The "untranslatable" emotions you never know you have

From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.

Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?

These words – taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch – have no direct English equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar.

Lomas’s Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all – think “frisson”, from French, or “schadenfreude”, from German – but there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable" experiences so far – and he’s only just begun.

Learning these words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced understanding of ourselves. “They offer a very different way of seeing the world.”

Lomas says he was first inspired after hearing a talk on the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of adversity”. According to Finnish speakers, the English ideas of “grit”, “perseverance” or “resilience” do not come close to describing the inner strength encapsulated in their native term. It was "untranslatable" in the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent encoded within the English vocabulary that could capture that deep resonance.

Intrigued, he began to hunt for further examples, scouring the academic literature and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own suggestions. The first results of this project were published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year. 

Many of the terms referred to highly specific positive feelings, which often depend on very particular circumstances:

Desbundar (Portuguese) – to shed one’s inhibitions in having fun

Tarab (Arabic) – a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment

Shinrin-yoku (Japanese) – the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally

Gigil (Tagalog) – the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished

Yuan bei (Chinese) – a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment

Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived

But others represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which could be crucial to our growth and overall flourishing.  

Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer

Wabi-sabi (Japanese) – a “dark, desolate sublimity” centred on transience and imperfection in beauty

Saudade (Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist

Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable

In addition to these emotions, Lomas’s lexicography also charted the personal characteristics and behaviours that might determine our long-term well-being and the ways we interact with other people.

Dadirri (Australian aboriginal) term – a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening

Pihentagyú (Hungarian) – literally meaning “with a relaxed brain”, it describes quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions

Desenrascanço (Portuguese) – to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation

Sukha (Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances

Orenda (Huron) – the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate

You can view many more examples on his website, where there is also the opportunity to submit your own. Lomas readily admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only an approximation of the term's true meaning. "The whole project is a work in progress, and I’m continually aiming to refine the definitions of the words in the list," he says. "I definitely welcome people’s feedback and suggestions in that regard."

In the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore the causes and consequences of these experiences – to extend our understanding of emotion beyond the English concepts that have dominated research so far.

But studying these terms will not just be of scientific interest; Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored.

“In our stream of consciousness – that wash of different sensations feelings and emotions – there’s so much to process that a lot passes us by,” Lomas says. “The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.”

As evidence, Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching effects.

Her research was inspired by the observation that certain people use different emotion words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. “Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad,” she explains. “For them, they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them.”

This is called “emotion granularity” and she usually measures this by asking the participants to rate their feelings on each day over the period of a few weeks, before she calculates the variation and nuances within their reports: whether the same old terms always coincide, for instance.

Importantly, she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety, for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem.

In this way, emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life. Sure enough, people who score highly on emotion granularity are better able to recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol as a way of recovering from bad news. It can even improve your academic success. Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10 and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behaviour in the classroom. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives,” he says.

Both Brackett and  Barrett agree that Lomas’s “positive lexicography” could be a good prompt to start identifying the subtler contours of our emotional landscape. “I think it is useful – you can think of the words and the concepts they are associated with as tools for living,” says  Barrett. They might even inspire us to try new experiences, or appreciate old ones in a new light.

It’s a direction of research that Lomas would like to explore in the future. In the meantime, Lomas is still continuing to build his lexicography – which has grown to nearly a thousand terms. Of all the words he has found so far, Lomas says that he most often finds himself pondering Japanese concepts such as wabi-sabi (that “dark, desolate sublimity” involving transience and imperfection). “It speaks to this idea of finding beauty in phenomena that are aged and imperfect,” he says. “If we saw the world through those eyes, it could be a different way of engaging in life.”

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http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170126-the-untranslatable-emotions-you-never-knew-you-had?ocid=fbfut

Umberto Eco: The language of Europe is translation

CIAO MAESTRO!

