Of Multiculturalism and Colonialism

BK2, who will be nine in a couple of weeks, was asked to pick a country to research and present to her class. She chose Algeria.

She told her classmates how you could fit Switzerland 50 times in Algeria! (yes Switzerland is this small and Algeria is this big!)
She took with her Tamtunt, Baqlawa and olive oil from Kabylie to share with her classmates.
She wrote the names of a couple of her friends in Arabic.
She told her class how her great-greandmother was imprisoned and tortured during the Algerian War.
Her class re-enacted a battle during the War, where half her class was the Algerian Army and the second half was the French Army.

Her teacher gave her excellent feedback. She got top marks for her efforts.

At that moment, I felt we made the right decision to live 2 kms this side of the French-Swiss border.

Olive oil, Tamtunt and Baqlwa

I lived five years in France. I have close family and friends there. The south of France, where we started our multicultural and multilingual family, holds a special place in my heart.
But I doubt that BK2 would have felt so at ease to share this bit about her family history. I am not sure how well her choice of topic would have been received in a French school.

Her choice of topic and its reception show how she feels totally accepted for who she is. I think living in a country with four official languages, and where over a third of the population comes from an immigrant background, definitely help.

On Belonging and Identity

From time to time, it suddenly hits me. I don't belong anywhere. I left my country, where I grew up. Left my family behind, the familiarity.  There are moments where I feel at ease where I am now, lots of times actually. But then , I suddenly realise, I've not been to a family wedding for a while. Only heard of family members passing away over the phone, not been to see them one last time.

I left home 19 years ago. Another three years, and I would have spent as many years abroad as in my home country. In my heart, I still feel totally Algerian. But I feel definite connections with the places I've lived in: France and England.

But then, it only takes a random sentence, some get-together, to feel excluded. I don't belong. Despite my language and cultural proficiency, I am not French nor English. Actually, I am not sure I still belong in my home country either. And I certainly do not belong in Switzerland!

Ramadan will start in a couple of weeks. For the last eleven years, ever since BK1 was born, I spent most of it in Algeria. There, activity is reduced, life slows right down. Nobody expects you to take kids to the open-door swimming pool in the searing heat while you haven't had a drink or anything to eat for the last 12 hours. Nobody plans a school musical show preceded by nibbles at 5pm. Nobody wonders why on Earth this crazy nursing woman of four kids would abstain from eating or drinking from dawn till dusk.

This year is different. Because the girls are still in school for almost the whole duration of Ramadan, we'll only be able to fast the last few days in Algiers. And it makes me sad. It makes me long for my childhood smells, the market stalls,  the anticipation of sharing a long-awaited meal with my parents, the long evenings, the rituals.

Today is one of those days.

Family Language Diagram Update

I feel a bit bad: we haven't updated the family language diagram for ages! I cannot even remember how long ago I touched it. Bad Babeldad!

Then again, the situation has only changed very slightly when it comes to languages. All three Babelkids are now sufficiently fluent to be able to speak pretty normally with native speakers of their four languages. English is the dominating language, by a mile, but it has always been.

So all good in the Babelhouse from a language perspective.

Small Changes

Drill down into details though, and you will notice changes.

BK2 is more and more defaulting to English, when in the past she would speak Arabic or maybe German. We now witness (and sometimes interrupt) long conversations between BK2 and BK1 entirely in English. BK2 starts it, usually.

BK3 has recently jumped onto the bandwaggon as well. And while the long days in school are a good justification for why BK2 does it, BK3 doesn't even go to pre-school yet, so she got it entirely from her sisters!

BK1 is probably the one with the most solid knowledge and command of all four languages, as she's always been. I guess the time we were able to devote to her when she was alone really paid off for her.

Slightly Bigger Change

So all is more or less as usual in our Babelfamily.

Just the right time to overthrow it all and add more complexity to the mix: we're moving to Basel, Switzerland!

This is a work-related move, of course, but we did actually chose Basel on purpose based on its proximity to France and Germany and the hope that we would come into a multilingual environment. I won't make any guesses as to what the move will do to the girls' language, but I'm sure it'll be interesting.

If you were thinking "Basel... hm... German-speaking part of Switzerland, isn't it?" then all I can say is "technically yes", which obviously means "nope!". There's a fine line between a dialect and a language, I guess. For me, personally, Swiss German is a language. I recently spent four days in Basel and quickly found that I was better off speaking English if I wanted to actually understand what people said to me. So, depending on how you see it, the girls will either pick up yet another language (and a new majority language, too!), or learn a dialect that is quite frankly very different from mine.

This blog might just come to life again in September!

I don't speak French!

Bath-time and mealtimes seem to be quite conducive to multilingual talk in our family.

Yesterday, during bath-time, the girls were chatting excitedly about all the things they will do during our holiday in Nice.
We will be staying with our friends C (French), A (German) and their four children aged 11, 8, 5 and 1. The children mainly speak French, apart from the oldest who understands and speaks some German.

Promenade des Anglais

BK2, aged 5, then started worrying over her weak French. She had a little voice when she said: "I don't really speak Francais. I speak Arabic, Arabic, Arabic, French; Arabic, Arabic, Arabic, French"; mostly Arabic words interleaved with French vocabulary.

