#multilingual characters

As some of you (who read my reviews) already might have noticed, I am bilingual myself. Sadly, multilingual people do not get represented well a lot in media, so yeah... some advice for writing them. It will certainly not capture every aspect of being bilingual, but it might give you a first idea.

There are different ways to be multilingual.

People who grew up with more than one native language will almost certainly speak all of them fluently. Most of them have two (their parents’ language and their country’s language, or the language of one parent and of the other) but I also know a family where the children grew up with four native languages (the mother speaks Portuguese, the father Italian, they talk to each other in English, and live in Germany, where the children grew up)

Some people speak two or more languages, but cannot write all of them - especially when the alphabets are not the same, for example English and Russian or Arabic. This affects mostly children of immigrants.

Some people can read and write a language quite well, but are not good at speaking or listening comprehension. Those people often learned the language at school with a bad teacher or by themselves with books and apps.

Some people, again mostly children and grandchildren of immigrants, can read and understand a language, but don’t speak it. Mostly, the parents decided to not teach the child the language, and they learned it themselves by listening to their parents talk to relatives.

Confidence can play a big role in this. I understand the dialect of my grandparents without a problem, but I would never try to speak it. I can’t even imagine forming those words with my mouth, and it would sound terrible.

People who learnt a language at school can reach completely different levels of that language. I started learning English at age 6 and am completely fluent by now. Other people in my class barely understand more than easy conversations in English.

Most people will do their very best to hide their accents.

If the person is not a native speaker, but fluent in a language, their accent will be a mix of whatever they can find at the moment. Media is a big influence in that.

Since I watch more British than American TV, my accent sounds a bit british, too. When I watched “Call the Midwife”, I often even unconciously copy the accent of Laura Main. I don’t know why her, but my brain just liked it, I guess.

Also, we will use words, phrases and sentence structures from so many different sources.

People who learnt English through the internet (aka most of the younger generation) will have problems to not use swear words when actually being in Great Britain or America. They just do not have the weight for us, since on the internet they get used all the time.

I have never in my whole live heard a multilingual person switch languages mid-sentence on accident.

We will do it on purpose, though, if the other part of the conversation understands both languages.

Also, we will maybe say the word in another language if we forget the meaning.

Multilingual people that are not natives in the language they usually use in their day-to-day life (immigrants, for example) will often count and calculate in their native language. For example at a restaurant where they calculate the price in their head, they will probably do it in their native language.

Conversations with multiple multilingual people can be very different.

If one person only understands one language, they will probably try to include that person by speaking the language they share. I can say from experience, though, that if eight native Germans that have varying levels of English language skills will sit together with one introverted Turkish person with medium English language skills, they will go back to German quite often. It’s not nice, but sadly natural.

In general, people will try to speak in their native language if possible. You can take two people that share a native language and also both speak English and let them walk around in London - they will probably speak their native language, no matter how well they speak English.

Multilingual people that share multiple languages will switch on purpose when they feel like they can express their thoughts better in the other language.

Many languages have taken words from English.

Especially young people take a lot of English filler words and phrases (or insults) and put them into their native language. “Help, mein Deutschlehrer überfordert uns mit Hausaufgaben, like, what the fuck, glaubt der wir haben nichts besseres zu tun?” Is a sentence you would absolutely hear from a German student.

Many young people that don’t live in Great Britain or America will not use these words and phrases around their parents. First of all, our parents often do not speak English as well as we do, but more importantly, our parents do not like us using English instead of ur native language.

Many professions nowadays have an English name, I don’t know why. What used to be a Hausmeister is now a Facility Manager. The longer the English phrase for your profession, the more likely you will not be taken serious by older people.

Once you have more than one native language, you learn new languages more easily, for some reason. I know a girl that speaks 7 languages, at age 20, 5 of them fluently.

"You speak English quite well” or phrases like that said by a native speaker can be the best compliment ever, or more uncomfortable than nice.

When you are translating for your family and hear that sentence, it is super nice.

When you are only speaking English, that sentence indicates that your accent is still heavy. You do not pass as a native speaker.

When you are a native speaker, that sentence is just weird.

You can indentify the people that learnt a language through reading by giving them words that are pronounced untypically.

For years I thought “precious” (a word that is heavily used on the internet, especially in fan communities, but not that much in school) was pronounces pree-ci-ous. I was shocked when I heard it for the first time.

There are situations where even quite fluent non-native speakers will not be able to understand or talk in their second language.

The first few minutes after standing up (although that can change when the person is really fluent)

When they are in great pain

When they are in great fear

When they are under great stress

Sometimes even when they did not use that language in the last few days

Translating in realtime is terribly hard and will fuck your head. When I was on holiday with my parents, I often had to read the information signs in museums or at sights for them and translate. It’s easier when you first read the text and then summarise it in another language, but trying to translate it sentence by sentence is painful and you will question your abilities in both languages.

This gets just more horrible when under pressure. While we were in England, a visibly stressed young woman came to us and asked us if we had 5 pounds, she had lost some money she needed to take the train back home. I repeated her sentence to my father. In English.

