Recommended Reads: An Italian Family, by Franca Magnani

Every now and again, a dip in the bookshop's bargain bin can be like hitting the jackpot. I'm always on the lookout for books that capture the multilingual experience from a human point of view, and Franca Magnani's memoir, An Italian Family, which expresses the amusing and confusing realities of a multilingual upbringing, hits all the registers.

Magnani's witty, intelligent and warm writing style takes the reader back to a very fraught time in European history when adapting swiftly to new situations and environments was absolutely key to survival.

What do you mean, you've never heard of Franca Magnani?! Umm... join the club. Neither had I before I rescued said book from the cruel fate of ending up in the maws of the recycling plant. Turns out, Franca Magnani was a journalist, foreign correspondent and author who spoke Italian, French, German and English to a superb degree.

Multilingualism was foisted upon her in 1928, at the tender age of three, when she left her grandfather's house in an Umbrian village to go and live in Marseille with three perfect strangers: her mother, her father and her older sister. Franca's parents, as politically active anti-fascists, had been forced to flee into exile a few years earlier. They left Italy separately and were unable to carry a baby across the mountains on foot while evading border patrols.

After spending just enough time in the French school system to sound like her French playmates, Franca and her family were uprooted again, this time being granted political asylum in Switzerland. They ended up in Zürich, presenting a triple linguistic challenge: getting to grips with Swiss German, the Zürich dialect and, later on, standard High German. The latter differs significantly from the dialect of German spoken in Zürich and more subtly from Swiss German.


Franca's father, Fernando Schiavetti, an Italian intellectual and committed anti-fascist, was also a linguistic purist determined that his daughters would not babble away in "migrantish." Not only was he hell-bent on his family conversing in "proper" Italian, but their command of the languages spoken in their host countries had to be just as impeccable.

The family's evening meal was subject to frequent interruptions when the daughters were ordered to prise either the Zingarelli, the Larousse, or the Langenscheidt off the shelf to make sure that words were being used correctly. The outbreak of WW2 put an end to these dictionary-accompanied family chats across the dinner table. Instead, they all listened to French, British, Italian, Swiss and German radio stations to see how the same events were covered from different points of view.

And although five different languages were spoken by the girls, mixing different languages in the same sentence was a capital offence in the Schiavetti household, punishable by a wallop on the back of the head (never a slap across the face, that was considered demeaning).

Hitting children on the head may have fallen out of fashion, and so has the view that code switching (mixing languages) demonstrates a lack of linguistic proficiency, but Daddy Schiavetti's dedication to the multilingual cause has to be applauded.


Here's another Recommended Read:
What Language Do I Dream In? by Elena Lappin


...and here's why excruciatingly bad books can still be great for language learning:
Why Terrible Books Can Be Terrible Useful 

Socialising Dilemmas: Which Language?!

Multilingual life can throw up some curious problems in social situations. Even if the people who get together have several languages in common, things can still get unexpectedly awkward.

A few months ago, my Portuguese teacher's son, Jaime, invited me and his mother for lunch in Madrid. Jaime lives and works in Switzerland, and since his German is a bit on the wobbly side, I'd been helping him with his CVs, interview preparation, emails, etc. for the past year and a half. He was briefly in Spain for a wedding, and this would be the first time we'd meet face-to-face.

Teresa was already there when I got to the restaurant, and we chatted in Portuguese while waiting for her son to turn up. When Jaime arrived, we first had to settle on which language to speak. (I usually speak Spanish with him, and some German.) In theory, we share three languages in common: Spanish, Portuguese and English. We decided on Spanish, based on the rationale that my Spanish is significantly better than my Portuguese and that this way, nobody would be left struggling with the conversation. Or so we thought.

After ordering our food, Jaime and I launched right into catching up, since we'd not spoken to each other in a few weeks. At some point, I turned to Teresa to ask her something. She looked at me blankly. Then she said, "Sorry, I'm not actually listening to the conversation... in my head, I'm correcting everything you're saying into Portuguese!"

Ooops.

