Contents

Could a language change so much that it becomes part of another language family?
By Rolf Weimar

Language - tree or machine?

By Rolf Weimar

How are "frog" and "spring" related?

By Rolf Weimar

The way of the Voice

By Diana Vereris

Endangered languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina

By Mirza Glavić

Exploration of place names

By Edward Bedford

When I Should Starting Speaking: Retail Edition

By Michael Simpson

When Writing Gets Hard: The Bilingual Problem

By Michael Simpson
 Could a language change so much that it becomes part of another language family?
By Rolf Weimar

You are born in a certain place and have specific parents. Who your parents are never
changes no matter what you do or where you go in life. You could have been born in
Australia and move to northern Scandanavia and your parents will still be who they are. It is
like this with languages. English is a Germanic language because it is descended from a
language spoken by Germanic tribes. It has taken on many Romance language derived
vocabulary, but that doesn't make it a Romance language anymore than moving to
Scandanavia makes you a Scandanavian.

But if you were to have a child in Scandanavia, it would be fair to call your child at least
partly Scandanavian. Language is not one thing but changes over time. There is no single
point at which Old English became Middle English. It changed gradually. Let's imagine a
language starting in Australia and being brought for some reason to Scandanavia (just to
continue the analogy). It would still be regarded as having been born in Australia, but after
some time it would be regarded as a Scandanavian language.

Could English change language families? No. But a language spoken in England that took
influences from English and French and other languages could be regarded as a Romance
language if history were different. And if such a language existed, it would be fair in this
alternate world to call it English. What would have happened if the English that we know had
died out? Imagine an alternate scenario where not only did the Anglo Saxons lose in 1066,
but the Normans managed to hold onto their land in England and Normandy. The beginning
of the end of the dominance of French in England was the defeat of Normandy to France.

This cut off the Normans in England from Normandy and they eventually assimilated into
English society. Over the next decades and centuries English would reemerge, changed, but
not forgotten. What if this hadn't happened? French would have continued its dominance in
England, and English as we know it would have slowly died out. English would be replaced
with French, but the French spoken in England would be slightly different to the French
spoken in France. Maybe the French in France would look down on what they called "The
bastardised mutterings of those English fools" or something to that effect. They would think
of the French spoken in England as bad French, as not the real French.

Maybe eventually the English themselves would get tired of this attitude and assert
themselves with the attitude that actually the way they spoke was perfectly alright and it was
merely the stuck up French who had a problem.Maybe the English would fight the French for
independence and win and to secure their victory they would say to the world, "We are
English and we speak English". But remember, in this alternate scenario, the English we
know is gone. So what do we call this Anglo-French spoken in England? Why not just call it
English.

This language would probably have a lot of Germanic-English loan words and would
probably be pronounced a bit differently or maybe very differently to the French spoken in
France. But going back to the original question, it would not be classed as a Germanic
language. It would be classed as a Romance language because it descended from French.
This is how a word like "English" could go from refering to a Germanic language to refering
to a Romance language. Could a language change families? No, but something connected
or associated with it might have a very different story than languages spoken before it.
 Language - tree or machine?
By Rolf Weimar

Are languages like trees? Did they grow and evolve slowly over time? Or did they get
invented by some clever guy and require knowledge and skill to operate and will break down
if not kept working by skilled professionals? The answer is a bit complicated. But let's start
with a clarification. What is a language? Nowadays we would probably say that a language
is something that has people speaking it and media such as books, TV shows and movies.

But what was language like before media? How were words used and what were people's
attitudes about words? If you grew up in western society, then you probably had language
education. While things are changing now, my generation and many generations before
mine were told many things about languages and about how to use words.

"Don't say 'me and my friend'" "Don't end a sentence with a preposition" "Don't split an
infinitive". All of that advice was not based on how the language actually works. The "split
infinitive" rule comes from Latin where it is literally impossible to split the infinitive since an
infinitive is a single word.

In English, as in other Germanic languages, splitting the infinitive is a completely normal

thing to do. This "rule" came about because someone had an idea and imposed that idea on
people learning the language in a classroom.

Teaching style and punctuation and common practises is a good idea as it allows someone
to more easily assimilate in the larger speech community as they grow up. But some of the
downsides of this approach is that it gives a lot of people (me included while I was growing
up) the idea that language is static and there are right and wrong ways to use it.