Also sorry to the poor worker at McDonalds who I talked English to while speaking German to my English exchange student.

People abroad will absolutely become friends with every person that they hear speaking their language. While being in London, we overheard a man talking to his son in German about taking a photo, and I immediately asked (in German) if I should take a photo of both of them together. We talked for fifteen minutes after that, even though we had never met before.

On that note, in tourist citys the people that try to sell things to tourists usually speak a lot of languages enough to say things like “Oh, I speak a bit of [language], too, but not well. Didn’t pay enough attention in school. You look like nice people.” Makes it so easy to sell things.

Idioms are literally hell. Best example has been in the news currently, with Greta Thunberg literally translating a Swedish idiom in a tweet not realising that “putting someone against a wall” means something totally different in English. 

Idioms will be hell for you as a writer, too, though, as long as you do not fluently speak both of the languages or at least one of them is fictional, because it’s quite easy to mess up if you use idioms that jus aren’t normally used by people speaking that language.

Bilingual puns are amazing, but sadly rare.

When they curse in their mother tongue during sex or say things like “look at me” or “beautiful” in their language

Anonymous asked:

Could you give us some tips of writing characters that speak more than one language please? Thanks!

Well there, Nony, in truth this is something I’ve been wanting to talk about for approximately forever. Be prepared for a lot of references to my current project here, because in Smoke Shadows knowing more than one language is commonplace for most of my characters.

Give your character a reason to know more than one language. This can be of any degree of importance, you just have to know it. If you’re stuck on ideas, here are a few pulled from my life and from Smoke Shadows. Keep in mind when reading these that, like learning everything else, any reason to increase your knowledge is a good one.

I started learning Spanish because it was a requirement in my school, starting in second grade.

I started learning German because I had an interest in it.

Jax started learning Brateo (the world’s universal language) because he needed it to communicate in the complex.

Ryker started learning every language he knows because of an interest or because of a friend who could speak it.

Know your world’s languages. Know them backwards, forwards, sideways, and upside-down. Also, know your characters. Know their native language, know what languages they’re learning and what levels they’re at in terms of proficiency. Just like you would keep track of your own learning, keep track of your characters’ learning as well.

Familiarize yourself with the mistakes they frequently make in their second language. Then, write your character working to fix those mistakes in their learning.

Know the obscure rules of your language (bonus points if nobody really knows why). A good example of this is the classic “i before e except after c”.

Determine what would constitute as the next few “big steps” in their learning process. Maybe it’s putting together a well-structured sentence, maybe it’s remembering the gender of a word. Maybe it’s remembering the alphabet in order and the different spelling rules. Write down the next five “big steps” and how long they should take.

Determine your sources of immersion. Let’s make this clear right now: if you’re learning a language but don’t get any actual exposure to it along the way, your journey is going to be a lot tougher. Figure out what types of media your character likes to start.

If they like music, determine how your character can access music in another language. (Maybe there’s an equivalent to Spotify?)

Whatever they prefer to use, even in today’s world there’s something for everyone. If your story is set in today’s world, consider things like Spotify, Netflix, and YouTube to help you out. Don’t discredit books or podcasts in other languages, either, and remember that there is media specifically meant for self-teaching language.

Remember that there are things polyglots don’t do. We can make a lot of mistakes, yeah, but there are definite things that have been written that usually don’t occur naturally. A few of these things include, but are not limited to:

Switching languages in the middle of a conversation (unless they are absolutely sure their conversational partner can keep up and it’s been established as appropriate).

Talk to someone in a language foreign to the other person. If their conversational partner only knows English, for example, your character shouldn’t start a conversation with them in French because they “forgot”. Unless it’s on purpose, and they’re trying to annoy the other person.

Always have motivation. Some days we don’t practice at all, and work on it the next day. Sometimes we don’t practice our third languages as much as we should (what no I’m not throwing shade at myself stop that), and it’s not always because we don’t have time.

Always switch seamlessly between languages. If it’s one we don’t have much experience in, it may take a few exchanges to get things going smoothly. Even if it’s a language we’re fluent in, some days the language will switch and it will still take a few exchanges for our brains to go, “oh, this is what we’re doing now.”

Inversely, remember that there are things polyglots do do. Sometimes when I’m reading multilingual characters, there are a few things I would add to make it a bit more realistic. Some of these things include, but are not limited to:

Switch easily between languages, specifically in reading, writing, and listening. I know, this one contradicts one of the don’ts, but this is important. Reading, writing, and listening are a whole lot easier than speaking, so we sometimes find it easier to eavesdrop in a different language than to hold a conversation.

Pat themselves on the back often. If someone walks past speaking in a language we’re learning and we understand every word, that’s the kind of pride that’s hard to ignore.

Forget words in different languages. The other day, I forgot the English word for “keys”. The first word for it that came to me was “llaves” (which is Spanish for keys) and I had to correct myself when I threw it into conversation as if it was normal. *This occurrence is probably more common between second, third, etc languages than with a person’s native language.*

Get addicted to too many new languages. It’s a slippery slope, and I just had to include this one because of Ryker. He started off with Brateo, and by this point he’s learned every modern language in the Colonies (there are only ten) and if moving onto the ancient ones.

