Hiya! Salut! Irei ì sũ ya?

This blog is called "Try-lingual in West Africa" but it's been a while since I talked about multi-lingualism. Fortunately a friend of mine has helped me with that! We were students together in our undergraduate days in York, studying Linguistics together, and she is now a lecturer at the University of York St John. She contacted me as she was teaching on bilingual families, and wanted to know if I could give some input so that her students would have a real-life example of one.

I agreed, and sent a diagramme of our communication habits – who speaks which language to whom – both within our family and also with the people who come here on a daily or regular basis (I included our translation consultant, as that added another language into the mix!). Here it is, with a brief explanation: (if you can't see the whole thing, try clicking on the image to open it up in another window)

This diagramme represents the members of our family with the people they interact with on a daily basis in our home. The basis for all these interactions is the OPOL principle – One Person One Language. Each person knows the language they use with every other person, but within the family the fact that everyone is bilingual is taken into account, so conversations fluctuate regularly between the two languages.

Marc is French, and speaks French with all members of the family.

I am English, and speak French with Marc and English with our children.

The children speak English amongst themselves, but often pepper their English with French words. (Their parents' languages show evidence of a certain amount of code-switching – going between languages – too!)

We live in a compound containing our own house, a smaller house (in which one room is used as a schoolroom for Marc to home-school the older children), and an office building where I work with a team on Bible translation.

P1-3 represent people who work on the property.

P1 represents two Bible translators who work with me in an office 50m from the house, and who come to the house for a 30-minute break every morning and often at other times. Their language use is identical to each other as regards the other people on the diagramme so they are shown as one entity.

P2 represents the woman who does the housework and looks after our youngest child while the rest of the family is out of the house in the mornings.

P3 represents a translation consultant who comes regularly to work with the Bible translation team.

The two older children have identical language use, and are only shown separately so that it is clear that they speak English to each other. Where arrows are missing, it can be assumed that the same language is used to both children, and this is true of the parents too. While the children use a different language for each parent, everyone else uses the same language for both.

(Child F is not really speaking yet, I only put an arrow towards me because she actually said, "Hello!" to me this morning!)

In future posts I will include some of the questions the students sent back after studying this information, with my replies.