Researching Multilingually: Linguistic Incompetence

Alison Phipps

University of Glasgow

Knowing Multilingual Researching

How can I know what researching multilingually means if I am monolingual?

No point of comparison

No story of growing access to other linguistic worlds

No experience of leaving one set of framings and using a different set

No experience of the feel of competence

Researching multilingual research

Listening to and gathering biographies / data of researching monolingually

Narratives and novels (Helen Sullivan)

Compare research undertaken multilingually with research undertaken monolingually for accuracy and results (use of multilingual questionnaires; interviewing with interpretation; participant observation

Autoethnography of Linguistic Incompetence

1) Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival

2) Asylum Languages

3) Lifelong Learning in Palestine

4) From language edges (pain/joy – word failure)

Learning the Arts

2 year of autoethnographic work in adult education tourist language classes for Italian and Portuguese

Language holiday in Lisbon

Beginner's language classes

Researching without the language

Ethnographic notes:

Difficulty and struggle to hear and make meaning

The jouiscence of making progress

Resource to common language (German and English) for rest and reflection and writing

Notes full of new words and phrases – mulitlingual research notes

Asylum Languages

Response to Call (Radio 4)

Linguistics needed

Languages useless

Language greetings learned with detainees

Contact with Swahlii, Georgian, Arabic, Congolese, Somali;

Language teaching as leveller

Research value in ignorance. Access.

Mother Tongue

Blen & Tigrinya

New script

Tonality

New questions of language and power

Linguistic exhaustion and pain - autodidacticism

Paucity of resource and opportunity. (payment for lessons illegal; transport problems).

Mother's Incompetence

Allowed space for processing and recovery in English (trauma victims often process better in a different language – see Holocaust survival – Grossmann)

Required patience and vigilance

Value of object, story, each word and script

Keyman keyboard

Materials- phrase books; CD

Patterns

Relationships formed through other means (food, joint worship, coffee ceremonies, gifts)

Listening in to patterns for hand holds – food, greetings, God, place names, goodness and beauty.

Ritual Learning

Habituated practices (Coffee, food, greetings, prayer)

(Mary Oliver)

Sensory awareness heightened: incense, cloth, scarf, coffee beans, skin and hair oil; spices, texture)

Linguistic power remains with powerless

Tsada: expections of whiteness

Chichewa

Greetings

Animals

Status of people

Surprise - Mzungu

Lifelong Learning in Palestine

Arabic: script and speech

Borders

Welcomes

Security

Research interviews

NGO/academic English

Suspicion or Trust

Because I am a linguist/ethnographer I quickly learned:

- greetings

- food names

- Prayer language (Insha'allah)

Monolinguals: la,la,la:

Gesture and some aggression/suspicion that translation maybe in correct

Palestine

Material objects

Scarves

Children practising English and teaching us

Flowers in a garden

Reliance on translation

Gifts and appreciation.

Movement of body in segregated space

Enforced time for observation

Pain/JoyElaine Scarry: Pain is

language destroying

Trauma fragments and disrupts patterns of memory.

Pain/Joy are produced from same patterns of neurological processing.

Advocacy as the compensation for linguistic incompetence (Amnesty International)

Words Fail Me

Researchers are presumed to be linguistically able

Failure of words / writers block is a serious business

Failure to engage multilingually is seen largely as a necessary inconvenience.

Some dimensions of life may be highlighted (notably those traditionally noticed by anthropologists)

Ingrid de Kok: Words failing

Researching Multilingually

Language acquisition – the form its takes, where it occurs, how it occurs is an important dimension to fieldwork and to research

We are positioned through our competence/incompetence and our stories of acquisition and mistake

Social Humility or Technological Control

Autodidactic, technological courses mask incompetence, hide error and failure

Social classes make space for 'rehearsal' and allow speech to be embodied and embedded

Humility, performed and languaged, enables the building of relationships of trust in the field for an ethics of access to be negotiated

The Value in Incompetence

Time to observe

Practice of researcherly patience

Experience of frustration and powerlessness which enables empathy

Noticing of greetings, rituals, sensory dimensions

Valuable stage, but not status quo.

A glimpse into early ethnography and anthropology- a stage in entering other worlds. (Evans Pritchard)

Thank You

RossettaStone.com

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Solutions for Incompetence?

Rosetta Stone Makes Inc. 500 List

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Languages as Technology

Technology is therefore a game pertaining not to the true, the just, or the beautiful, etc., but to efficiency: a technical “move” is “good” when it does better and /or expends less energy than another.

(Lyotard 1984)

“Making the World a Better Place”

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Your Time

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• Languages measured out in technologically controlled time.

• Liquid languages for liquid modernity.

Rosetta Stone: A Counter-Story

• Discovered 1799• 1814 – Demotic

translation• 1822-24 Greek &

Coptic & hieroglyphic• 1858 – Full English

Translation• Egypt, France,

England, U.S. • 57 years