You see, Teresa and I never speak in Spanish to each other. Except for when I can't think of how to say something in Portuguese, then she helps me out. I also tend to mess up my Portuguese by mixing in Spanish words and expressions (this drives her mad), and in her capacity as my teacher, it's always been her job to correct me relentlessly. It's a deeply ingrained protocol which has served me (and my Portuguese) very well, but in this lunch situation, not so much...

What I Talk About In German Book Club Whether I Want To Or Not

"What are the different words for 'testicles' in German"?

It's about five minutes before the close of this week's book club session when this question drops. Reproductive body parts did not feature this afternoon, neither in the book we've been reading, nor in any of the tangents the group discussion has gone off on. There are always tangents. But nobody does tangents quite like Horacio.

After a year and a half of weekly meetings - and Horacio never fails to show -  I'm still trying to get used to his non sequiturs. "Hoden," I tell him, "and the most common colloquial term is  'Eier', just like in Spanish: 'huevos' (eggs)".

He can't help it, you see. On the bell curve of neurotypical, he takes about the same position as Pluto does in our solar system: Way, waaaaaay out there. There's no guile in him (at least that's what I like to think), but he sure keeps me on my toes.

"Premature ejaculation," he blurts out in a session not too long ago while the rest of us are engaged in philosophical musings on the meaning of freedom,"How do you say that in German?" All eyes are on me, the only native German speaker present. My group mates try their hardest not to crack up. There's relief on their bemused faces - at least it's not them having to satisfy Horatio's thirst for knowledge.

On another occasion, Horatio desperately needs to know whether "[insert a term that can only have found its way into his vocab courtesy of frauleindoesfrankfurt.com]" was a common way of saying "to ejaculate" in German.

Curiously, when we are actually working up a sweat on our way through a racy passage and I'm in a BRING-IT-ON! frame of mind, ready to Bavarian-dialect-coach the entire cast of Ready Steady Fucktoberfest, Horatio chooses to keep shtum like a fish. I count my blessings, but deep down I know he's just waiting for the next time when we'll be comparing German vs. Spanish cemetery etiquette or examining the Teutonic penchant for separating trash into umpteen different categories. He's all for delayed gratification, our Horacio.

Recommended Reads: What Language Do I Dream In? By Elena Lappin

I love to read about multilingualism. It’s not so much the academic side, which intrigues me the most, but the personal account of the experience. What impact does living one's life in multiple languages have on a person's sense of self, on their relationships with others? What rewards and difficulties do people face as a consequence of moving within several cultures? Under what circumstances did they acquire their languages, and how do they keep them alive and vibrant?

Yesterday I finished reading What Language Do I dream In, by Elena Lappin, who speaks six languages (or more, I may have miscounted), five of which are central to her life. As a serial immigrant, she has lived in seven countries and currently resides in London.

Lappin speaks to her parents in Russian, to her brother (who's a German writer) in Czech and to her children in English and Hebrew. Her early attempts to raise her first son in Czech, which she had long considered “her” language because she spent a good chunk of her formative years in Czechoslovakia, failed, since family ties with the country had eroded over time. A mother tongue spoken only by the mother, it seems, is not enough to make it take firm root in a child.

In this evocative memoir, besides tracing her convoluted family history, the author describes her inner struggle with choosing the language she could finally realise her dream in: becoming a writer. In fact, which language to write in, rather than dream, becomes a personal as well as a professional quest.

Counter-intuitively, Lappin choses neither her first language and mother tongue, which is Russian, nor her beloved Czech, in which she says she has always felt truly at home, but English, the last language she learned to speak competently when she was already an adult. And although her story is as different from my own as could possibly be, I can very much relate to this part.

As an aside, the author represents someone I’ve referred to as a “Silver Spoon Multilingual” in a previous post. Funnily enough, one of the chapters of the book is entitled “Silver Spoon”. Her silver spoon, though, doesn't have much to do with her multilingualism, but concerns an actual silver spoon with an engraved name that she does not recognise at first sight, but which turns out to be a Russian version of her own name. 

My rating: 9/10.

