Since finishing my thesis on créolité in May (still need to work on revisions!), I’ve been reading a lot more articles about how language functions in given societies. In multi- or plurilingual communities in the US and abroad, languages often serve different functions. One may be the “prestige” dialect for news broadcasts and business, while the other is a “vernacular” used primarily with friends and family. Alternatively, one language can be used for communication within a group and the other for communication with other communities (a very common phenomenon for language minorities). Here at the lycée, we have 7 French speakers, 6 English speakers, 5 Spanish speakers, 2 German speakers, and 1 speaker each for Russian, Lithuanian, Arabic and Wolof. Obviously, a range of abilities is represented within each of these groups for the purposes of this post I’ll loosely define “speaker” as “able to understand and participate in a casual conversation.” (The difficulty in ascribing linguistic identities to people is the subject for another post entirely).
One of the fun aspects of living abroad is that every experience can be somewhat educational – including Friday night card games. We have regular games of Pitch and Blackjack (British version) with drinks and ice cream. Since some of the housemates don’t speak English that well, we use French. However, this weekend, we began using some Spanish at one point in the game. All of the non-Spanish speakers had stepped out of the room and A, the assistant from Nicaragua, encouraged us to communicate in her native language. It was a nice break before the others returned and the card game resumed. We didn’t completely switch out of Spanish, but used it amongst ourselves and French if we were addressing the larger group. Without consciously realizing it, we had established a separate language community within our own little group. This has been happening since Day One with the English speakers, but we have all made concentrated efforts to use French in group settings in order NOT to exclude others.
As for the card games, I came out in the bottom half each round. No Monte Carlo trips for me!
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