Comunicazione e traduzione a confronto: l’Occidente incontra l’Oriente

In determinati contesti comunicativi tra più persone, per esempio una visita presso un conoscente o una conversazione tra amici, la comunicazione “occidentale” tende a presentare per prima cosa il fatto come si è svolto, per passare successivamente ad eventuali spiegazioni e commenti. Nei paesi arabi invece, la situazione è capovolta. Osserviamo i seguenti dialoghi:

Comunicazione occidentale

• Ho perso il treno
• C’era un traffico terribile e l’autobus è rimasto bloccato per quaranta minuti nel centro.
• Sai, piove, e qui appena cadono due gocce diventa un pantano.
•  Questa città è sempre più invivibile...
•  È un periodaccio…

 Comunicazione araba

•  È un periodaccio...
•  Questa città è sempre più invivibile…
•  Sai, piove, e qui appena cadono due gocce diventa un pantano.
• C’era un traffico terribile e l’autobus è rimasto bloccato per quaranta minuti nel centro.
•  Ho perso il treno…

Questo modo di procedere nella comunicazione interculturale, quali riscontri può avere? Senza dubbio gli occidentali sono noti per essere spesso troppo diretti ed irruenti in certe circostanze, e allo stesso modo gli arabi ci percepiscono in questa maniera: diretti ed invadenti. Dal loro punto di vista, si evita prima di tutto di entrare nel cuore dell’argomento, anche quando ricevono una visita, solo dopo una accurata accoglienza e convenevoli si passa ad instaurare un dialogo sui fatti da raccontare.

Come si ripercuote tutto questo sul linguaggio e sul pensiero? I processi cognitivi si attivano interagendo con le persone e con il proprio ambiente sociale, portandoci poi ad interiorizzare dei processi ed interagendo con il nostro mondo individualmente. Quindi la natura umana presuppone una competenza sia individuale che sociale, vale a dire il nostro pensiero è anche influenzato dall’esterno, ma tuttavia individualmente prendiamo coscienza delle nostre azioni, riflettiamo, ci confrontiamo e decidiamo il comportamento a noi più vicino e opportuno. Perciò anche il linguaggio è influenzato da questo aspetto sociale, ma è bene precisare che esiste anche una sorta di linguaggio “interiore”, che fa parte della nostra sfera individuale e permette lo sviluppo della consapevolezza metacognitiva e lo sviluppo delle competenze individuali. In breve, ogni lingua è influenzata dall’aspetto sociale, dall’ambiente in cui è nata e che la circonda ed è noto come questi margini siano oggi anche influenzati dagli aspetti linguistici e sociali della globalizzazione.

 Per quanto riguarda la lingua araba, benchè sia molto difficile da apprendere, ma non impossibile, è senza dubbio una delle lingue più poetiche, e ai più nota come una delle più antiche del mondo. È la lingua di 250.000.000 di parlanti, la cui letteratura e cultura è tra le più gloriose nella storia dell’umanità, considerando che rappresenta una civiltà che per secoli ha anticipato le grandi scoperte umanistiche e scientifiche del futuro Occidente.

 Inoltre, non tutti sanno che molti nomi di sostantivi italiani derivano dall’arabo. Infatti, come scrisse il semiologo Daniele Barbieri, nel suo articolo Colpisce più la lingua (araba) che la spada, nella frase “la nave era in avaria. L'ammiraglio uscendo dall'arsenale si lamentò degli acciacchi. Giunto a casa si buttò sull'alcova azzurra mangiando arance e albicocche con un po' di alcool”, tutte le parole con la A vengono dall'arabo. Si potrebbe tentare anche con la C: “ Ho messo il caffè nella caraffa. Nella dispensa c'è una cassata con i canditi, nella casseruola un po' di carciofi”.