I have learned a lot since starting Silly Linguistics and it has changed how I view language,
and in particular how words are used. Language is a lot more flexible and changable than a
lot of us realise and it will continue to change as society and culture changes.

When I was growing up, I viewed language the same way I viewed computer science or
maths. It was a system invented one day and you learned how to use it similarly to how you
learn how to drive a car or change a tire. Don't get me wrong, language is a skill, and it is
something you learn but the truth is a lot more grey, and actually, much more interesting
than I thought it when I was growing up. I got excited by the odd anecdote about languages
but I would often go back to computers and forget about languages.

Everything changed in 2014 when I got involved with High Valyrian from Game of Thrones
and through it I got exposed to linguistics. Maybe it wasn't my teachers' fault. Maybe I just
never engaged enough. I guess I just decided one day that English class was boring and I
hadn't given it much of a chance from that point on.

I just had a lightbulb moment a while ago and I realised that language is like improv. You
make up things as you go along and see what happens. When you were growing up and
before you were taught specific rules about languages you probably heard people talking
about the family dog and you would say "Look at the doggy" or something like that. You
heard words and you repeated them. Toddlers learn hundreds of words a month.
Toddlers try out lots of things. They pull the cat's tail and stick their biscuit in the sand and
practise their walking by going from room to room. This exploratory trait does not stop at
language. They try out different sounds. There are some theories that say that the
equivalents of "mama" and "papa" sound so similar world wide because they are just the
babblings of toddlers converted in the minds of adults into words.

"mama" has an M and "papa" has a P. Both sounds are made with the lips and they are
some of the first sounds made by babies. What is interesting about first language acquisition
is how fast and well it happens for the vast majority of children. They are born with the
ability to make sound through crying and that's about it. But soon they are saying things like
"papa" and "kitty" and then things like "I'm hungry" and then "I want to go to the park".

This process has been repeated for thousands of years. Do we really need people telling
children how to speak? It should be as silly as explaining to a 5 year old how to breathe. In
our tribal past people would just speak and the language would evolve and change like a
lava lamp. Then some grumpy grammarians came along and said "Don't say 'me and my
friend'" and "Don't end a sentence with a preposition".

As for the "me and my friend" thing, a lot of people would come up with some reason why it
is wrong. But these arguments miss a point. No one would say "That giraffe doesn't look
enough like a zebra". Of course they wouldn't. That's absurd. Then why are we looking at an
utterance and saying "This is wrong". A giraffe got to be the way it is today through small
changes over time. We should understand how the giraffe evolved, not tell it that it's wrong.

Similarly, it would be much interesting to look into why people say "me and my friend" than
just say it is wrong. Science is showing more and more how our minds are set up for the
complex task of perceiving speech sounds, decoding them, parsing them into sentences,
trying to understand the message and do the whole thing the other way to go from our
thoughts to a series of sound waves to transmit our message.

If language is a natural process and came about through our biology then we should look at
it through a scientific lense. After learning more about languages and linguistics I quickly
came across the descriptive method which looks at how language is actually being used
rather than how it should be used and I found that the descriptive method is a more
interesting approach but it is also scientific and is slowly revealing to us how this system
came about and how it works.

So we go back to the original question, is language a tree or a machine? Well, this question
itself is a bit of a trick. Trees are themselves living things that change and grow over time.
They have their own internal machinery, just of a biological nature, instead of a metallic one.

Languages are machine like in that they are complex and have many moving parts. But they
are very un machine like in that they change over time, are very flexible and have ways of
adapting to changes around them. There are some who say that language might have
evolved once tens of thousands of years ago and spread quickly from that point to all the
humans living at that time.

Those humans then moved from Africa to the Middle East, Europe, Asia and beyond,
bringing language with them. If this theory of single origin is correct it means that all world
languages are related, some more closely than others, but all having a common source. Just
look at the range of languages we have. We have languages were you can communicate
complex thoughts with a single long word and we have others where you need to use lots of
extra words before or after other words to express the correct nuance.

I don't want to give people the impression that descriptivism is "anything goes" (which is far
from the truth) or that prescriptivism (prescribing usage) is the devil. Each has their place in
the world. Language plays a lot of functions in the world and in some areas of life, such as a
court room, language becomes quite structured. But I do want people to realise that
language is a lot more than what you may realise it is.