This is the child who whenever urged to stop talking in English at home, and switch to Arabic, would usually go (in Arabic!): "I can't speak Arabic. I can only speak French".

Here she is now showing how knowledgeable she is of her own language capabilities.

As to her not being able to speak French, I have no worries at all. I am sure she will be stringing sentences two days at the latest into our stay. I will report back!

ps: I spent 20 minutes writing this post only to realise afterwards that BabelDad beat me to it!

BK2 Worries about her French

We're going to France tomorrow to visit friends.

In the bath this evening, BK2 expressed her worries about being able to communicate with our friends' kids, because they only speak French.

We try to tell her she'll be fine and she speaks a lot of languages, but she's not convinced.

"Ich gette muddled up!" she exclaims, "I'm getting muddled up!".

If you're German, you will have noticed: that was supposed to be a German phrase.

The first word as well as the grammar were indeed German. The rest: not so much.

But how adorably has she captured the very essence of her worries in just one multi-lingual sentence!

Food Terminology

If you are new to the UK, be prepared to be confused at mealtimes. Lunch, dinner, tea, supper, luncheon, which one is when?

Algeria and France

In Algeria, the main three meals are called qahwa (coffee, whether you drink it or not), ftour (for midday meal, which also designates the evening meal to break Ramadan fast!), 'acha (the evening meal, similar to the word desingating the evening prayer).

In France, they are petit déjeuner, déjeuner and dîner.

In both Algeria and France, the midday meal is the most substantial one. When I lived in France, we used to have a two-hour midday break, encompassing a two or three course meal at a restaurant, plus coffee once back at work.
The customary Friday couscous in Algeria is infallibly served at midday, just before the Friday prayer.

Germany

When I first visited BabelDad's family in Germany, I literally starved during the day. I had to sneak out for a pretend walk in the fresh air at 2pm, only to ravenously gulp down a Döner Kebab. The main meal of the day in Germany, you guessed it, is the evening one. I made up for the lack of sustenance during the day by eating huge amounts of bread and cheese at frühstück, and loads of cake in the afternoon.

Northern England

In the UK, mealtimes can get a bit confusing. Be careful when you make an appointment with a plumber at dinner time, or tea time. If you are from a southern background like mine, you would naturally think dinner time is about 8pm and tea time about 4pm. Well, you would be surprised by the plumber turning up unexpectedly at noon or 6pm instead. Dinner in these necks of the wood is the midday meal. Tea is the evening meal, which in the UK is quite early at 5.30pm to 6pm.

So what's supper? Apparently, it is another evening meal, a couple of hours later than tea, for posh people (...), or for parents who have put their children to bed and now can enjoy a child-free meal. Note: we do have family meals in our house, at 6pm, but boy do I understand those parents who forego tea with children for a quiet supper!

And if you are wondering what the English call the drink tea time, there isn't a name, because you can enjoy a cuppa any time of the day. Off to have mine in my £10 porcelain mug. Because drinking tea for me has become one of the most frequent and enjoyable activities of the day.

What if? Part 2- Living in France

We never intended to stay in Britain. We never intended for our girls to be born in England, and become English.

We left southern France on a rainy February morning, as if to prepare us for the gloomy weather in Northern England.
When we packed our car that morning, we were convinced we would be back in two years time.

Here we are, eight years later, still in England, with three children, new friends and a new house. Une nouvelle vie, quoi.

Currently, the girls speak Arabic, French, German and English with varying degrees of fluency.

How would have our linguistic situation differed had we been able to stay in France?

To start with, there would obviously have been no English, whatsoever.
Even though we lived in a highly international area, with some stubbornyl-refusing-to-learn-French British expats, French would have been the majority language.

BabelDad and me speaking French at home would have meant the double presence of French inside and outside the home. This would have ruled out MLAH.









Knowing BabelDad, he would have stuck to OPOL. The girls would probably have had some proficiency in German, albeit less than what they currently exhibit.

As for Arabic, I believe that the girls' proficiency would have been pretty low. The reasons, as I see them, are two-fold.

First, I would have greatly struggled to do OPOL. As a virtually-native French speaker myself, I would have had to rigidly speak Arabic with the exclusion of any French. Mission: Impossible.



Second, Arabic in France is un-glamorous, to say the least.  Arabic is associated with a civilisation that "has less value than France's, a civilisation that enslaves women, disrespects individual and political liberties and allows tyranny".

It would have been difficult to normalise the use of Arabic outside the home in this climate.

I can easily imagine how desperate-to-blend-in children would not want to use a language with such a negative stigma attached to it.

How to get away with swearing on national US television

Jean Dujardin has won the Oscar for best actor, the first ever French actor to win the prestigious award.
I remember when I first saw him in the mid nineties, in one of the first talent search shows in France, Graine de Star. Then in the late 90's-early 2000 in Un Gars, Une Fille (A Guy, A Girl). At the time, I had just met the BabelDad. We, as well as many 20something and 30something, followed the on-screen and off-screen romance of Jean (Chouchou) and his co-star Alexandra Lamy (Loulou), who eventually got married in real life.

That night of the Academy Awards, Jean Dujardin struck gold. Twice. First the statue. Second the p**ain word.
His joy summarised in the last "Wow, P**ain, Génial, Merci, Formidable" is a pleasure to hear; in spite of swearing; or because of it.