bilingual interactions

[Michael H Agar]

 I was thinking of different examples and the differences in situation, motive, personalities etc. Inspired by Nancy's example, I wondered about that particular kind of situation, frequent in my experience, more about international colleagues working together on some project. And so why wouldn't it happen with some frequency that two people with different L1s and some competence in the other's L1 as their L2 sometimes talk their own L1s to each other? 


If it's true that L1 acquisition and L2 learning both show that at any point in the process comprehension outpaces production, and if I remember right that the preferred direction for simultaneous interpretation is L2 to L1 ...

And if there's a lot of space in that massive excluded middle between "doesn't speak L2" and "speaks L2" so that it's normal and frequent for a person using L2 to have what the Austrians call "Sprachmuedigkeit" or "language/speech tiredness"...

And if nothing in the interpersonal and situational constraints  on communication of the moment prevent it ...

Why wouldn't it happen that two people would figure out that they could both talk in their L1, use less energy, and drink more? Perhaps this version could even be about removing boundaries.

And having figured that out once, why wouldn't they go forth and suggest it in other encounters, L2 comprehension ability and situational constraints permitting?



Mike



On Aug 23, 2011, at 9:22 AM, Alejandro Paz wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I agree that this is a very interesting thread, with several good examples. The one thing I would add is it's important to specify what kind of boundary the participants understand themselves to be talking over, when deciding on a term (accomodation, asymmetric bilingualism, etc). That is, the communication pattern described by Rudi is very common inter-generationally among immigrant families (e.g., children speak English, parents answer in Spanish or other), which is very different than the peace-keepers described by Nancy, or from Jean Jackson's example from the Vaupes (I believe there was such bilingual communication in her description, perhaps I'm mis-remembering; that's in Bauman and Sherzer's volume "Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking" from 1974, and there's a follow-up somewhere from the nineties).
> 
> The other point to keep in mind is that in a stable situation, the varieties generally converge in many ways that participants aren't necessarily aware of, even if they hold these varieties to be distinct "languages." How the varieties are maintained distinct, and enregistered as emblems, is linked in some sense to the kind of boundary that is being signaled.
> 
> Cheers,
> Alejandro
> 
> (U of Toronto)
>