It is not just something for Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. It is something for all of us.
Language is our heritage as humans. We can create new words and share new ideas with
the world. We are literally born to do it and that should be celebrated.
 How are "frog" and "spring" related?
By Rolf Weimar

Proto Indo European is the grandfather or great grandfather of English (depending on how
you count). This means that we can trace elements of Modern English all the way back to
Proto Indo European which was spoken about 4000 BC.

Proto Indo European, like any language, had its own peculiarities. One of them was the "s-
mobile" which refers to how the letter "s" sometimes just didn't stay there in some words but
did in others.

The s-mobile is indicated by a bracket around the letter s in words that have been
reconstructed in Proto Indo European. We have to reconstruct them because no one wrote
Proto Indo European down. We reconstruct words by looking at Modern Indo European
languages like English, German, Spanish, Italian, Persian and Hindi and start finding
connections between them.

English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and a few others are part of
the Germanic group of languages. They all descend from a language linguists call Proto
Germanic.

If we don't have direct evidence that a word existed then we say the word is reconstructed
and we apply a star at the beginning. If a document exists that has the word in question in it,
we say the word is attested.

The word for "bull" in Proto Indo European is *(s)táwros. Here we can see the star and the
brackets. We know that the s was mobile because it appears in some descendant languages
but not others.

The word *(s)táwros became "steer" in English, and "Stier" in German, but in Greek, the "s"
wasn't inherited, so we get "tauros".

So what does this all have to do with spring and frog? Well, they are actually related
because they both come from a Proto Indo European word with an s-mobile in it.

One last thing we need to know about to make sense of this. When Proto Indo European
developed into Proto Germanic in Scandanavia, the sound "p" became "f". But this did not
affect other descendants of Proto Indo European. So for instance, it is "father" in English but
"pater" in Latin.

But here is where things get weird (if s-mobile wasn't weird enough already!). The sound
change (also called a sound shift) of "p" becoming an "f" did not affect words that had the
combination "sp".

So in the Proto Indo European word *(s)preu (which means jump), when the "s" was present,
the "p" stayed and turned into the word "spring", but when the "s" wasn't present, the "p"
became a "f" and the word developed into the word "frog". So "spring" and "frog" are what
linguists called cognate which means they descend from the same source.

And now you can tell people that the frog is named after the fact that it jumps.
 The way of the Voice
By Diana Vereris

You've seen the title and you think there is something familiar in it, like you've heard it
before, right? Or maybe you instantly recognized what this is all about? That's right, the
amazing language of ancient snowy peaks and ruins which once stood proudly as the
chapels to the giant beasts of might, the voice of the dragons.

The dragon tongue or when spoken in itself, the Dovah-zul, which translates to the voice of
the dragon, hereby starts the series of articles concerning the languages of fiction, as of the
thought that the authors paid that much attention to details of their art to create an entire
language to make their world feel fuller.

If you are not yet familiar with Dovahzul, it has been created by a senior designer and writer
for 2011 Bethesda Softworks' game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Emil Pagliarulo. He stated
that one of his inspirations was Beowulf spoken in Old English, though the language itself
doesn't coincide directly with the alphabet we use in English, as there are 34 unique letters
within it.

This fact includes that there is no presence of the letter "C" which is instead replaced with
"S" and "K". Some original letters include "oo", "ur", "uu", "ah" and "aa", which cannot be
spotted in any other existing language as of today, though the way they should be
pronouced can be taken from the Norse languages, as the overall feel of all Skyrim, and
therefore also the ancient language we meet thoughout it, is very Scandinavian-like.

The vocabulary, especially the word formation, resemble Germanic languages. The joining
of two words can create a new one (which is mostly present in German), for example
"junnesejer" meaning "the kings of the west", while "jun" on itself means "king" and "jer" "the
east". What's interesting is that there are no words for "moon" and "eclipse", but "kreinvulon"
means the latter (literally, the dark where there is sun), as of "krein" being the sun and
"vulon" the night. The first word in the formation is considered more important, therefore
"vulonkrein" would mean "night sun" or "the light in the night" or just simply "the moon". To
form the plural form, the first letter of the word and the letter "e" are added to the end of the
word in most cases.