Altre parole di origine araba che potremmo citare sono: zenit, zero, alchimia, azimut, chimica, elisir, Gibilterra, harem, intarsio, algebra,monsone, nababbo, cammello. Di l'origine araba sono anche i seguenti sostantivi: almanacco, assassino, aguzzino, bagarino,alfiere, bizzeffe barattolo, cerbottana, chitarra, macabro, cotone, crumiro, taccuino, talco melanzane, nafta, divano, dogana, pappagallo, zucchero ragazzo, denaro, facchino, giubbotto, limone, garza, sciroppo, spinaci, tariffa, zafferano traffico, valigia, gatto, giacca, liuto, magazzino, materasso, nuca, ovatta, ricamo, safari, saracinesca, tamburo e  zecca.

La poeticità della lingua araba è nell’armonia del significato di numerosissime parole, nello stile di vita che sa cogliere emozioni e passioni, ma al tempo stesso con semplicità e profondità. Prendiamo ad esempio i saluti:

Buongiorno - Sabaha l-hary - lett. “mattina di bene”

   Sabaha n-nur - lett. “mattina di luce”

Il significato letterale di “benvenuto” è invece:

“ che tu possa trovare famiglia e pianura”

Espressione che risale al più antico periodo beduino, dove la famiglia è simbolo di calore e protezione, la pianura invece è simbolo di viaggio spensierato a dorso del dromedario.

Prego! -  tafaddala  - letteralmente: “ essere così gentile da fare qualcosa” o meglio “ accomodati, favorisci, prego, fa’ pure”. Inoltre secondo i contesti potrà anche valere per “ prendi, serviti, entra, passa prima tu, dimmi, ecc.”

Passiamo ora alla tecnologia.

Quando le accademie di lingua araba furono chiamate a creare un neologismo per l’elaboratore elettronico, il computer, fu naturale ricorrere al verbo “ hasaba” , cioè “contare”, ma anche “ calcolare, elaborare”, applicandogli lo schema raro di a – u di valore intensivo, che talvolta troviamo in parole come faruq “ saggio”, o con valenza strumentale, come nazur, cioè cannocchiale.

Pertanto l’area della famiglia delle parola come “hisab”, cioè “conto”, e “hasub”, cioè computer, è evidente estrapolando la radice h -s- b.

D’altro canto, strascichi di passato coloniale sono ancora oggi evidenti, anche dei modi di dire. Prendiamo come esempio il contesto di un bar.

Il cameriere viene interpellato con quel termine la cui traduzione letterale è “maestro, insegnante”, termine diffusamente usato anche per interpellare un artigiano, un tassista ecc. ( cit. mastro, capo). Diffuso è altresì nel sud Italia, interpellare alcune maestranze in questo modo. Usuale è anche il francesismo graçon per interpellare un cameriere nei paesi arabi. Il termine standard vero e proprio per cameriere è invece “nadil” che tuttavia viene usato unicamente in letteratura.

E fate attenzione ad ordinare un gelato al bar! Se nel Maghreb /glas/, dal francesismo “glace” , significa gelato, in Arabia Saudita, nei Paesi del Golfo ed in Irak, /glas/ sta per bicchiere!

http://www.torkanweb.com/#!LOCCIDENTE-INCONTRA-LORIENTE/c1jsz/ijpypup265

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Dott.ssa Giovanna Bondanese, laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere, laurea magistrale in Traduzione Specialistica, laurea specialistica in Scienze della Mediazione Interculturale. Insegnante di lingua inglese, francese ed italiano per stranieri. Traduttrice, mediatrice interculturale.

Follow me! My page about Translation, Linguistics, Foreign Languages and Semiotics

FOLLOW ME AT: 

http://www.torkanweb.com/#!fonemi/c241a

Russian: beautiful, complex and a window to the unknown

What gives Russian its romantic complexity? Over the past two months, we’ve explored the ten languages essential for the UK’s future. We turn to Russian in the eighth post of our series, by Keira Ives-Keeler of the British Council in Russia.

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The Cyrillic alphabet can intimidate non-native Russian speakers, but it shouldn’t!

