#3 Attempted Translingual Writing: Mi Familia
Mi familia,
narrowed down here to the people I live with, es bilingue, actually trilingue,
in English, Spanish, and Quichua, an indigenous language of Ecuador. Quichua is
related to Peruvian and Bolivian Quechua, the language of the Incas, but
without an e or an o, only a, I, and u. Hence, it’s Quichua with an i vs.
Quechua.
Of course,
only two family members actually speak all three languages fluently: my son
Mike, whose mother tongue is English, second language is Spanish, and third language
is Quichua; and his wife Jackie, an Ecuadorian from the 25% Quichua minority,
whose language strengths are opposite Mike’s: Quichua, her mother tongue
(although there’s been some attrition for her and her younger siblings),
Spanish her second language, and English her third. At home in the US, Mike and Jackie speak to
one another in Spanish about 70% of the time, 20% English, and 10% in Quichua. They keep up their Quichua by speaking to
Jackie’s parents and older siblings when they spend every summer and some
winter breaks in the Ecuadorian Amazon where they have built their own house. Mike
has also served as Quichua teacher in the Andean and Amazonian Field School. When they are in Ecuador they speak almost no
English except when Mike reads to Millie at night in English so she keeps up
with her reading. Jackie can sustain a Quichua monologue with her parents, but Mike might have to resort to Spanish. Quichua has the same relationship to Spanish in Ecuador as
Latin American Spanish does in the US—it’s experiencing attrition among the
younger generations. You might even say it’s an endangered language.
Mike and
Jackie have two kids, mis nietas; Millie (which means assertive or brava in
Quichua) is 8 years old and in the third grade; Lisan (meaning roof-thatching
material in Quichua, paja toquilla in Spanish) is a one-year old baby. Millie
is an English-dominant bilingual with Spanish as a heritage language, but she
doesn’t have much Spanish literacy yet. She can understand telenovelas though,
which I really admire because I have a hard time with them. Technically Spanish
is the language she heard first and therefore her first language, but it is not
her stronger one She can also understand
Quichua in context, especially when her mom is scolding her, for example, for
not eating enough good food (mishki mikuna) at meals and being addicted to
golosinas. The baby makes lots of
comments and converses with us, but her speech is mostly all gurgles and
intonation; she has no words yet because maybe she’s not sure which language’s
words to use? She does know dada for her
daddy, teta (Spanish for bottle), and baby, so two English words y una palabra
en español. Her mom always
talks to Lisan in Spanish; Mike and Millie seem to speak to her half Spanish
and half English.
My husband,
on the other hand, is a dedicated and stubborn English monolingual, who would
ideally prefer an English only policy at home because he is a control-freak,
but he’s learned how to tolerate the languages in contact. I have studied, but have forgotten most of my
Quichua, but can occasionally understand some of what Mike and Jackie are
saying, especially negative or judgmental comments, often so that the rest of
us won’t understand what they are saying.
It’s a secret language that doesn’t always work for them; I remember
some Quichua because I lived with a Quichua family for a couple of months once, studied
it there and on Skype in the US and in Quito, and have been to the Ecuadorian Amazon about five times.
When I talk to Jackie in English, she always answers me in Spanish—this has
been going on for 11 years. I usually
code-switch, empezando mi comunicación con ella en español, pero switching to English when I run into a snag because
deep down, I’m lazy. Now I only use Spanish
with Millie when we are reading in English and she asks me what a word, say
"anxiety," means in English and if I know the equivalent in Spanish—ansiedad--that
she might or should know, I’ll provide it as a synonym along with English
synonyms like nervousness. When she was small, she was a serial monolingual and when she came back from Ecuador every August, she was slow to regain English so I would speak with her in Spanish until mid September.
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