And He saw that it was good

Name: Miriam Weinbaum Age / D.O.B.: 44 /August 2, 1979 Gender, Pronouns & Sexuality: Cis woman, she/her, homosexual Hometown: New York Affiliation: Government Job position: Medical examiner Education: High school diploma, BA in nursing, pre-med, MD (forensics) Children: None Positive traits: intelligent, focused, hard-working, reliable, rational  Negative traits: aloof, stubborn, arrogant, egocentric, materialistic

Felix let out a huff of amusement at the tidbit of advice the other woman gives her. “I get my job done well and I’m one of the few around here with a degree in what I’m doing, so they’re lax with me.” She comments back, listening to Diana as she rants for a second. It seems like she’s quite stressed, at least, Felix thinks she is just by the sound of her voice. She tugs on her shirt, as she answers Diana’s question. “I did, but it wasn’t anything dangerous.” But it also wasn’t pure water so she couldn’t just pull the liquid from her shirt without leaving the non-water part of it. She turns around just as she sees Diana picking up a vial. “Put that down.” She walks over to where she had been working. “Hungary, or whatever country you said needs this, has to understand if they want it done right, it’ll take more time than they’re patient for. She hates it when people try to rush science. They’d rather have inaccurate results and data sooner than correct and precise answers because those answers take a few days longer. 

“Okay, you have to know what you’re doing,” Diana says, moving her hand as if to wave away the comment she shouldn’t have made. She can’t even read lab reports, so the professionalism of the lab staff is really none of her business. “Well, I would have hoped they give you something to wear over your clothing if you are operating with dangerous materials?” She quickly replaces the vial, not wanting to mess anything up. “Poland,” she comments, leaning against the nearest table and giving a sigh. “Okay, the thing is, they have really strict laws there on what certain post-humans can and cannot do. And I don’t know if you’re following the media there, but there’s this woman who won a pretty important election, and she has admitted to being post-human. But apparently, they need to check if the information she provided is correct before she can take office, which they apparently don’t have equipment available for at the moment because their authorities are overwhelmed. And at the same time, there’s a law on how soon after an election office has to be taken by the winner, otherwise they’ll just have an election again. So while I understand that....everything takes time, so you see why I can’t just tell them to be patient, yes? I felt that was sort of breakthrough when she won, you know?”

Mary was careful to tread lightly, knowing Diana was upset and not wanting to make her turn that anger around at her. “I think they just like to give tickets. Sure, you get the ticket but when some guy down the street is an hour late on the parking meter, traffic cops are nowhere to be found.” Yes, that was good, agreeing with her, acknowledging that she had a right to be angry and keep her anger towards someone else. “I ride a bicycle, but I have to admit I kind of hate cars.”

Diana nodded vehemently. “Exactly, and it’s always the people whose urgency was getting groceries who get lucky. Why is that?” She didn’t even have a driver’s license - money had been short for her back when she had gotten the license for the scooter, and somehow at some point it had seemed too late to change anything about that. Even though she had been thinking repeatedly that having access to a car would make things easier, getting one just for herself seemed like a waste as well. “So you don’t have a license at all, or you just prefer biking?”

Mary was only walking by but then she recognizes the voice and looks around to find the source. She sees Diana, but she’s not sure if she should acknowledge her judging by how upset she sounded. “Parking enforcement can be jerks. Do you know what it’s for?” She asks as she walks closer to her.

Diana takes a deep breath as she recognizes Mary. She likes to think she’s pretty good at keeping her anger under control at work but this here really feels like the straw on the camel’s back. “Yes, I shouldn’t have left it here. You can’t just lean a scooter against any wall here. But it just feels really illogical that ambulances can park wherever they want to, but if I have an emergency at work, it’s sorry, but you can’t park there.”

“You know, people do a lot of wrong things and a lot of things they wouldn’t have believed themselves capable of when they’re trying to survive. I’ve done both as well and I’ve never tried to deny that. And that’s part of me whatever I do. I get the concept of a name being random, you know. My ability sort of cuts me out for that.”