Водка, meaning ‘little water’, or as the rest of the world knows it, ‘vodka’, was the very first word I learnt how to write in Russian. It might be a huge cliché, but it is a deceptively easy word to learn, and one of the few that I would argue is just about decipherable from Cyrillic for an English speaker. Here’s how each of the Cyrillic letters translates:

В = V

О = O

Д = D

К = K

А = A

Easy right? Three of the five letters are exactly the same! Of course, it gets a bit more difficult when you start constructing sentences, but in general, with 33 letters in total it’s not so bad, and once you’ve cracked it you can move onto the joys of Russian grammar. I would certainly argue that it isn’t the alphabet that makes Russian so difficult for foreigners to learn. Rather, it is the fact that as a Slavic or Slavonic language, lexically and grammatically Russian shares very few links with English (fashionable Anglicisms aside).

Slavic languages like Russian are not closely related to English 

The Slavic or Slavonic family of languages consists of three branches – East Slavic (Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian), West Slavic (Czech, Slovak, Polish and others) and South Slavic (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian). In reality, I find that what this means is that as an English native speaker, most of the time if you don’t know a word it’s pretty difficult (read: near impossible) to guess.

Nevertheless, in recent years, English has had a growing influence on the Russian language, which is particularly noticeable in Russian spoken in business settings, and in the Russian media. From стейкхолдеры (stakeholderi/stakeholders) to ‘брокеры’ (brokeri/brokers) there are countless examples to choose from. One of the most bizarre examples of this has got to be the legendary Moscow ‘фейс контроль’ (face control) – the policy of upscale nightclubs, casinos, restaurants and similar establishments to strictly restrict entry based on a bouncer’s snap judgement of the suitability of a person’s looks, money, style or attitude, especially in Russia and other former Soviet countries.

Russian pronunciation and grammar can be challenging

This growing influence of English might mean that in years to come it will be easier for foreigners to learn Russian, but I can’t help feeling that that may well still be a long way off. In the meantime, there is plenty for non-native speakers of Russian to be getting on with. Verbs of motions, verbal aspect, and anything to do with numbers/dates/numerals are the dreaded cases, but it has to be said that although there are lots of rules,  there are equally few exceptions.

Also, pronunciation is tricky and once you step into the real world and away from your lovely Russian textbooks, predicting where the stress falls in a word and how to pronounce it correctly becomes a lot more complicated (unlike Spanish, for example, with its penultimate syllable stress unless where marked). This is one area lacking in rules when it comes to Russian, as stress is not fixed (so can fall at the beginning, middle or end of a word) and placing the stress on the wrong part of the word can cause all sorts of confusion, mainly resulting in blank faces or potentially laughter depending on what you might (unintentionally) have come out with.

Russian is intensely lyrical 

In spite of this, complex as it might be, Russian is an incredibly beautiful and lyrical language. It’s no coincidence that some of the world’s greatest poets hailed from here. And once you have achieved some level of proficiency, the sense of achievement makes it all worthwhile.

Russian culture is not easy to grasp, but it’s worth the investment

As with most languages, the best way to learn Russian is through immersion. This was my experience, although unlike many students who come to Russia on their year abroad at university I chose to live in a student dorm (общежитие) rather than with a host family. I will never forget arriving at St. Petersburg, exhausted after a long journey via Germany, stepping out into the cold, gloomy Russian afternoon and wondering quite what I’d let myself in for, as the university driver grabbed my bags and trudged off to the car park, muttering and grumbling to himself along the way. I was fresh from a summer in sunny Florence and had been repeatedly told that St. Petersburg truly was ‘the Venice of the North’. As it turned out, two years of studying beginner’s Russian at university hadn’t quite equipped me for the numerous encounters with angry babushkas, disgruntled cashiers and perpetually miserable and erratic marshrutka (shared taxi) drivers that awaited me.