The grammar of Dovahzul are almost identical to those of English language, though there
are no apostrophes, tenses, punctuation, upper and lowercase letters and the prepositions
come sooner than they do in English. As for the alphabet itself, it draws inspiration from the
ancient Cuneiform script and the runes where designed to resemble claw marks etched into
stone, typically with two or three slashes and a dot or hook formed by the dewclaw, so that it
would be possible for the dragons themselves to write in Dovahzul. The author of such idea
is the concept artist Adam Adamowicz.

There are some texts aside from dragon tablets with shouts, which we can read in the voice
of the dragon. Those are the in-game books "Dragon Tongue: Myth no More" (this one
details the discovery and translation of the Dragon Language) and "Songs of Skyrim", along
with it's revised version "Songs of Skyrim: Revised". Some of the songs can be also heard,
such as the Dragonborn Theme, which is the official theme of the game, through in the in-
game book it is depicted as an ancient song without a tune or a sure pronounciation.
The fans of the series of course contribute to the existence of the language, coming up with
new words (following the rules deducted from the in-game texts), translators, courses,
numbers (for counting in Dovahzul see www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-t-count-in-
dovahzul/en/dovahzul) and more. You can read more about it on Thuum.org (where there is
also the legacy translator from English to Dovahzul and vice versa and the biggest
language-learning course on the internet), The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Wikia and The
Unnoficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP).
 Endangered languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina
By Mirza Glavić

While everyone is debating about Serbo-Croatian (or Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian) and there

are so many controversies over its name, or whether it is one language or several distinct
ones, no one is paying attention to endangered languages which are actually dying. The
three major peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina were at war in the early 90s, and now that
they are at peace, everything in the country is divided so that all of them enjoy the same
human rights.

However, if you are not a Bosniak or a Croat or a Serb, you are likely to face discrimination
and suffer injustice in the society. The same goes with languages. Minority languages are
officially recognized but that is just a piece of paper. In reality, it seems like those languages
do not exist on this land at all. They are: Albanian, Czech, German, Hungarian, Italian,
Ladino, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian, Rusyn, Slovak, Slovene, Turkish, Ukranian, and
Yiddish.

Two of the world’s languages that UNESCO listed as endangered have their speakers in
Bosnia and Herzegovina – Judaeo-Spanish and Romani. Judaeo-Spanish is officially
recognized as a minority language as Ladino, but as already mentioned, it is just a piece of
paper. Romani, officially does not exist, even though you can hear people speak it daily in
the streets, on a bus etc. Luckily, these two languages are also spoken in several other
countries, among them Western European. Perhaps, these countries could help the Romani
language survive extinction, while Judezmo is mainly spoken in the Balkans.

Judaeo-Spanish (judeo-español, español, judió / jidió, djudeo-espanyol, espanyol,

djudyo/djidyo, ‫ ודֿֿד ֿֿג‬/ ‫ודגֿד ֿֿג‬, ‫אֿספאנֿֿגל‬, ‫ודגֿדֿאג‬-‫אֿספאנֿֿגל‬, ђудео-еспањол, еспањол, ђудjо /
ђидjо) is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish, but also largely influenced by
Semitic languages and the main language of the country it is spoken in.

As you can see above, it is written in Latin, Cyrillic and Hebrew scripts, and has many
different names. Ethnic groups who speak this language are mainly Sephardic Jews and
Sabbateans. The total number of native speakers varies from 60 000 to 300 000. According
to UNESCO, this language is categorized as severely endangered. It is spoken only privately
at home, and the Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo still chants part
of the Sabbath Prayers in Judaeo-Spanish.

It is not taught in schools, and there are not any public signs in the cities in this language.
The literature mainly consists of religious books. Music could be a great cure for endangered
languages. The Jewish Bosnian-American musician Flory Jagoda recorded two CDs of
music in Judaeo-Spanish taught to her by her grandmother, a Sephardic folk singer, among
a larger discography.

Romani (romani čhib) refers to many languages of the Romani people, as they are all
different across the area where they are spoken which is large and the majority nations’
languages had a great influence. However, they all belong to the Indo-Aryan branch of the
Indo-European language family.

