Language

Lately I've been feeling a little self-conscious about speaking English with Sylvain in French settings. We met through a French friend that left us on our our own for a few hours while we sat at a bar nursing Southern Comfort, we hardly knew each other and Sylvain's English was barely conversational, so I resorted to drawing pictures on cocktail napkins to help get my point across. We celebrated our second anniversary this past weekend and I asked him what his first impression was that night, his response: I thought you were good at drawing stuff...

We've talked to a lot of bilingual couples like ourselves many of whom have relocated to France, all of them say it's impossible to switch languages- meaning, if you initially spoke English, it's impossible to switch to French. Of course in our case my French isn't nearly as good as Sylvain's English is now, but I've noticed despite my French having improved significantly, I still switch to English when speaking with Sylvain even in French situations. Apparently this is the general case for bilingual couples, a friend of mine would love to switch to English with her boyfriend, but it just doesn't work because they started in French, and even when I consciously try to practice my French with Sylvain he responds in English out of habit, even if two seconds earlier I reminded him to speak French.

Still it reminds me of when I was younger and bilingual folks would speak their language amongst each other while we who spoke only English knew naught of what was being said. That feeling that they are talking about you in front of you instead of behind your back, or simply of being excluded. Why didn't they speak English in front of you when they knew how to. What were they saying to each other that you didn't understand. This never really made me feel too uncomfortable, but I know for some it does. Having lived in a foreign language country for a year it was sometimes nice to be able tune it all out, not to have to listen to the conversation next to me because it was being conducted in a foreign language it was easy to do so.

I have an Indian cousin who speaks her native language with her children, but she has very good reason to, she wants them to be bilingual and they aren't going to be if they aren't exposed to the language. Living in an English speaking country, this is crucial to their language development and appreciation. Moreover it's pretty obvious when the conversation includes me that I'm included and it's conducted in English, if on the other hand she's telling her son to put on his seatbelt, I'm not really missing much and I trust that what she's saying is for their ears and would be rather dull: tie your shoes, stop running around, it's your bedtime... Trust me sometimes I think we're better off not understanding, after being a nanny for a year I would get so bored of telling A to sit down in her chair or she'd get hurt and for S to stop talking and start eating if there were other's in the room who didn't speak English they'd have been lucky not to have understood the same banal commands over and over.

Language is a really complex thing, the way we express our desires needs and feelings with each other is often done through the spoken word. However in can be exclusive and hurtful too. In some situations it's a basic need. When I speak with Sylvain who is my other half I want to be understood in the clearest terms possible, for us that is in English. People often develop close relationships with other's because they feel that the other person understands them best. There are various other forms of communication; art, body language, but when it comes down to it, we connect to others based on shared ideas which are more often than not transmitted through the spoken language.