However, what my first years of studying Russian in the UK also hadn’t prepared me for was the overwhelming grandness of what has to be one of the most stunning cities in the world, and the unforgettable experiences and people that would shape the future of my career and the next few years of my life. Russia may initially seem like a grey country on the surface – grey skies, grey buildings, grey people even! – but if you delve deep enough you will see that there is a humanity and ‘realness’ about Russia that is difficult to describe and endlessly fascinating. Social etiquette may be quite different, most notably perhaps in the traditional Russian approach to smiling – generally smiles are reserved exclusively for people you know and not for strangers (for example, in shops and supermarkets). However, having the opportunity to put my language skills into practice gave me an insight into the country and culture that no number of textbooks, history books or travel guides ever could. Furthermore, Russian hospitality is difficult to rival and just like the British (although this is not actually the impression that Russians tend to have of us) they like a good party!

Understanding Russian opens up a world of incredible art, theatre, literature and culture

So, in spite of Russian’s reputation as an extremely difficult language to learn, for those who do give it a go, the potential rewards can be huge.  With some of the finest literature, theatre and art in the world coming from the Russian-speaking world, if you do love culture then you are simply spoilt for choice. Nothing can compare with reading Russian works in the original; Anton Chekhov, Ivan Bunin and the modernist poet Anna Akhmatova are probably my personal favourites. A night at the theatre is par for the course and generally won’t break the bank, Moscow and St. Petersburg regularly host some of the most famous and revered art works the world over, and once you get used to the fact that smiling at strangers is a no-no (I’m still getting there with that) you’re halfway there.

Russian is the eighth most widely-spoken native language in the world

Furthermore, you have the whole of the Russian-speaking world to explore. Russian ranks eighth in the world with 140-150 million native speakers, and is also spoken as a second language by over 120 million people in Russia and the neighbouring countries of Central Asia – the majority of these people, will not, in fact, speak English.

Speaking Russian gives a useful edge in your career

Although Russian may still be seen as a niche language (something that should be challenged in my opinion, considering the global role that Russia and the Russian-speaking world has to play), speaking a language that many other native English speakers do not speak opens up opportunities that might not be available otherwise. From interpreting at international conferences in Asia, to working as a translator at the UN in Vienna, my knowledge of Russian has helped me to see the world. I’ve met some amazing people and learnt more than just vocabulary along the way. It even led me to the British Council, through my participation in the organisation’s Graduate Scheme.

So all in all, although I may not have had a clue what I’d let myself in for when I first started learning Russian, I have to say that I agree with the BBC’s Bridget Kendall, who is quoted in the Languages of the Future report as saying that ‘deciding to learn Russian was probably the best decision I ever made’. It might not always feel like it on the days when it’s -20 degrees in Moscow and the threat of ice underfoot and icicles overhead loom ominously. But on the whole, learning this beautiful and complex language has opened up an equally beautiful and complex country for me. Russia might well be a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but life in Russia is certainly never boring, and learning Russian is never dull. Besides, in true Russian spirit – if you don’t have to suffer for it, then surely it’s not worth it anyway!

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http://blog.britishcouncil.org/2014/09/26/russian-beautiful-complex-and-a-window-onto-the-unknown/

The Bilingual Mind

Temple University professor, Aneta Pavlenko, has just written a ground-breaking book, The Bilingual Mind, on the intriguing relationship between language and thought in bi- and multilinguals. She is herself a speaker of many languages and has researched this topic for much of her career. She has very kindly accepted to answer a few questions about her book.

Your work is inspired by the writings of some renowned linguists and anthropologists such as Humboldt, Boas, Sapir and Whorf. What role did they play exactly?

These scholars are commonly seen as proponents of linguistic relativity, the idea that different languages shape different worlds for their speakers. This idea is highly controversial and yet at the heart of the debate is a profound misunderstanding–and a deliberate misrepresentation–of Sapir’s and Whorf’s actual views. When we go back to their writings, we see that these multilingual scholars, interested in language change, did not believe for a moment that language determines thought. If it did, both language change and successful second language learning would have been impossible. In the book, I attempt to solve this linguistic whodunit, identify the real authors of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and then return to the original questions raised by Humboldt, Sapir, and Whorf about what happens when we learn a new language.