The one spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina is called Vlax Romani. The total number of
native speakers is about 4 million, but the population is sparse around the world and they
are minority in every country. This makes UNESCO put it on its definitely endangered
category. The major prejudice is that this is not a language at all, that the people are just
speaking some gibberish they created among themselves so they can speak secretly,
because they are considered evil, for some reason.

However, as mentioned, it belongs to the Indo-Aryan group and has a long and natural
history. Also, it is standardized and has several ISO codes (depending on the variety) and is
recognized by Glottolog. Like the former language discussed, the government does nothing
to include this language in the “equal human rights”.

All in all, the lives of the endangered languages are made even more difficult in a country
such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs are all equal and at peace.
The minorities are the ones who are marginalized and sometimes even treated as they are
not humans. As a linguist, I must say that the language diversity is a beautiful thing. We
should be more open and treat languages of other people equally, and maybe learn some.
 Exploration of place names
By Edward Bedford

Place names can often reveal a surprising amount about the language and politics of an
area. This is perhaps most obvious when places have been renamed in a different language
(such as Istanbul which used to be Constantinople), and this is normally done to show a
political change. Place names can also show which language, and so often which ethno-
political group, was dominant in an area. A great example of how a city’s name is often
changed into the language of the political elite is the Romanian City of Alba Iulia.

There are too many names to full detail, yet one can understand the point by considering the
early Slavic name Balgrad, the Hungarian name Gyulagehervar and the Germanic
Weissenburg. All of these names mean “the white city” (albeit the Hungarian adds the
descriptor “of Gyula”). Although this is a fascinating subject to explore, I find effect of
manuscript traditions upon such names even more interesting. As such this article will
explore two slightly different instances of this and consider what this shows about languages
in general.

The English town of Salisbury has been in the news recently for negative reasons, yet I think
it should be known more generally as a brilliant example of the effect medieval scribal
practices can have on modern names. Old Sarum is atop a hill about two miles north of
modern Salisbury, in Wiltshire. The fort was developed into a fortified town by the saxons
and was called something like Searoburg. This town prospered until a dispute between the
civic and religious authorities caused the Bishop to move the church down onto the adjacent
plain, and so the descriptive “old” was added to the original settlement, and “new” to what is
now Salisbury.

The name Searoburg developed into something like Sarisburie in Middle English. As much
of the written organisation, both civic and religious, functioned in Latin, manuscripts
frequently used a system of shorthand that had been developed since Tironian Notes used
in the late Roman Republic. One of the common ways of showing that a word had been
contracted was to draw a line over the end of it. As such Sarisburie was shortened to Sar̅.

Yet at the same time a very similar form of contraction was also used, as well as the macron
over the end of a word which was used as a generic sign that the word had been shortened.
A macron over could also be used to show a missing final nasal consonant (such as n and
m) and also common syllables ending in one. This sped up the writing of Latin as the
common endings -um and -ium could be shown by a quick line over the stem of a word.

Due to the confusion between these two forms of notation Sar̅ was re-extended falsely as
Sarum, perhaps initially by people elsewhere who were not familiar with the spoken full
name. It seems this happened at some point in the 13th Century as by the 14th Century the
Bishop of Salisbury was describing himself as the episcopus Sarum instead of episcopus
Seriberiensis. This is interesting as Sarum is being treated as a latin name and not altered
like Sarisburie into Seriberiensis. In part this might be as Sarum fits Latin Morphology for a
noun and so Sarum as a Latin based name would not have seemed unusual.

The effect of mistaken reformations of ‘original’ names is far more frequent than one might
think. However, this can show the logical fallacies of older times, and so acts as in
interesting window into the mentality of such periods. For instance, looking at an old
Ordnance Survey map of the Isle of Wight I saw an area called Centurions Copse. I was
intrigued and so had a further look. It might seem that this must have some Roman
connection, not unlikely as there was a Roman villa nearby. Yet there is no evidence of any
Roman settlement in this position, nor any sign of the toponym before the Victorian era. The
actual source of the name seems to be a corruption of the patron saint of a local (now ruined
and lost) church. As the earliest mention is of centurion’s Chapel, this quite clearly provides
the cent part of the name as an adaptation of saint. The rest of the name is rather less
certain as the few sources that name the chapel vary quite significantly.