‘Where did you get that from? Answer me!’ The mother holds the crumpled-up five-dollar bill in her first and red spots have broken out on her cheeks over her anger at Diana’s silence. But the truth is too complicated for Diana to explain, how is she supposed to explain that they let her go into the section with the English-language books when no adult is allowed to, how is she supposed to explain that the tourists like to give her money for her answers when she doesn’t even know why they would believe her in the first place? She just showed them the way to the train station, and that’s what she tells to her mother, but the answer is still wrong, wrong because it doesn’t sound plausible.

“Don’t lie to me, Diana! We don’t lie. He doesn’t want us to lie!”

And anything not plausible a lie. And the worst she could have done. 

And yet later, once they are in the States, Diana learns to reproduce the parents’ stories which have stopped being plausible to her as soon as she’s hit a certain age, stories that have become true by the power of repetition and their association with survival. “My parents lots their cash card, I’ll pay for the class trip next week.” “I’m just visiting someone here, I don’t know where the people are who live here” and most of all: “Îmi pare rău, nu vorbesc engleză.” Because even though Ioan is much younger than her, Diana’s lies are the most convincing of them all. 

I don’t speak English.

“I didn’t really care.” Felix says simply with a shrug, not looking back as she does it. She keeps pulling out shirts and throwing them back in the bed, searching for a particular one that she’s pretty sure is clean. When she hears the name and section she works in, she remembers that that’s what she was doing before her little spill. “Almost done. Just had a speed bump finishing. Once I get a shirt on, I’ll get it done in a jiffy and you can be on your way.” She says this in an overly fake cheery tone, before make a noise of victory as she finds the shirt she’s looking for.  

Diana still stands with her back turned: “Maybe you should because others might be more insistent on professionalism than I am.” Which is supposed to be genuine advice based on something Diana believes she’s had to learn far too early, but with the stress of work comes out sounding annoyed. “They called me twice today, can you imagine? Like we aren’t hurrying as is. You spilled something?” God knows why she’s telling this to someone in the labs - maybe it’s the fact that she has so few contacts outside of work to speak of. As she waits, Diana glances at the vials and instruments on the shelves, picking one up at random. “Yay,” she merely comments. 

I hope you don’t mind me publishing this since this really is an interesting question and I have thought about this now so I figure I should share my thoughts on this. 

To begin with, I think that the amount of gesturing or changing mimic or any type of physical expression or emoting is a cultural phenomenon and not language-intrinsic. Like, don’t pin me down on this, but if language X needed a ton of gestures to accompany words just to accurately convey meaning, people probably would have adjusted language X’s lexicon over time to make it more able to express a range of things, making said gestures redundant. 

Instead, I think the extent of gesturing comes from the tasks that language has/can have/is not supposed to have in that particular culture. I always bring up Hofstede when talking about cultural comparisons but what can I do, I simply haven’t found a better system yet (plus Hofstede actually uses ways of speaking occasionally as illustrations of his cultural dimensions). Let’s take Italy (stereotypically ‘I speak with my entire body’-culture) and Finland (stereotypically ‘I don’t even really move my mouth when speaking’-culture). As per Hofstede, Italy is a masculine country. Masculine countries value success and triumph, the aim of an argument is winning, peole have every right to be proud of their achievements and you should strive to make yourself heard. Finland is a super-feminine culture. People in feminine cultures are humble and abhor bragging. The aim of arguments is reaching a compromise, and in conversations, people fairly take turns speaking. I think you can sort of see how these things could affect the way people express themselves. Or take uncertainty avoidance: Cultures with very high uncertainty avoidance (like Italy) do not deal with uncertainty well. Life is experienced as stressful and people release stress in their interactions. People are constantly tense and afraid of their plans not working out. This is not seen as a negative trait but as normal. In cultures with lower uncertainty avoidance (Finland scores medium here) people are less tense, and react in a more relaxed manner to things not working out or changes in their plans. At the same time, that resilience and calmness is expected and emotional outbursts might be seen as strange, and so on. 

