Read Online Bilingual Being by Kathleen Saint-Onge - Free Book Online Page B

were mothers and grandmothers – and, I’m sure, fathers and grandfathers, too – caring enough for their children to bring them to the library, to the door of the language they’d need to be successful here – the mainstream, dominant tongue. Witnessing their children’s linguistic gains, their investments, in the new language. But also witnessing their own and their culture’s losses, and the child’s diminished loyalty, in the old language. For losses these surely would become. Learning a new language is a gamble.
    WE DON’T TALK LIKE THAT HERE
    Among the circle of newcomers to Canada I was close to for years through work and personal preference, there were so many examples of language risks that I could pick a day at random and relate at least one. Mothers telling their children that dinner was ready, in the mother tongue, to have their words returned by “Yeah, whatever, lemme finish. I need to beat the level.” It’s muttered so fast that the mother misses it and innocently asks, “What’s that, honey?” Another day a parent calls for help with a daily chore as the child whispers under her breath in perfect English, “Shut the hell up.”
    I witnessed much in those years that I never shared with these parents either. It seemed too hurtful and hit too close to home. But I did speak, off to the side, to those numerous sixteen, fourteen, twelve, ten, eight, and even six year olds. “You shouldn’t talk to your mother like that,” I reproached. “It isn’t right. You shouldn’t use your English like that, to be sneaky and rude to your parents.” “So sorry, Abla [sister, a common greeting]. I won’t do it again,” they replied, contrite for a few minutes. Caught out. The outsider – me – now deep within their halls, kitchens, and living rooms, monitoring a dangerous game of power reversal inside the household. A difficult play where the new tongue isused to engage independence, as the mother tongue, slowly diminishing, struggles to maintain the appearance of normal relations.
    In these situations, the mother typically failed to register the impolite remark, asking innocently, “What?” She knew she’d heard a string of sounds, but it was too quick, too speckled with colloquialisms the child had picked up organically and she’d never encountered. And as she tended to assume the best intentions from that incomprehensible utterance, English became the secret code of children, idioms flying past parents at dazzling speed – the source of transitory humour soon becoming an instrument of distance, then defiance. If monolingual, long-settled parents think their adolescents are slipping away from them, they should try spending a day in an immigrant’s shoes.
    The examples need not be so brutal. There’s ample evidence, even among the young, that language is a barrier, a breach between worlds, one you cross at your own peril. My textbook example of this dates back to a dinner event I attended in 2003 or 2004. I sat with the women in a large living room, while my much loved then-husband sat with the men in a front sitting room. The conversational flow throughout the home was in Turkish, and a few women were becoming quite bilingual. As I chatted with one on the couch, her four-year-old son came out of the men’s area to ask her if he could have another cola. His mum gently indicated with her hand that he should wait until I finished my sentence.
    I watched him out of the corner of my eye as I talked to his mum in English. His face turned from me to her, and back again, several times. Then he interrupted me, matter of factly, as if he urgently needed to instruct me about something substantial, to correct me about a meaningful oversight about which he had critical knowledge and I, quite evidently, did not. “We don’t talk like that here,” he said. He then repeated what I’d