It is interesting seeing the name St. Urian, attached to the chapel, on early Ordnance Survey
maps, from the late 19th century, as there is no saint of that name in any Christian
denomination. This instead is an attempted reconstruction of the original saint’s name, and
might be influenced by the now somewhat outdated adjective uranic (this tended to be used
to mean heavenly, or more generally pertaining to the sky or Uranus, both as a god and
planet) which takes its stem from Uranus (ultimately from the Ancient Greek Ουρανός). This
combined with the variant spellings of actual Saints, such as St. Urie etc., causes the
inaccurate name St. Urian to be used.

Looking at the sources which describe the chapel as being dedicated to a saint one sees a
multitude of possible names, St.Urie, St. Uires, St. Uryth. These names all seem to be
variant local spellings of the same saint and possibly reflect the different pronunciations of
this name at different times. There are two possible saints, known in relevant Christian
Denominations, that could be being mentioned here.

The most obvious one is St. Urith who is primarily a Devonian saint. This at first may seem
odd as this saint is very little seen in dedications of churches outside of Devon, however the
important landowners of the medieval Isle of Wight also held substantial lands in Devon, and
so there is a plausible connection to explain what would otherwise be rather odd.

The other possible saint is St. Turien, who is mainly known in Northern France, and might
have been brought over by Norman aristocracy. This name does seem to be rather different
to the names recorded in most early sources yet is not so different that it is impossible to see
how it may have been corrupted into something like St. Uries, this is simpler than it might
seem as the name was already quite varied and so might have initially been something like
Turies and then due to the elision of the “t” in French pronunciation it was taken into English
as saint Uries.

As one can see from these two examples, reconstructions of abbreviated or corrupted forms
of place names often show more of the reconstructor’s ideals and belief than the original
name. This is one of the many ways in which language can show such detailed aspects of a
particular time, and how fluid most languages used to be in regards to spelling and
pronunciation. Indeed one could say that the near universality of literacy in many countries
today has lead to a rather restrictive and static phase in their development.
 When I Should Starting Speaking: Retail Edition
By Michael Simpson

After completing Spanish Duolingo recently and being on a self-imposed speaking break, I
was speaking Spanish with some regulars to my job at Walgreen’s when a coworker
interrupted and asked if it was Spanish I was speaking and if I was fluent in it. I jokingly
called it Arabic, and, on a more serious note when the customer left (they gave a good
laugh), I said I wasn't fluent in Spanish. I merely spoke it for their convenience.

The coworker looked at me strangely and said, “But you're able to speak it.”

“Yes.”

“So you took it in school?”

“Well, I learned a bit in school. I can just ask a lot of questions.”.

It seems to me that it is difficult to explain to a non language learner exactly what it means to
be fluent in a language or even speak the language. It becomes worse when the explainer’s
own learning style is a hoshposh of 'just getting by’ with the native speakers. Completing the
Duolingo course in fifty days was probably the closest I’ve come to seriously trying to learn
Spanish in a while. I would practice speaking everyday but had hit that major plateau that so
many more famous polyglots talk about trying to overcome.

The difficulty with practicing by myself and the methods that I employed, practicing with the
customers, is philosophical in nature. Who do I talk to in Spanish? I listen closely and
overhear people speaking a different language, and I always want to speak with them in that
language. But I hesitate.

For instance, when a customer comes up to my counter and speaks pretty good English, I
will speak English. They won’t want this random person butchering their native language
when they already speak a perfectly good one. If I have trouble understanding them, I try to
pinpoint what language they're able to speak (normally Spanish or French in my area). I'll
use context clues, such as their account names or if I hear them speaking it previously.

I am sure many other polyglots have similar issues if they try to actively use the language.
Retail is a strange animal. The person behind the counter ringing up your purchase is an
active hostage to your experience. They are trying to ensure you come back, or at the very
least, that you don’t report the store for a negative experience. When the cashier tries to
speak the language, it is most likely for that sake of communication.

“Oh, you speak Spanish?”

“Just enough to get by.”