I think this is a fantastic read for everyone who's fascinated by the multifaceted reality of multilingual living, including its emotional dimension. The only part, which I perhaps didn't relish quite as much as the rest of the book was the last four chapters, in which the author goes into minute detail about her efforts to disentangle her complex family history. She doesn't manage to get me to care about these ancestral characters as much as she does about the still-living members of her family. On the other hand, her profound need to investigate her roots is precisely what gave rise to this great book in the first place, so fair dues.

Das Mensch

If my grandmother refers to you as "das Mensch" two things are certain: you are female and you've pissed her off.

If you know a bit of German, you may be confused. Doesn't Mensch mean human being? How can that be an insult?

Some of you will also be questioning the use of the neuter article "das". Mensch is a masculine noun, so shouldn't it be taking the article "der"?  Well, it's precisely the strategic deployment of the "wrong" article which turns an innocuous human being into a slur.

Just a couple of days ago, I stumbled across a definition, of sorts, in an anthology of Bavarian women's writers I had bought recently (click here for a post on this book). See below for the relevant passage.

Source: Von Menschen, Menschern und einem Abendrot, by Margaret Kassajep (1916-2008), published in Bayerische Schriftstellerinnen

So, the upshot is that, in southern Germany, das Mensch is a traditional derogatory term referring to women and girls of suspect morals. Nowadays, it's roughly equivalent to the b-word, but perhaps a tad less strong.

My granny simply labels any woman she doesn't like as das Mensch. Which, in her case, applies to pretty much any female she's ever met. She doesn't like men much either. Or, in fact, anyone who happens to fall under the wider category of der Mensch.

The Curious Case of German "Mobbing"

If a German tells you that he was mobbed, try not to look too horrified. He probably wasn't pummelled into the ground by a horde of rabid yobs. What he's most likely trying to convey to you is that he has suffered an incidence of bullying. Not a pleasant experience, for sure, but it creates a far less violent image in one’s head than "mobbing".

Mobbing is another case where an English term has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into German. And it didn't only lose the fight, but also its original meaning. In German, Mobben/Mobbing is used for all manner of bullying, be it at work, at school or in one’s personal life, regardless of whether the perpetrators are a pack of club swinging thugs ganging up on someone in an alleyway or whether it’s one single, mean-spirited person orchestrating a slur campaign behind the victim's back.

I've not yet been able to figure out 

a) why another word was required for something for which plenty of German words already exist, for example (and depending on context) schikanieren, drangsalieren, hänseln, nötigen, triezen, zwiebeln, (jemanden) fertigmachen, ausgrenzen, verekeln, the list goes on...

b) why, if the existing possibilities did not suffice, it had to be an English word 

c) why they picked the WRONG English word 

The noun (das) Mobbing, or, alternatively (das) Mobben, as well as the verb mobben, were added to the Duden (the most authoritative German dictionary) in 1996.

Curiously, the Duden also features the compound noun Mobbingberatung, meaning “a professional counselling service for those affected by Mobbing”. I'm guessing the reason for this is that Mobbing's primary connotation is with psychological harassment in the workplace, with the aim of making someone resign from their job. 

I don't endorse bullying in any shape or form, but I wouldn't be surprised if this phenomenon was much more common in Germany compared to other countries like the US and the UK, since it is nigh on impossible in Germany to fire an employee on a permanent contract, even if they deliver a performance that would make an arthritic sloth blush. See here for an amusing blog post which puts a bit of a dent in the myth of "German Efficiency".

  

Not Lost But Omitted From Translation

Sitting on the train in Munich yesterday, I payed closer attention than I normally do to the warning notice aimed at dissuading fare dodgers (Schwarzfahrer). I noticed that the text had not been translated in its entirety into the other languages.

[To make it easier to read, I've cut the French and Italian texts from my rather blurry photo and just left you with the original German along with the English translation]

As you can see, in the translation(s), the notice limits itself to stipulating the amount of the fine (€60) you will incur if you are caught without a valid ticket and the legal ramifications. The original German text, however, contains two extra sentences (highlighted by me) which are... how to put this delicately... bordering on the contemptuous:

Whatever reasons you may cite [for not having a valid ticket], there is no excuse which we haven't already heard before. We know them all, and none of them are going to wash with us. 

