Roles of different languages in a multilingual individual

Are you a multilingual who prefers one language over other for a specific task and another language for another task? Do you always use a language in a certain environment and a different language in some other environment even when you are not specified? What might be on work here? First let us ask who is a multilingual person? Multilingualism according to some might be the ability to communicate in more than one language and for some it may be being able to more than just communicate in more than two languages. For some, being fluent simultaneously in several languages might also be a requirement. If being able to speak and understand more than one language is multilingual, more than half of the world's population is multilingual. If being fluent in more than one language simultaneously is multilingual a little less than half of the population is multilingual. And if the requirement asks for you to know more than two different languages fluently the share decreases to between 10% and 20% of the population. Putting aside all these different understanding of the term we are going to talk about multilingualism in which one can communicate fluently in more than one language. Following this definition I myself can be counted under multilingual. I can understand and communicate in three languages quite comfortably.

It is a common believe that children at young age do not learn a new language but they acquire it. Sticking to that common belief, I personally have acquired three languages at a young age. I was born in late 1990s among a Nepali speaking community in East Nepal so obviously Nepali is my native and first language. Our region is heavily influenced by Indian culture. Television was a favorite pass time for all at the time and the language of television was Hindi. I have heard the tales of the time when my parents were small, the first television in the village and the only broadcast was 'doordarshan'. All the villagers used to gather around the only Television and watch Mahavharat and Ramayan in Hindi. Even when I was little, cartoons and movies we watched were mostly in Hindi. So basically the language of this Entertainment system was Hindi and most people learned Hindi at a young age through this medium. Hindi being similar to our native language also helped. The other language I got familiar with at a small age was English. In the Indian sub continent English is regarded as a superior language by most of the people. It is considered to be a language of the intellect and a sign of higher knowledge. The British Raj ended in 1947CE but there language still prevails. It might be because there is a lack of alternative to unify the linguistically rich subcontinent. Whatever the reason may be, the result is everyone trying to imbibe this language and me writing this blog in English and not in Nepali, Hindi or Sanskrit. This concept also led my parents to put me in a Christian Boarding school in Darjeeling, India at a very young age for two years. Maybe it helped my English or Maybe not (probably not) but it has definitely made me want to have proficiency in this language. Even in Nepal most of the private schools are English Schools, it means most of the subjects are taught in English and English is the only language permitted for communication within the school. Speaking in other languages can even be punishable. I have been punished for greeting my principle in our traditional way, saying Namaste. I can go on analyzing why I know the languages I know but it is a separate topic for another blog. In this way I acquired the three languages at a young age but gradually all three languages have found their specific roles in me.

I prefer one language over other for doing a specific task and understand this is very common among many multilinguals. What factors may be in play here? I prefer reading and writing in English because I am comparatively faster in doing these tasks in English. One may prefer reading, writing, speaking or even listening in a particular language over another  because of the discrepancy in his/her language skills. One may be fluent in speaking a language but not so comfortable writing in it. I understand this as a result of a technical discrepancy. The other factor influencing your choice of language may be your social surrounding or environment you are in. You may give your presentation to a group of professional who understand both English and your native language in English because it’s a global language or because of its perceived hegemony over other languages. Similarly you may prefer making conversation in your native language in the dinner table at your family gathering although everyone understands English (sometimes better than the native language itself) because of the sense of tradition or maybe because you do not want others to impute you as supercilious. The other factor is inveterate habit, it may be a little far and wide but nonetheless it explains why we give some language some specific role. The initial two factors may also eventually convert into a habit. You may involuntarily write in a language even when you are also good at another because you have developed a habit of writing in that specific language because you preferred it when you had a skill discrepancy or you may only speak in you native language in the dinner table because that's what you have always been doing. I myself have a personal experience: I tend to prefer listening to English language educational videos in youtube rather than Hindi or Nepali. Maybe initially I was drawn to it because of the lack of these kinds of videos in any other language (or maybe I did not bother to search in any other language). It may also be because of their high production value and quality or maybe it was because of me unconsciously validating the superiority of English language in my subconscious. Whatever the initial reasons might be, I have now developed a habit and fell like something incomplete listening to Hindi or Nepali educational videos or usually any kind of videos. I had noticed this bias of my ears towards Hindi and Nepali but didn't give it a second thought until one night when I was sleeping with my brothers. My six years old cousin brother wanted to hear a bed time story and I had none to narrate. What I did was, I opened youtube and played a bed time story in Nepali, it was an animated cartoon. I naturally thought he would want to listen to a story in Nepali, being born and raised in Nepal. But contrary to my assumption he told me to play a story in Hindi instead. I shockingly asked him why and his answer was simply that he preferred to listen in Hindi. It was because he was habituated to watching Hindi cartoons on Television. Cartoons in any other language seemed alien to him even though he speaks and understand Nepali and even listens to English songs. It seems like my little cousin assigned Hindi language to cartoons.

In this way Polyglots (multilingual people) assign different roles to different languages. There is a language in which you think: it is usually your mother tongue. A language, in which, you talk to yourself. A language you like listening to, like in the example we talked about. A language for romance: Some people think some languages are romantic and poetic than other, it is of course a subjective matter but it is as true as sun rising from the east to that individual. A language for intellectual thoughts and thinking. A language of humor: As they say ‘humor is sometimes lost in translation’, some have more sense of humor in some language than other. Different language for different environment. There can be myriad of roles of a finite language. The roles are dynamic but what is certain is the richness of knowing different languages.      

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by Nick