So, there’s a lot to take in here. As a polyglot myself, I wanted to make this post as helpful as I could. Thanks so much for asking!

I’m in no way an expert in any parts of those things (being bilingual, being Cuban, growing up in the 1940s, or going to a Catholic girl’s school). You can check out my bilingual characters tag as well as my language tag, which might hopefully collectively be of some use to you.

My five years of middle school were spent at a school that was about 65% Hispanic, and I saw that, a lot of the times, a lot of them would speak Spanish to each other. Some teachers weren’t particularly a fan of that, and I’m guessing they would be even less of a fan of that in a 1940s Catholic girl’s school.

I’m not really clear on if your character is growing up in a Spanish-speaking household or a Spanish (aka people from Spain) household, but I’m guessing Cuban Spanish is a bit different from Spain-Spanish, so there could be some tension there if she’s growing up in a household that speaks Spain-Spanish. (This is just a guess, so someone please correct me if I’m wrong.)

I genuinely know nothing about Cuban migration to the US pre-1959 diaspora  and so I have no idea how people from Cuba were viewed in the US at that time, and answers to questions like this would differ depending on where she lives, but consider where she would feel comfortable speaking Spanish to, who she would feel comfortable speaking Spanish to, and whether there are any other Spanish speakers in her school. I suggest thinking also about whether she or other members of her family are literate in Spanish. I know a lot of the students I went to school with weren’t particularly literate in Spanish, even if they were fluent/native speakers.

Consider also how fluent and/or literate her family is in English. That would likely depend pretty heavily on how long they’ve been in the US, though I have no idea if English was being taught in Cuba at that time.

I’ve been thinking about jotting down some of my observations about speaking multiple languages for a while now and I thought, hey, maybe it could be useful for writing people and dialogue (not sure if it would, though). But I must add a disclaimer: these observations are from my own personal experiences, so they might be inaccurate, incomplete, etc. Please feel free to add to this post if there’s anything important that I left out, and do let me know if I should change some stuff. Thanks!

Well, here goes nothing. 

So, I am a language nerd, and I love trying to figure out what languages characters I love speak. So why not share some of these ideas? To start us off - Aleksandar of Hohenberg in the Leviathan trilogy. 

In Goliath,  they specify that Alek speaks six languages. Some of these are obvious, others less so. 

1. German Obviously his first language. 

2. English And he’s pretty good at it too.

3. French Which we learn when it turns out that he doesn’t know Russian. When asked if he knows Russian (again in Goliath), he says that “all the Russians I ever met spoke French”. (French was a common language among Russian aristocracy and at court.) He also acts as a translator for the Russian captain.  

4. Latin Knowing your own family’s Latin motto off by heart hardly proves that you know Latin, but he can judge (supposedly by Dr Barlow’s pronunciation) that she knows Latin in Leviathan. Even if this bit of information was not in the book, I would have put Latin on this list, as Classical languages were a central part of an elite education in the 1910s. In addition to this, Alek is Catholic, so Latin would be central in terms of religion (the Catholic Church didn’t start using vernaculars in mass until the 1960s).

5. Classical Greek It would be pretty unlikely to find a young man of the European aristocracy who did not know Greek in the 1910s. As with Latin, it was seen as essential to your learning. The quality of both his Latin and his Greek can be up for debate, but there is nothing pointing to that he wouldn’t be good at them. 

A side-note on the fact that he says that he speaks six languages. You could exclude Latin and Greek from this, as they are not spoken, and suggest two modern languages, but English, French, Latin and Greek constitute a very well-rounded curriculum for a young prince. It’s pretty common that people use the term “speak a language” to mean “know a language”, and Alek makes this observation to illustrate (to himself) that he’s pretty useless, which Latin and Greek might seem to be if you’re on an airship. 

Also, Alek would have done more than just learn to read Latin and Greek. He would have been trained in composition, e.g. translating speeches into Latin and/or Greek, and more likely than not also verse composition. Image Alek having to write love elegies in Latin. Isn’t that a lovely thought? 

6. Hungarian This is the odd one out, both in terms of linguistics (Hungarian is part of the Finno-Ugric language family, while all the languages above are Indo-European) and in terms of evidence. There is no indication that Alek knows Hungarian, but it is never indicated elsewhere that he speaks any other language. So why Hungarian? The Austro-Hungarian empire was surprisingly accepting of the many languages spoken within its borders. It is not a question of German as a majority language with several smaller languages in the minority. According to a 1910 census, 23% spoke German as their first language, and 20% spoke Hungarian as their first language (source). Other languages that were spoken were Czech, Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak... I’m not a hundred per cent sure that German-speaking aristocrats would bother learning Hungarian, but in Alek’s case, it seems like a real possibility. After all, his father was keen on reform, and seems to have wanted to keep on the right side of his subjects. And of course there was Hungarian-speaking aristocracy, so this is not only a question of status.