What do you mean by the expression "the bilingual mind"?

I use the expression ‘the bilingual mind’ to draw attention to the fact that most of the world’s population is bi- or multilingual and to argue that this bi-/multilingualism matters for our understanding of human cognition. The process of learning and using language affects categorization, memory, perception, and self-perception; learning another language may reshape these processes and reorganize the structure of the mind.

You mention "language effects" in your discussion of the bilingual mind. Could you explain what you mean?

This term refers to demands individual languages place on our cognitive processes in terms of categorical judgments and allocation of attention. Some require us to mark whether the action is accomplished or still in progress, and others require us to say whether we personally witnessed particular events. Learning a new language requires us to allocate our resources differently and acquire new categorical distinctions and ways of parsing events.

You state that when one acquires a second language, cognitive restructuring takes place. Can you explain what this is?

Cognitive restructuring refers to self-reorganization of linguistic categories that takes place when we learn a second language. Take, for instance, English/Russian word pairs cup/chashka and glass/stakan. Russian speakers learning English will begin by associating the English words ‘cup’ and ‘glass’ with the already existing representations of ‘chashka’ and ‘stakan’. But this can only take them so far, because in English we call paper, plastic, and styrofoam containers for coffee on the go ‘cups’ and in Russian they are ‘stakanchiki’ (little glasses). To use English appropriately, the learner has to restructure the pre-existing representations, in the case of ‘glass’, for instance, shifting attention from shape to material. And this is just one simple example of the myriad of cognitive adjustments in lexical and grammatical categories that take place when we acquire a second language.

What are the main factors that account for this restructuring?

Cognitive restructuring is a very new direction in research on bilingualism. As a consequence, we are only beginning to understand its process and the factors that affect it. In my own view, the key factor involves language use in communication, in meaningful contexts and in the presence of physical objects. The co-occurrence of form and meaning allows us to form new connections between words and their referents and to learn to pay attention to distinctions required by the second language.

How has your own multilingualism influenced your thinking on this topic?

First, my multilingualism provides me with experiential insights into what it means to live in two or more languages. Secondly, my working languages–French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, and my native Russian–offer access to a large body of literature that I can read in the original, which is particularly important in the case of Bakhtin, Luria, and Vygotsky who had been badly mistranslated into English.

In your book, you refer to a large amount of scholarly work, from many different sources, but you also call upon biographies, literature including poetry, as well as personal testimonies. Can you say a bit more about this?

Certainly. I deeply believe that our scholarship is only meaningful insofar as it can speak to real people and address their everyday problems and dilemmas. This is why I try to make connections between studies conducted in the experimental lab and autobiographical writing and poetry, which, in my view–and that of Vygotsky and Sapir–offers unprecedented access to people’s inner worlds. The mixing also reflects my academic bilingualism. My training took place in two academic surroundings, Russian- and English-speaking, and while I write in English, I draw on the Russian academic tradition of interweaving research with fiction and poetry.

At one point in your book, you state that you are "irreverent bynature". How has this trait helped you in your work?

From the first day of graduate school, I never assumed that I should be buying into this or that theory and have continuously questioned the premises and foundations of our research enterprise. I suspect that this unruly behavior made me a pest and a nuisance to my professors, yet it also made me a better scholar because it led me to disrespect artificial boundaries between fields and paradigms. Conducting experimental research taught me healthy respect for the challenges of empirical science, while sociolinguistic theories offered me tools necessary for critical evaluation of the scientific enterprise. Irreverence also makes me a better writer, or at least it makes writing more fun.

You sometimes show concern about the work of some psychologists, applied linguists, anthropologists and even translators. Why is that?