The same will go the other way around, the customer being a hostage to the cashier’s
conversation. How often do we hear a cashier awkwardly ranting about their day and we
can only stand and awkwardly affirm their fears or deny them? They have our money in
hand; they have our products in bags; and they have our change in the drawer. We only
begin to feel for them because of the clear-cut Stockholm Syndrome, falling for our captors,
at least until change is safely in hand.
The cashier starts speaking your native language, but you’re trying to practice English. They
keep slipping back into your native language. It would be a frustrating process, but you are
actively engaged in speaking with them. Their heart is in the right place but this is not what
you wanted to do today. These were not your plans.

I’ve been on both sides of the counter, at Mexican stores trying to practice Spanish while the
person will only speak English with me, and ringing up customers and practicing Spanish
while they only want to practice their English. These situations happen everyday,
everywhere, and it is incredibly awkward to experience whichever side you are on. When
the person asks me how well I speak the language, I try not to define it.

You will never hear me claim fluency in Spanish, as I merely want to communicate. I don’t
want to claim something and not be able to prove it to one hundred percent efficiency.
There will always be something you don’t know, something you cannot remember. That
doesn’t mean you are not fluent in the language. After all, some native English speakers will
go their entire lives without being able to differentiate between their, they’re, and there, but
that doesn’t mean they’re not fluent. They just speak a little less than others.
 When Writing Gets Hard: The Bilingual Problem
By Michael Simpson

A Clockwork Orange is one of my favorite movies. Alex DeLarge participates in the ultra-
violence, goes to jail, a form of ‘rehab,’ and goes back into society to have the ultra-violence
bestowed on him back. It’s a classic movie, polarizing at the time because of the overt
sexual themes and obvious violence. It was hated and despised at the time by so many
people, but critics loved it too. Needless to say, it is a fantastic movie.

Alex DeLarge and the teenagers in this dystopian society speak this really weird mixture of
Russian and English slang. The novel makes very little sense sometimes as so much is
from Alex’s point of view but he speaks in this slang simply called Nadsat. The author,
Anthony Burgess, was a polyglot himself and was obsessed with various forms of slang,
creating a new mixture just for the novel.

The difficulty of understanding Alex with this slang is common with writers attempting to
portray individuals who speak multiple languages. What words should I use and in what
way? How far am I willing to go in an accurate portrayal of someone who may not speak
any English at all?

I cannot personally relate to people who have grown up speaking another language or had
to learn English from scratch. Their ability to write such a character is far easier. Lin-Manuel
Miranda (In the Heights) wrote many of the songs in Spanish for the musical, having grown
up in both cultural perspectives. Burgess was a linguist before he started writing A
Clockwork Orange and used that experience.

For a project I am currently developing, an adult animated comedy series about four people
working retail, one is from a Hispanic family but never really used Spanish growing up. After
all, second-generation students do not necessarily need to learn their heritage language. It
was only after exposure to adulthood did this particular character realize that it would be
beneficial to actually try to learn. I will not spoil anything for when the series becomes fully
developed, but the journey itself is a form of character growth that many of us in these
linguistics and polyglot communities can relate.

Learning a language just to speak with a certain group of people is a daunting task: it is
applying pressure to the self to figure out not only how to speak a language but how to
speak in such a specific way that you accomplish this specific goal, that, if you are
successful, will require you to speak this over and over in a professional capacity. In reality,
it ends up being exhausting. However, it is still rewarding in the fact that you have
accomplished that specific goal.

That is where this character would be at after completing this specific goal in mind. There
desires a certain realism despite being animated and comedic nature. When there is
character development in a story, there should always be a price paid for that development.
Imagine the struggle you had trying to learn a language; that would be considered the price
paid in your character development. In A Clockwork Orange, it would be him going through
the rehabilitation program.

The real question I pose, I guess, would be how does one really write character
development? It requires a change in the person from beginning of the story to the end.
From monolingual to bilingual, or somewhat proficient if goals are shorter. The bilingual
problem in writing becomes in what ways can I change this person from beginning to end,
and in a vital way to the story. I know, it feels like I am writing in these characters for the
sake of having them, but the purpose of this project, on an emotional level, is to tell the story
of retail workers, even if it is in a funny way.

As a retail worker who has learned languages to help customers, this was an important part
of my personal journey so I am writing it in the hopes that others realize that it is okay to go
above and beyond in helping others in this kind of setting. As Alex DeLarge would probably
say, “Viddy this, my little droogs!”
Thanks for reading Silly Linguistics Issue #4
We hope you enjoyed it!

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