I wonder why they did not translate this part. It wasn't for lack of space, that's for sure. Were they, perhaps, worried that the condescending tone might ruffle tourists' sensibilities...?


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After publishing this post, a fellow blogger sent me this image, which was part of the 2014 campaign against fare evasion run by the Berlin Transport Company:

"Fare dodgers are getting ever more daring"

Getting My Bavarian On

Barbara Engleder won gold for Germany in Rio yesterday in the women’s 50m rifle three positions event. After being declared winner, she went totally berserk, crashing to her knees, beating her chest, the ground and the air with her fists and hollering victory at the top of her lungs.

Although this exuberant display of emotion may have been a tad out of the ordinary for a German athlete, there was something even more striking about what happened next.

In the post-competition interview, in which Engleder explained her joyous outburst as the need to release the build-up of tension, she spoke in the broadest Bavarian imaginable. 

My mum was aghast during the entire news report, while I stared at the screen with bemused incredulity. We are both native Bavarian speakers, to be sure, but there is a widely held consensus across Germany that dialects are only to be used in informal situations, e.g. with friends and family, but NOT in formal settings like TV broadcasts or job interviews.

On such high-brow occasions, you are meant to speak Standard German (Hochdeutsch), which every German can understand. By switching to dialect "inappropriately", the speaker risks coming across as an uneducated, uncouth hillbilly*. Or worse, a farmer. 

For the past few years, whenever I’m on a home visit, like I am right now, I make a concerted effort to stick to Bavarian as much as possible, even with strangers in shops and restaurants, as long as I think that they, too, are Bavarian.

I generally find that the reception to my speaking Bavarian is overwhelmingly positive, with most people replying in the dialect without raising an eyebrow.

If there’s one advantage to getting older, it’s that you care much less about what people think of you. So what if anyone takes me for a barn-raised redneck? 

I’m really enjoying putting a conscious effort into expanding my Bavarian vocabulary. I’ve learned at least a dozen new words this summer already. My home village is a rich picking ground, and people of the older generation are particularly rich source of terminology, which is fast falling out of use. It pains me having to watch my very first language dying a slow death. (I did not start to speak Hochdeutsch until I went to kindergarten). But who knows, now that I have an Olympic gold medallist on my side, maybe there's still hope?

[Click here to listen to an interview with Barbara Engleder]

(*Hinterwäldler in German).

Lost For Words - Why My German Sucks

My mother just can't help herself. She had to slip in another comment about the frightful gaps in my  vocabulary. We were having coffee at her friend Maria’s house yesterday when, recounting an anecdote, Maria mentioned the German word for ‘fairground ride’, and I remarked that I couldn’t remember having heard that term before. There was guffawing and stares of disbelief. How can you not know that?! Last week, there was a similar incident on the train with Mum berating me for failing to recall the word for (railway) sleeper.

My pointing out that, in fact, I do know what things are called, but... in English, does nothing to mellow maternal consternation. 

I guess it’s hard for her to understand my predicament. It’s just one of those things you don’t really get unless it happens to you.

Mum spent all of her 65 years immersed in the language of her native country, listening to German, reading in German, thinking in German, speaking nothing but German. I’ve had less than a third of that time to assimilate my mother tongue. Much of the passive vocab, which I once possessed as a teenager, has slipped into oblivion during the past quarter of a century of living abroad.

I also made the fatal mistake of not reading any books in German for two decades, which must sound paradoxical to anyone who knows how much of a bookworm I am. Since moving to Spain five years ago, I have been trying to remedy this sad state of affairs, and I have the Kindle archives to prove it.

I do know where my mother is coming from. I, too, took my German for granted for far too many years, never making an effort to maintain, expand and update it, believing that it would always be there for me, held in suspension, pristinely preserved, like a pickled marsupial in a museum display cabinet. But nope. It’s very much a case of “use it or lose it”.