a number of different peoples as their second language. In fact, soon more people will speak English as their second language than do people as their first language. Moreover, in each of these communities the English language is a little different—it has been made a little different because second language users have changed it and adapted.

Now, what is it called when you speak more than one language?

MULTILINGUALISM: Multilingualism is the ability to speak more than one different language well. Notice this definition does not require you to be fluent.

Now, who are these multilingual people in the outer and expanding circles? What are their speech communities like? What is it like to be a speaker of several languages and what happens when a person speaks more than one language?

Before we go any further, we need to take a step back for a minute and review two concepts.

• We need to review the concept of language as a code.

• We need to review the concept of a speech community.

Review: code/language

I want you to remember that we can call a language a code. When two or more people communicate with each other in speech we can call that system of communication they employ a code. Now, when two speakers are multilingual, again, that is they speak two or more languages, then they have access to two or more codes. If they switch between those codes we call that code-switching. This can also be called a third code or language that draws from the other two codes or languages.

Slide 1: code switching

Take for example Sasha and Lena.

When Lena says to Sasha: “Would you like some tea? And Sasha replies: “Why yes, thank you.” They have just used a system of communication, or a code. We might call that code English.

Now, if Lena and Sasha speak both English and Russian, and Lena asks Sasha the same thing again in Russian, we would say they are employing two codes, and by moving back and forth between the two codes, we would say they are code-switching.

Finally, there is code-mixing:

Ask a student: Excuse me, what’s your name? Really, well, ochen priyatna!

That was an example of code mixing, using two codes, and mixing the two codes together in a single sentence.

Now all of us, whether multilingual or not, use our languages or codes and the dialect or dialects of our languages or codes in our speech community.