hem|mungen

On language and passing

Recently Sattva wrote about language learning, bringing up two points of view that I've often vacillated between:

1. if you are in germany, you should speak german or at least try. it's your right. 2. if you are just beginning to learn german, it's not always the best method of communication. language is about communicating with people the best you can.

These hit home. When you're trying to learn a language, it's frustrating to find people responding to you in your native language because they think it will make the conversation easier (not facilitate it, necessarily. Just make it easier to get through, to finish). In that sense, I do think you "have a right" to speak the local language, assuming that's part of why you're there. If it isn't, if you can and prefer to exist without the local language, or if in that moment you don't feel like using the local language, then you shouldn't have to. No one should expect you to use it, to struggle in it when you don't want to. The right rests with the speaker, doesn't it?

This gets sticky when we're talking about supermarketgerman, or postofficegerman, or other more pragmatic instances of language. Registering as a resident, paying taxes, all those kinds of administrative things are tough if you don't speak German, though many forms I've had to fill out were offered in multiple languages (Turkish, Vietnamese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian). As Sattva says, this is all tricky because it is bound up with the debate on immigration and naturalization, multikulti etc. Does "allowing" immigrants living in Germany to live there without learning German mean that German Culture will erode? Doubt it.

But beyond “functional” language, I don't know. In Germany I’ve often chosen or fallen into bilingual groups and settings, where expression both in the sense of communicating ideas and in terms of creative expression could happen in either English or German. Regardless of how well I speak German, it's nice to be able to express something in English when I need to and to know that people will understand it on more than just a denotative level. Sattva also makes the point that perfected spoken language can allow those who already have the advantage of "looking German" to disappear, to pass as German, while those who don't, no matter what their language skills, don't have that privilege. Passing was really appealing to me when I started learning German, when I really didn’t want to stand out as an American. In high school in Wilhelmshaven I found I had a talent for accents, and I emulated the dialect so closely that I sounded as if I'd been a Fischkopp my whole life. (My Spanish, which I learned in school in WHV, sounds ridiculously German.)

Passing was proof that I'd accomplished something, that I’d been successful at learning the language. It wasn't until I was in college that I started thinking that maybe I didn't really want to be mistaken for a German. The more aware I became of Turkish culture in Germany, and of immigration in Germany more broadly, the more indignant I became that people (including myself) would think of physical characteristics as a determining factor of nationality or belonging. But more personally (and lets face it, probably more importantly at 21), I started noticing that I was a different person when speaking German, and I couldn't figure out why this was. Now I think it's because, as Sattva suggests, certain intimate aspects aren't communicated the same in a second language. Ever. It took some time before I felt like my real personality was the same in both languages. I haven't been conscious of that process, but I can say that I finally felt it had happened while we were living in Berlin, after almost twenty years of speaking the language.

Posted by Heather at January 10, 2005 01:15 PM