In the case of psychology, my main concern is with the treatment of bilingual participants. Some researchers exclude bilinguals as ‘unusual’ or ‘messy’ subjects and others treat them as representative speakers of their first languages, brushing aside any potential effects of second language learning. In the case of linguistics and anthropology, my main concern is with the researchers’ own bilingualism. Despite being linguists, we hold ourselves to an abysmally low standard as language learners. My concerns are reinforced by the many errors I see in the treatments of Russian in translation and in scholarly literature that sometimes does not even get the basic facts right.

Where do you see research on the bilingual mind going in the next ten years?

I see three main directions for research in the next decade. The first and the most straightforward will apply existing approaches to the study of other language combinations and different types of bi- and multilinguals. The second will examine whether language influences on cognition are also subject to plasticity effects; in other words, is there a critical period for learning to attend to categorical distinctions and motion trajectories in a native-like way? The third direction is to go beyond the study of acquisition of English, French, or German by immigrants and foreign language learners and to consider ways in which speakers of major world languages–including researchers–acquire languages spoken by small groups of people.

More generally, if you had one wish that could come true regarding bi- and multilinguals, what would it be?

This is an interesting and unexpected question. I guess, I would want people who speak more than one language to experience less anxiety about their languages, fewer concerns about perceived limitations and deficiencies and more joy and pride. When I come to workshops and conferences in your homeland, Switzerland, I witness amazing presentations and exchanges taking place in German, French, and English. Yet I also see my multilingual colleagues and their students being concerned about the limitations of their English, deficiencies in their German, or the wrong accent in their French. To end with your words that became a motto for my whole research agenda, a bilingual is not a sum of two monolinguals but a unique speaker/hearer in his/her own right. So let’s take pride in our linguistic abilities and achievements.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201310/the-bilingual-mind

The Dialectics of Discourse By Norman Fairclough

Discourse and social practices 

Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth, CDA) is based upon a view of semiosis as an irreducible element of all material social processes (Williams 1977). We can see social life as interconnected networks of social practices of diverse sorts (economic, political, cultural, family etc). The reason for centering the concept of ‘social practice’ is that it allows an oscillation between the perspective of social structure and the perspective of social action and agency – both necessary perspectives in social research and analysis (Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999). By ‘social practice’ I mean a relatively stabilised form of social activity (examples would be classroom teaching, television news, family meals, medical consultations). Every practice is an articulation of diverse social elements within a relatively stable configuration, always including discourse. Let us say that every practice includes the following elements:

Activities

Subjects, and their social relations

Instruments

Objects

Time and place

Forms of consciousness

Values

Discourse

These elements are dialectically related (Harvey 1996). That is to say, they are different elements but not discrete, fully separate, elements. There is a sense in which each ‘internalizes’ the others without being reducible to them. So for instance social relations, social identities, cultural values and consciousness are in part semiotic, but that does not mean that we theorize and research social relations for instance in the same way that we theorize and research language – they have distinct properties, and researching them gives rise to distinct disciplines. (Though it is possible and desirable to work across disciplines in a ‘transdisciplinary’ way – see Fairclough 2000.)

CDA is analysis of the dialectical relationships between discourse (including language but also other forms of semiosis, e.g. body language or visual images) and other elements of social practices. Its particular concern (in my own approach) is with the radical changes that are taking place in contemporary social life, with how discourse figures within processes of change, and with shifts in the relationship between semiosis and other social

elements within networks of practices. We cannot take the role of discourse in social practices for granted, it has to be established through analysis. And discourse may be more or less important and salient in one practice or set of practices than in another, and may change in importance over time.

Discourse figures in broadly three ways in social practices. First, it figures as a part of the social activity within a practice. For instance, part of doing a job (for istance being a shop assistant) is using language in a particular way; so too is part of governing a country.

Second, discourse figures in representations. Social actors within any practice produce representations of other practices, as well as (‘reflexive’) representations of their own practice, in the course of their activity within the practice.

Norman Fairclough