(For people curious about this, here’s Hofstede on Italy and here’s Hofstede on Finland. Try this website, it’s so fascinating I could spend hours on it every day.)

The point I’m trying to make is that I think gestures are inherent to culture, not to language. The average language learner does not migrate culture when they learn a language - they learn grammar and lexicon, but very rarely do they lean interactional patterns like these from the get-go, unless the language is a second language for them (rather than a foreign language)

Let’s have some illustrations using my example - here is Matteo Renzi speaking English: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4blKB1_Cc54

I think we can all agree that he gestures quite a lot and expresses a lot via facial expression as well. At the same time, you could probably call him already ”partially migrated” because he probably appears in an international environment a lot. But I still thinks he’s an example of someone who probably learned English in an Italian setting - at Italian school, from an Italian teacher, and only started speaking to native speakers very late in his life, and even then does so only occasionally he didn’t “learn” to gesture like an English native speaker. 

By contrast, here is Pihla Viitala speaking Finnish (her mother tongue): https://youtu.be/Qri1ATZxyU4 and here is Pihla Viitala speaking English after returning from the States where she has been shooting an English-language movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFcX9r8w4M4. 

Yes, it’s still super noticeable that she’s not a native speaker and yes, she very clearly sounds Finnish. But I also find it noticeable that she speaks English differently from how she speaks Finnish because she moves her hands more and her face emotes more (yes, there might be better examples, e.g. a bilingual person who has grown up in two cultures, but these were the best examples I found for the moment, work with me here). Apart from having repeatedly worked in an international environment, she has also lived in English-speaking countries before, so I believe she might have picked up native-speaker interactional patterns there. 

What does this mean for omnilingualism? Working with my logic that omnilingualists learn foreign languages like second languages or even mother tongues, I think they are absolutely able to learn these interactional patterns, like gestures - like Pihla Viitala has with English, except omnilingualists obviously do so pretty much immediately and to perfection and can do so all their lives and not only while they are young. But I think they can only do so if they have learned said language in an authentic setting, or from someone who represents that particular culture. Say, an omnilingualist learning English in England (or solely from an English native speaker who has grown up/lived in the UK) would be able to adapt their gestures to the average English speaker’s, and would do so without thinking about it much. By contrast, say: Could Renzi teach English? I guess so. But if that omnilingualist learned English from him, and did so in Italy, they would probably learn to speak English accompanied by the Italian gestures that they have seen the language accompanied by with Renzi. Their ability still gives them the huge advantage that they pick up the gestures over a super-short period of time, but if they’re unlucky, it might be the wrong set of gestures. 

(Here’s where the “training” part comes in that I pointed out in that original post: You can have a smart omnilingualist who will think “Hm, so he’s originally Italian, I bet he doesn’t speak perfectly, let’s go learn from an actual English native-speaker as well”. But you can also have a dumb or lazy person who would say “yo okay I speak English now, let’s go”, and would not reflect on the larger context of what they have learned. I think in a lot of cases, whether someone is a good omnilingualist boils down to this reflection that allows you to assess whether a certain way of speaking is appropriate to a situation or the persona you’re trying to convey).

And here's yet another headcanon because I've been thinking about this quite intensively recently: Do omnilingualists have to be aware of what their brain is doing like how one would in a foreign language, or do omnilingualists’ brains use language without conscious effort like one would use one’s mother tongue? 

I feel like there are two basic ways in which you can conceive of omnilingualism:

In the first, you would conceive of the brain to work like Google Translate, basically. Someone uses a word or a grammatical form around you, your memory stores the information on its equivalent in another language (i.e. your mother tongue, because this is the first one you learned) and the information on where the word is typically found. 

The brain in speaking then automatically adapts expression to the situation based on the frequency information it has saved, like your brain is this gigantic text corpus (for people who don't know what corpora are in language study, it's basically a thing where you can look up a word and it will show you the contexts in which it is most often used, but usually no grammatical information. It looks something like this typically: