language choice

8/3/2019 Language Choice

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Language Choice

J. K. Buda

Although most of the world's population can speak only one language, a sizeable minority is able

to communicate in two or more. Of the world's 750 million speakers of English, for example,

only 300 million use it as their first or native tongue. The remaining 450 million speak it as a

second or third language. Whenever speakers of two or more languages come together, a

decision has to be made about which of these languages is to be used. It may be thought that the

factors affecting choice of language are few and simple, but such is not the case. Often no

satisfactory explanation can be given as to why speakers make the choices they do.

Sociolinguists have long been fascinated by the phenomenon of bilingualism and the complex

language switching patterns that often accompany it. Many bilingual speakers are able to switch

from language to language with ease, sometimes in mid-sentence. Attempts to define such

patterns have not, however, met with much success. Research reports on the subject are cluttered

with such obscure terms as 'diglossia', 'domain', 'code-switching' and 'ethnolinguistic vitality', but

reduced to the level of a layman's understanding, the less than original conclusion would seem to

be that choice of language is dictated primarily by the milieu in which the speaker finds himself.

It is only fair to say that research into this subject has been hampered by the inherent

unreliability of the information-gathering methods employed, the two most common being

analysis of tape-recorded speech events, and questionnaires in which subjects are asked about

their linguistic behaviour patterns.


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The problem with the first of these methods is that the presence of a researcher, or even the

suspicion that the conversation is being recorded, is usually sufficient to affect spontaneity.

Covert recording of speech events is of course possible, but severely limits the range of available

speech event environments.

Questionnaires, likewise, are inherently unreliable. Subjects may not be fully conscious of their

own language usage patterns, or may wish to portray them in a socially or culturally favourable

light. In every language survey of India, for example, two or three thousand people (0.0004% of

the population) invariably claim that Sanskrit is their first language.

Most research has focused on bilingual subjects, but true bilingualismnative-speaker fluency

in both languagesis not a prerequisite for the exercise of language choice. Anyone who can

speak two or more languages well enough to communicate his or her thoughts and emotions is

free (if circumstances allow) to exercise choice.

Indeed it may be possible to gain a few more insights into the phenomenon of language choice

by deliberately not focusing on bilingual subjects, and by widening the scope of investigation to

include all polyglotsthe term 'polyglot' here being used in its widest sense, meaning someone

who can speak several languages, though not necessarily with the same degree of fluency.

It is with this in mind that the following comments are offered, not as definitive conclusions

based on exhaustive and systematic research, but as a few tentative conjectures drawn from

personal experiences and observations.

It may help to clarify the problem if we begin by suggesting that language choice is subject to

two categories of factors: preferences and constraints.


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has said. Nevertheless she chooses to reply in English. For several minutes the

conversation continues in two languages, the customer speaking in Japanese, and the

assistant persisting in a use of English.

3. On a flight from Honolulu to Tokyo, two young Oriental ladies are discussing, inelementary accented Japanese, the friends they will meet and the shopping they will do

when they get to Japan. Their conversation is interrupted when a cabin attendant comes

along and asks them, in English, whether they would care for some light refreshment.

Both of them answer in fluent unaccented American English, and after the cabin

attendant has gone to attend to their order, they switch back to Japanese.

A simple single-element preference/constraint model cannot fully explain the language choices

illustrated in these three examples.

It does not always follow that a bilingual or polyglot will prefer to speak his native language, or

will feel most comfortable using it. Some polyglots prefer, for a number of reasons, to use their

second or third language. The children of immigrants, for example, often feel antipathy towards

the language of their parents' homeland, and prefer to use that of their host country, even though

they may not yet be completely fluent in that language. As they grow older, the language of the

host country usually becomes dominant, leading in some instances to a partial or even complete

loss of the heritage tongue. Small children are particularly sensitive to peer rejection, and those

of ethnic minorities are prone to over-emphasize their conformity with group standards of dress,

behaviour, and language. In many cases, however, the period of late adolescence brings a new

awareness of cultural and ethnic identity, and the mother tongue may acquire a strong symbolic

value.


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The sons of, for example, Sikh immigrants to the United Kingdom or Canada may, during their

years in elementary or middle school, strive to suppress their ethnic and religious identity in the

interests of group solidarity, but a growing awareness of discrimination may eventually lead

them to turn away from a society which they feel is not prepared to accept them, and seek to

redefine their identity by a return to the dress, religion, and language of their parents or

grandparents. In the case of Sikh males this would entail adopting the distinctive Sikh unshorn

hair style, the wearing of, among other things, a turban and steel bracelet, and the preferential use

of the Punjabi language.

The children of Caribbean immigrants may exhibit the same pattern of rejection and subsequent

espousal of a specific variety of English, as opposed to a discrete language. They may

consciously suppress the British, Canadian, or American speech patterns they have acquired over

the yearsfrom birth in the case of those born in the host countryand attempt instead to

mimic those of the Caribbean island from which their family came.

The same reaction can also be seen among the children of groups which do not experience the

same degree of discrimination as Asian, African, or Caribbean minorities living in Western

countries. The children of East European immigrantsusually indistinguishable from the

community at largemay still feel the attraction of their heritage culture as they grow older,

not because they feel rejected by the society in which they have been raised, but because of the

narcissistic appeal of identifying with a disparate group.

Assuming that the two ladies in the third of our examples were second- or third-generation

Japanese living in Hawaii (a not unreasonable assumption in the circumstances), it may have


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been this kind of cultural and ethnic awareness that led them to conduct their conversation in a

language which was clearly not their strongest.

Some polyglots may feel that one or other of the languages they speak (not necessarily the

dominant one) is better suited to the expression of certain ideas or emotions, and they may prefer

to choose that language whenever the situation warrants. Certain languages may be perceived as

'soft', better able to express emotions and feelings, whilst other 'hard' languages may be thought

more capable of expressing concepts and ideas.

Language choice may also be affected by utilitarian considerations. A speaker may feel that use

of a particular language will place him in an advantageous position either within a group or

within a wider social context. If his antagonists in a discussion or argument are less fluent than

he is, this will clearly serve to give him a valuable edge. If the use of a specific language is

perceived as socially advantageousthe use of English in India is an obvious examplethis

would be another factor contributing to its preferential use.

In some cases a speaker might perceive an advantage in the use of a language with which he is

less than familiarto feign ignorance, for instance, or to cut short an unwelcome dialogue.

The perceived advantage does not have to be vis--vis other individuals. It may be for purely

personal considerations that a person chooses to speak a particular language. A student of a

foreign language may prefer to use that language whenever possible, with the sole intention of

improving his ability. This may have been the reason behind the persistent unilateral use of

English by the shop assistant in the second example.


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We have already mentioned the most common constraint upon the use of a specific language,

that of congruity. Communication is only possible if both speakers share the same language, and

there is little to be gained from addressing someone in a language which they do not understand.

The only possible exception might be the early stages of direct-method language teaching.

A related constraint is that of linguistic etiquette. There is an almost universal taboo upon the use

of a language which might exclude one or more members of a group from a discussion, even if

the subject of that discussion has no direct relevance to that person or persons. A group of

several French speakers may, for example, be discussing plans for a farewell party for one of

their workmates who is about to retire. Another person, one who does not work at the same

company, who does not know the gentleman in question, and who will not be invited to the

party, joins the group. This newcomer, moreover, does not speak French. It is now incumbent

upon the group to continue their discussion in a language which that person can understand

English or German, perhaps.

Having to change the language of the discussion to one which may be a second or third language

for a majority of the members can, of course, have a stultifying effect upon the course of the

discussion, making it more difficult to express thoughts and ideas. In this case, however, the

exclusion constraint takes precedence over the language preference of the group majority. In

extreme cases the requirement for a common language might force all of the speakers to adopt

second or third languagesif the newcomer in the example given above were a native speaker

of Arabic, for example.

The search for a common language may sometimes prove unsuccessful, and a group will have to

choose the language which allows the participation of the greatest number of people. Before


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switching to that language, however, it is considered polite to apologize to the person or persons

who will be excluded, and to obtain their consent.

The first of the three examples given earlier would appear to be a good illustration of this

particular constraint. The members of the group at the party were all of Polish descent, and

Polish was the language they chose to speak among themselves. When they became aware of the

presence of their hostess, they felt obliged to continue their conversation in English, opening the

way for her possible participation. The interesting variation shown in this example is the way the

conversation continued in English for some time after the hostess had moved on to chat with

other guests. Most of the members of the group had lived in the United Kingdom for many years,

and were fluent in English. There was no linguistic pressure to switch back to Polish at the

earliest possible opportunity, and perhaps some of the members may have felt that such a hasty

return would have been rather indecorous.

One other constraint deserves to be mentioned. Various psychological factors sometimes

preclude an easy and spontaneous switch to another language. It may be that two or more

speakers have become accustomed to conversing among themselves in a particular language, and

feel extremely uncomfortable having to change to another. Yet other speakers may find the act of

language-switching difficult in itself. Whereas some bilinguals or polyglots can shift with

consummate ease between languages, even in mid-sentence, there are those whose language

choice is reactionary, a reflexive response to the language in which they are addressed, or the

language environment in which they find themselves.

One interesting example of the latter constraint was furnished by an Italian consular official who

once told the author that he could speak twelve languages, and a thirteenth which he refused to


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use. That thirteenth was Serbo-Croatian, a language he had been forced to use on summer visits

to elderly maiden aunts in Yugoslavia, and which for him was forever associated with some of

the most dreary and unpleasant memories of his childhood.

At the end of the Second World War, the diplomat was employed by the Italian national railway,

and given the task of coordinating the repatriation of thousands of Allied soldiers. One day a

Polish soldier visited his office, and the conversation was conducted in German, the language

they had used on many previous occasions. After several minutes of discussion, the Polish

soldier remarked that he had heard that the Italian could speak Polish, and asked him if this were

true. The official confirmed that he could indeed speak Polish, and after a moment's hesitation,

the conversation continued in German. Several minutes later the Polish soldier once again asked

if the Italian could really speak Polish, and the answer was the same. Towards the end of the

conversation the soldier repeated his question for a third time, clearly dissatisfied with he

answers he was getting. When the Italian answered 'yes' for the third time, the Polish soldier

asked him rather bluntly, "Well then, why don't you?" The Italian replied, "Because you're

speaking German, that's why."

From what we have said so far, it should be clear that a large number of factors influence

language choice, and many factors may work either with or against each other, producing a

complex web of interaction which makes the task of describing any one language-choice event

extremely difficult. The suggested division of factors into two categories may be of some help,

but it must be recognized that some factors may exhibit the characteristics of both preferences

and constraints, making it impossible to locate them satisfactorily in either of the two categories.

It is difficult to determine at which point a negative preference an intense dislike of a


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particular language, for examplebecomes a constraint. A positive constraint, likewise, may

exhibit some of the characteristics of a preference. A more useful approach might be to try and

plot these factors somewhere along an axis which represents a continuous gradation between

positive forces directing choice towards a specific language, and negative forces directing choice

away from that language.

Finally, it needs to be recognized that language choice events do not exist in a vacuum.

Language is, after all, a medium for interaction and communication between people, and the use

of language will reflect the infinite complexity of human relationships.

Reprinted from Otsuma Review, No. 24, 1991


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Introduction

Studies of intercultural communication have all too often taken misunderstandings as their

central category (Ehlich 1996: 925 for an overview). By contrast, I will focus on the innovative

potential of intercultural communication in the following. Cross-cultural communication is just

as often characterized by success and leads to satisfactory understanding as intracultural

communication. This is particularly true where cross-cultural communication is at the same time

intimate communication. While the use of a common language does not guarantee mutual

understanding, the absence of a common language does not necessarily prevent it, either. Novels

and plays frequently explore the idea of an understanding that goes beyond language. In Max


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Frisch's playAls der Krieg zu Ende war(1949), "After the end of the war",1for instance, a

Russian officer in 1945 Berlin falls in love with a local woman. Neither speaks the other's

language, and they have no lingua franca.2Nevertheless, the lovers feel that their understanding

is perfect because they can never tell each other a lie. The officer feels that Agnes is the only

individual who understands him. He values their conversations without a common language

much more highly than those with other Russian speakers:

Excerpt 1: Frisch 1995 (11949): 249

Stepan /Dich verstehe ich. Ich verstehe nicht die Deutschen, sie sind nicht ehrlich zu uns.

Und unsere eigenen Genossen verstehe ich nicht. Der Krieg hat sie zu Tieren gemacht./

["I can understand you. I can't understand the Germans, they aren't honest with us. And I

can't understand my own comrades. The war has turned them into animals."]

Understanding without a common language is also a recurrent theme in contemporary

advertising: the product is fashioned as a means of communication in the absence of another

common code. A TV spot for Jacobs Krnung, a brand of coffee, for instance, which was

broadcast on German TV in early 1999, starts with a group of Bedouin riders spotting car tracks

in the desert sand. The leader utters a battle cry and they break into a gallop. The camera changes

to a European family who are enjoying a coffee break in the shadow of their car, surrounded by

mountains of sandy desert. The distant sound of hooves bodes evil and tension runs high as they

stare in fear when they see the Bedouins charging down a hill. The father protectively kisses the

head of his little boy and his daughter, a young woman, looks at her mug of coffee in a moment

of indecision and then gets up, faces the riders, and offers her mug with both her hands to the

leader of the Bedouins. At this gesture, the attack comes to a halt, the woman and the Bedouin
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prince smile at each other shyly and take turns sipping coffee from the mug. Relief. And the

comment of the voice-over says: "Jacobs Krnung und wir verstehen uns." (Jacobs Krnung and

well understand each other). The product has become the means of communication in a

potentially dangerous intercultural encounter.

In Ervin-Tripp's study of the language use of Japanese-American couples, some informants also

reported that they had no common language or had not had a common language when they first

met. Instead, they spoke "the language of the eyes." (Ervin-Tripp 1968: 202). In 1919 Zara

Witkin, an Californian engineer and socialist, fell in love with the Russian actress Emma

Tsesarskaya when he saw her on screen in Village of Sin. He went to Moscow to find her and

they became lovers although she spoke no English and he only a few words of Russian. Another

couple without a common language, the Russian actress Zoya Fyodorova, and the American

naval attach Jackson Rogers Tate communicated with the help of a dictionary. Their story is

particularly tragic as they had met in Russia during World War II and were separated four 43

years because of the Cold War, eight of which Zoya spent in prison, their daughter being raised

with an aunt (both accounts from Visson 1998). So, a romantic attachment may transcend

linguistic confines not only in fiction or advertising but also in "real life".

There can be no doubt that understanding without a common language will be the exception

rather than the norm. However, accounts like the above drew my attention to a group of highly

successful intercultural communicators: intercultural couples. My assumption that intercultural

couples must be successful intercultural communicators is based on findings from social

psychology that show that - in Western post-industrial societies - communication difficulties are

the major cause of marital unhappiness and marital failure (e.g. Fitzpatrick 1990: 433; Sternberg


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1988). A 'good spouse' is no longer just a good housekeeper, breadwinner, or sexual partner but a

good communicator. It follows that stable intercultural couples must be good intercultural

communicators. My research project on the language practices of intercultural couples is thus

based on the assumption that an understanding of their communication patterns will improve our

understanding of what makes intercultural communication successful, instead of fraught with

misunderstandings.

In the following I will discuss my notions of intercultural communication and intercultural

couples, I will look at methods for the study of couple talk, and I will discuss the language

choices of these couples.

2 Intercultural communication and intercultural couples

In the last two decades an approach has been gaining ground in gender studies, which does not

seek to explain assumed differences in the verbal behavior of men and women to result from

male dominance but rather from cultural differences between men and women (Freemann and

McElhinny 1996: 231ff for an overview). It is argued that men and women are socialized into

different cultures because, as children, they play in different same-sex groups (Maltz and Borker

1982: 202ff). In this sense, each and every heterosexual couple would be an intercultural

couple.3While no one can be happy with such a comprehensive category, the problem affects all

studies in intercultural communication: our notions of intercultural communication are

presumably based upon the speech community. However, just as linguists are notoriously unable

to distinguish between a language and a dialect, we cannot define a speech community

unambiguously either (Andrews 1996: 397ff). The days of traditional areal speech communities
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have long been dead and gone. At least in urbanities, where speech communities are divided

along the lines of gender, regional and national origin, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation,

or interest groups. "There is then a sense in which all communication is cross-cultural" (Romaine

1994: 29). A German-American couple whose conversation I taped made this point when the

wife asked her husband:

Excerpt 2: d16, ll. 378-3834

Susan5: do you THINK, that WE have more to deal with, being bicultural, American and

German, as ... a couple ... a Hamburger, and a Bavarian? ... do you think there's more

cultural differences? more difficulties with us? or more with a- a German couple? a

Northern German? and a Bavarian? ...

It is not clear where intra-cultural communication ends and intercultural communication begins,

particularly so as sociolinguists have begun to refute essentialist notions of identity (e.g.

Crawford 1995; Ehrlich 1997; Kramsch 1998). Cultural or national identity may be salient in one

interaction but not in another, or at one point of an interaction but not at another. Participants

may construct themselves and be co-constructed by others at one point as, say, people from

Munich, at another as Bavarians, at another as Germans, at another as Europeans, at another as

Westerners etc. And at many points of an interaction other aspects of a persons identity will

override cultural/national identity. Instead, gender, ethnicity, social class, professional status,

status differences etc. may be foregrounded. Thus, an interaction between a person whose first

language is English and one whose first language is German is not intercultural communication

by the mere fact that there is an American and a German talking. It is only intercultural

communication if the participants choose to focus on the cultural/national aspects of their
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identities, i.e. the "interculturalness" of a given interaction ? or its "intraculturalness" for that

matter ? is interactively constructed. Instead of intercultural communication we may just as well

be looking at a conversation between two university lecturers, two parents, a member of the

armed forces and a civilian, or between wife and husband. "Each of us is simultaneously a

member of multiple discourse systems which make competing demands on us for membership

and identity." (Scollon and Scollon 1995: 15). Instead of "looking locally" (Eckert and

McConnel-Ginet 1992) which aspects of a persons social identity are being made salient in a

given interaction, intercultural communication research has too often been driven by ideas of an

essentialist otherness (e.g. Andersen 1997). Essentialist models

portray [the Other - I.P.] in terms of fundamental attributes which are conceived as

internal, persistent, and generally separate from the ongoing experience of interaction

with the daily socio-political contexts of ones life. (Bohan 1993: 7)

Just as research on language and gender has moved away from a focus on difference ("womens

language vs. mens language") to an interest in the social construction of a gendered identity

(e.g. Crawford 1995, Talbot 1998, Romaine 1999), I am suggesting that a social construction

approach would also offer new insights in the field of intercultural communication. Instead of

asking how Germans and Americans, for instance, use different communication styles, it might

be much more useful to ask how cultural and national identity is done, i.e. how it is constructed

in ongoing interactions.

Communication between partners in a romantic dyad may even be far too personal to be

considered intercultural communication at all. Is interpersonal communication all there is to it?

Maren, another participant in my study, makes this point when she says:


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Excerpt 3: gb2, ll. 354-356

Maren but then I mean- I don't think that we saw each other as an Englishman and a

German woman. it was just two people. I mean, it was Dennis and Maren.

Again, it is helpful to consider the notion of the social construction of identity. Personality is one

factor in the construction of a persons identity along with gender, ethnicity, status etc. While

personality affects all interactions of an individual it is never the sole contributing factor (Scott

and Spencer 1998).

The concepts 'intercultural communication' and 'intercultural couples' have been shown to be

fuzzy. For the purposes of the present study, I only collected data from self-identified

intercultural couples, specifically Anglo-German couples (see the section on "Sample and

informants" below). The experimental research design (see the section on "Methods" below)

served to make cultural allegiance salient and explicitly positioned participating couples as

"intercultural." A positioning only a few couples explicitly resisted (see Excerpt 2 and Excerpt 3

above).

Couples with different cultural backgrounds are not the marginal minority one might think.

Although EU figures on marriages between partners of different linguistic backgrounds are not

available, even if one takes national origin as an indicator (Harding and Riley 1986: 23), the

figures for Germany show that binational marriages have been on the increase over the last

decades (Statistisches Bundesamt 1997: 22). In 1960, 3.7% (total: 19,458) of all the couples who

got married in the Federal Republic were between a German and non-German national. By 1995

their number had risen to 13.5% (50,686). Marriages between German nationals and nationals of

the two major English-speaking countries, the US and the UK, fell during the same period (see


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Table 1), which is due to the changing role of the British and American forces in Germany, and

to changing immigration patterns.

Table 1: Marriages between German (1960-1990 FRG), and UK and US nationals in

Germany (tabled from: Statistisches Bundesamt 1997: 23)

1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1993 1994

German female

UK 708 637 586 654 975 1,093 1,148 1,047 901

USA 6,062 5,289 2,841 2,235 2,472 2,567 2,987 1,860 1,728

German male

UK 99 186 346 390 381 333 354 349 335

USA 97 154 297 391 317 422 443 562 518

total: 6,966 6,266 4,070 3,670 4,145 4,415 4,932 3,818 3,512

I will now go on to discuss which linguistic choices these couples have, which choices they

make, and what their attitudes towards these choices are. Before, I will briefly address the

question of how to obtain data for the study of marital communication that is also intercultural

communication.


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3 Methods for the study of marital communication

In many areas of linguistics, the fact that our results will be influenced by the method used to

obtain the data has become a matter of urgent concern (e.g. the section on 'methodological issues'

in Gass and Neu 1996: 21ff). The first choice that one has to face is between elicited data and

naturally occurring data. While the latter are usually heralded as the 'real thing' in pragmatic

studies, they, too, have some serious shortcomings such as their unsystematic nature (Beebe and

Cummings 1996: 67). Also, one has to be cautious about the naturalness of "natural"

conversational data as the observer's paradox also applies in non-experimental settings (Wilson

1987). Furthermore, naturally occurring couple talk that is not embedded in another situation

such as a party setting is difficult to come by. The only studies to use naturally occurring samples

of couple talk as their data are, as far as I know, Fishman's (1978; 1980; 1983) work on the

supportive nature of female's contributions in conversations and the follow-up study by

DeFrancisco (1989; 1991). Fishman asked three monolingual US-American couples to have all

their home conversations tape-recorded for a certain period, and DeFrancisco seven.

For these reasons, in the study of marital communication, elicited data are used much more

frequently. Elicited data can take many forms: questionnaires, sociolinguistic interviews,

experimental settings, or discourse completion tests, to name but a few. I won't go into the pros

and cons of all these methods here as I have done so elsewhere (Piller, in print). Instead, I will

look at experimental studies of the communication practices of romantic dyads that have been


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carried out in the social psychology of language. In these studies, couples are asked to engage in

activities like the following: "to work toward a mutually satisfactory solution to a salient

relationship issue" for thirty minutes while being videotaped (Notarius and Johnson 1982), "to

engage in pleasant conversation" (Fitzpatrick, Vance and Wittemann 1984), to discuss "un thme

conflictuel" (Boucher 1995), "a neutral subject" (Spaine 1991), or "one current relational

problem and one successfully resolved marital problem" (Weatherford 1985). In yet another

study, of nonverbal communication in romantic dyads, couples were videotaped while playing

'Trivial Pursuit' (Manusov 1990a; 1990b). In all these designs, participants are basically asked to

role-play their own conversations (Baus 1992).

These research designs obviously have the advantage of yielding real communication between

the partners, while most of the other possibilities involve a certain amount of self-reporting, or

talk in the presence of other participants. However, it has the disadvantage of being artificial and

making subjects feel very self-conscious. Ethnographers of communication, who will only accept

observation of naturally occurring conversations as valid data, generally deny the validity of

experimental approaches. Nevertheless, the presence of an observer is in many social situations

in a way "unnatural," too, and in the case of the intimate dyad simply not feasible most of the

time. And, as Tannen (1994: 130) argues in favor of experimental designs, a communication is

natural to the situation in which it is produced. Thus, experiments elicit speech that is natural to

the odd situation in which it is produced. Experimental designs, furthermore, ensure

comparability as they are standardized.

As I am interested in the language choices intercultural couples make, in their reasons for these

choices, in their attitudes towards intercultural communication, and also in certain features of


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their actual conversations such as conversational control and humor, I needed to combine data

that are normally collected through sociolinguistic interviews, with actual couple talk. I did so by

developing a one-page "discussion paper" in German and English. The discussion paper served

participating couples as a basis for the discussions which they were to self-record. Both, the

questionnaire and the discussion paper, were prepared in English and German to give the couples

the choice of their preferred language. Altogether, the discussion paper consists of 23 questions

in four sections: language usage and skills (8 questions), language and culture (5 questions),

language and identity (4 questions), perceived and self-reported attitudes towards intercultural

couples, and their children (6 questions). The questions are not numbered but presented as a

running text with four paragraphs. In the following they are numbered for ease of reference.

The questions on language usage and skills are the following:

As a bilingual couple, which language do you usually speak together? Under which circumstances do you use another language? Has your language use changed in the course of your relationship? How well do you speak each other's language? How did you learn it? Do you speak other languages, and do they play a role in your relationship? What do you think about each other's slang and dialect? Have you created something like a "private language" for yourselves?

The questions on language and culture are the following:


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Does the fact that you are a bilingual and cross-cultural couple influence yourrelationship?

How? Do you have some stories to show that it is good fun to have different languages and

cultures?

Do you have some stories to show that having different languages and cultures can bequite frustrating?

Which cultural traits of each other do you really like or really hate?

The questions on language and identity are the following:

It has been said that "one's language is one's inheritance and one's secret code." Has yourrelationship affected your sense of identity?

How? How do you feel about English, German, or other languages and cultures? What do you really hate or love about Britain, Germany, the US or any other country?

The questions on perceived and self-reported attitudes towards intercultural couples, and their

children are the following:

Do you have any stories about official institutions and how they deal with bilingual andbinational couples?

What do your families and friends think about your relationship? Do you have some stories about their reactions? Are you passing on both languages and cultures to your children?


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Why, or why not? How does it work?

This paper was given to German-English couples who were willing to spend some time

discussing the issues addressed in it, and to tape themselves as they did so. I had been expecting

to get, on the one hand, self-reported information on the couple's language practices like in a

semi-structured interview, and on the other hand, also real samples of couple talk without the

presence of a researcher. Although the design is experimental, it is "not too unnatural" as the

couple has the choice of the setting.

4 The sample/informants

After I had "tried out" the proposed method in a pre-study with two couples, who are personal

friends, I started advertising for my research in various bilingual interest publications in June

1997. The sample is thus being drawn on a voluntary, self-select basis from bilingual couples

who can be reached through advertisements in bilingual interest publications, radio shows, or

Internet sites. I intended to collect a sample of about 30 conversations. I wanted to have about

fifteen conversations from couples living in a German-speaking community, and a further fifteen

from couples living in an English-speaking community. Altogether, about 180 couples responded

and asked for the materials (information sheet, discussion sheet, questionnaires, tape), and 51

tapes were returned to me.


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4.1 Language choice

The first choice that participants in an intercultural encounter face is that of the choice of the

medium: in which language (or languages) is the interaction going to be conducted? In the

following I will discuss the linguistic choices made by these 51 couples and the reasons they give

for their choices. One might argue that the preferred language choice of any person is the mother

tongue. Persons who can use their mother tongue can be conceived to be in a powerful position

while the use of a second language always entails a certain amount of relinquishing of control. In

one of his essays on English linguistic imperialism, Phillipson (1998: 106), for instance, writes:

Language rights will inevitably have to be limited further, but already in effect European

politicians and bureaucrats often opt to function in a foreign language, or are pressured

into doing so, rather than insisting on their language rights.

The quote suggests that these politicians and bureaucrats would be better off expressing

themselves in their mother tongue instead of an L2. I am arguing that such a view is too

simplistic. For many people their second language has become their preferred choice of

expression as the examples in Coulmas (1997) amply demonstrate. To give just a few examples,

Paul Celan chose German as the language of his poetry instead of Romanian, Joseph Conrad

chose English as the language of his novels instead of Polish, Salman Rushdi writes in English

instead of Gujarati, and Jorge Semprn in French instead of Spanish "because he had turned

French into his mother tongue" (Coulmas 1997: 32). In some situations the choice of a non-

native language may actually be an act of empowerment: a person opts to leave the "linguistic

caste system" (Kachru and Nelson 1996: 91), which privileges native speakers and is based on


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the assumption that a person can only express herself fully in her first language, and has to

relinquish (some) control in any other language.

So, which linguistic choices do intercultural couples make and what are their motivations for

these choices? In a very brief article that is based on introspection, Siguan (1980) identifies the

following factors that might influence linguistic choice in intercultural couples: "le territoire," i.e.

the language of the monolingual area where the couple live; "diglossie," i.e. the choice of the

more prestigious language if the couple live in a bilingual area; "loyaut linguistique," i.e. the

choice of the non-native or less prestigious language for reasons of solidarity; "langue de

l'homme et langue de la femme," i.e. there is a tendency for the language of the male partner to

prevail; and "facteurs individuels," i.e. choices that do not fall into the larger patterns previously

identified. Are these factors born out by my data?

Of the 51 couples, 21 use German as their common language, 16 English, and 14 a mixed code.

This count is based on the language choices reported in the questionnaire that accompanied the

conversation and on the conversations themselves. Obviously, it could be argued that self-reports

on a questionnaire and a conversation taped for research purposes might not reflect what the

couples "really" do. However, in the social constructionist framework outlined above there is no

such thing as a "real essence" and a display of self in one context is exactly that: a construction in

one particular context. Those couples that report a mixed code use two different strategies: either

each partner speaks his or her language all the time and receives the other language back, or both

partners engage in code-switching. 38 of the couples who sent me tapes live in a German-

speaking country (37 in Germany and one in Austria), 10 in an English-speaking country (5 in

the UK, 5 in the US), and three live in another country (Belgium, Israel, the Netherlands).


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Table 2: Couple language and community language

couple language

community language

English German mixed code total

English 6 2 2 10

German 8 18 12 38

Other 2 1 - 3

Total 16 21 14 51

As was to be expected from previous research from a diversity of contexts ,6the community

language is the most powerful indicator of the language bilingual couples will use for marital

communication (see Table 2) - this is also what Siguan (see above) predicted. Six of the ten

couples who live in an English-speaking country use English with each other (60%), and 18 of

the 38 who live in a German-speaking country use German with each other (47%). However, it

was also to be expected from these studies that the overwhelming majority of bilingual couples

would opt for the community language as their common language - which is clearly not true for

my sample. So which factors govern the choice of a common language according to the couples

themselves? I will now look at two factors in some more detail: habit and compensation.

4. 2 Habit
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Many couples explain that they use the language they use, whether it is the majority language or

the minority language, out of habit. It is the language they used when they first met that they

stick to. Maren, for instance, a German woman who lives in England with her English husband

says:

Excerpt 4: gb2, ll. 20-26

Maren well I suppose- your German is quite good now but erm it's just habit, isn't it?

before, we spoke in English to each other. we met in England. when we met, you didn't

know- you knew only one phrase in German.

Dennis that's right.

Marenzwei Bier bitte. ("two beers, please")

Habit may account for the use of the majority language (as in the case of Maren and Dennis, who

use English in the UK) or the minority language (as in the following example of a couple who

use English in Germany). Deborah, an American woman who lives in Hamburg with her German

husband, also adduces habit as the reason why they use English together.

Excerpt 5: d20, ll. 10-23; 51-59

Deborah [...] well, my husband and I erm decided to speak English together. and I guess

mainly that has to do with the fact, that, when I first arrived here in Germany two years

ago his English was considerably better then my German, and in order for us to

communicate, even on a basic level, it was- it was necessary for us to speak English. and

I think we've just kept that up, because it became a habit, and also I think it's sort of a, ...


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a way for him to offer some sort of sacrifice to ME. because I had to give up, all my

things, my culture, my language, my family, and my friends, to move to Germany. and he

had everything here around him. and I guess the only thing he COULD offer me was his

language. [...] it- it's STRANGE for us when we speak German with each other. because

we met in the States, he was teaching German at the university where I had studied. and I

had already graduated but he was giving me private lessons. and that's how we became

friends, and we just spoke English together THEN. and we have always spoken English

together, and it just seems strange that- that once I came here, that we should then speak

German. [...]

Deborah finds it strange to use the majority language with her husband because that is not what

they did when they first met. The fact that couples find it difficult to change from the language of

their first meeting to another one can probably be explained with the close relationship between

language and identity. In a number of studies in the 1960s, Ervin(-Tripp) (1964; 1968) found that

language choice is much more than only the choice to the medium. Rather, content is affected,

too. In a number of experiments, that have unfortunately not been replicated since, she

demonstrated that in Thematic Apperception Tests (TAT) the content of picture descriptions

changed with the language (English or French) a person used. When she asked English-Japanese

bilingual women to do a sentence completion test, she got the same dramatic results: the sentence

completion changed from one language to the other. Her most famous example is probably that

of a woman completing the stimulus "When my wishes conflict with my family ..." with "It is a

time of great unhappiness." in Japanese, and with "I do what I want." in English (Ervin-Tripp

1968: 203). Likewise, Koven (1998) shows in her study of the narratives of French-Portuguese

bilinguals that the self is performed differently in these languages. She argues that these differing


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performances point to contrasting experiences and positional identities in the two linguistic

communities. So, there is evidence that bilinguals say different things in different languages,

which makes it quite obvious why intercultural couples stick to the language of their first

meeting: they might lose the sense of knowing each other, the sense of connectedness and the

rapport derived from knowing what the other will say in advance if they switched.

Habit also explains why the percentage of couples who use German in a German-speaking

country is lower than the percentage of couples who use English in an English-speaking country

(47% vs. 60%; see Table 2). English is much more likely to be the language of the first

interactions - no matter where the couple will eventually settle down - as the portion of speakers

of German who have English as a second language is much higher than the portion of English

speakers who have German as a second language.

4.3 Compensation

Deborah (see Excerpt 5) mentions a further factor that influenced her and her husband's choice of

English as their common language. The use of English in Germany became a gift that was

offered to compensate for the sacrifice Deborah had to make to live with her husband: migration.

A lot of recent research has shown that language and power are inextricably linked: "all socio-

communicative verbal interaction, at whatever level of formality or complexity, reflects the

distribution of power among the participants." (Watts 1991: 53). In intercultural relationships the

partner in whose native country the couple live is clearly privileged: legally, economically, and

usually socially, too. In the linguistic construction of reality, power may also accrue to a person

through being an undisputed expert manipulator of a code, a native speaker. Being a foreigner


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and having to use a non-native code places a person in a doubly marginalized position, while

being a native using the native code places a person in a doubly strong position. The compromise

to let one partner be the native, and the other the native speaker may well be conducive to a more

egalitarian distribution of power in a relationship.

Research on language and power is frequently linked to research on gender. This leads to the

question whether it is the male or the female partner in intercultural relationships who find

themselves in weak or strong positions in the above sense?

Table 3: Language choice and gender

Female partner migrates and uses the majority language with her partner 22

Female partner migrates and uses her native language with her partner 21

Male partner migrates and uses the majority language with his partner 3

Male partner migrates and uses his native language with his partner 1

total: 477

Table 3 shows that, in my sample, about half of the female partners find themselves in a doubly

marginalized position, i.e. they have given up their status as natives and their status as native

speakers. However, only three male partners find themselves in such a weak position. Almost an

equal number of couples, have reached a compromise by compensating for migration with the

use of the minority language. This includes a number of 'weaker' compromises, too, though, as I
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have also counted those couples that report the use of a mixed code as 'compromise couples'.

5 Conclusion

To sum up, this paper has three objectives: first, I am arguing for a social construction approach

to the study of intercultural communication. Second, the discussion of my research design is

intended to contribute to methods in the study of intercultural communication. Third, I am

identifying language choice as a major factor in the linguistic construction of cultural identity.

Through their language choices, the couples in my sample most often align themselves with the

majority. However, they may also actively construct themselves as intercultural border-crossers

by the use of a mixed code, or even as minority members, which happens when both minority

and majority partner use the minority language. The reasons the couples themselves identify for

their choices are 'habit' and 'compensation. Both factors have wider implications for the study of

intercultural communication generally: we need to learn more on how content and identity

constructions differ with language choice, i.e. how content and the presentation of the self differ

from one language to the next in a multilingual's repertoire. Also, the power make-up of

intercultural conversational exchanges, enacted through code-choice and other devices, deserves

further attention as the trouble with intercultural communication are not misunderstandings in

themselves but the fact that the life chances of minority members may be at stake if such

misunderstandings occur.

Notes


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1Here and elsewhere: the translations into English are mine.

2 See Leisi 1993 and Piller 1998 for more detailed analyses of the love talk in this play.

3I do not wish to align myself with the so-called difference approach, which has been heavily

criticized for ignoring power relations in society (e.g. Troemel-Ploetz 1991 or Cameron 1998). I

am adducing it here to make the point that there are no clear definitions of and no firm

boundaries between cultures.

4"d16" is the code of the interview. The line numbers refer to the original transcript. The

following transcription conventions are employed in the excerpts:

pause

- truncation

, clause final intonation ("more to come")

. sentence final falling intonation

? sentence final rising intonation

[] parts of the utterance have been left out

CAPS emphatic stress

Italics German utterance

5All the names are pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of my informants.

6E.g. Bernard 1994; Dorian 1989; Gal 1979; Mertens 1994; Mougeon 1984
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7The three couples who live neither in an English- nor a German-speaking country have been

excluded from this count, as has the only homosexual couple in my sample.

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