Multi-Lingual Accounts

November 22, 2014 10:30 PM

Do you know of any works that include an account of what it was like to grow up using at least three languages, and also shows the difficulties and confusion of having that experience?
posted by slowlikemolasses to Writing & Language (8 answers total)

Third culture kid might be a useful search term.
posted by escapepod at 10:40 PM on November 22, 2014

Try searching for "trilingual child": lots of promising looking results including this interview with a 27-year-old who was raised trilingual
posted by the agents of KAOS at 3:05 AM on November 23, 2014

Many Malaysian Chinese and Malaysian Indians grow up learning at least three languages. They learn Tamil or Mandarin, English and Bahasa. Plus, many Chinese speak at least one other dialect, depending what area of China their family originally hailed from. I assume the same would be true for the Indians as well, but I am not as knowledgeable about them. Unfortunately I don't have any links to share, but if you are interested I could probably introduce you to a friend or two that could give a firsthand account. Feel free to memail me if interested.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:34 AM on November 23, 2014

Sorry, no citation, but I once read an account of a boy who grew up in a multilingual household, English and French parents, IIRC, and Spanish(?) nanny. His difficulty was that he had gotten the notion that everybody in the world speaks a different language and that he was responsible for inventing his own language, and as he approached primary school age, he had no idea how to start on his language.
posted by Bruce H. at 5:02 AM on November 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

I am having a hard time remembering how explicitly he speaks about that issue, but it permeates One Day I Will Write About This Place, Binyavanga Wainana's memoir about growing up in Kenya with a Ugandan mother (and a very Ugandan first name), a Gikuyu father (and a very Gikuyu last name), in an English and Swahili milieu during the end of Moi's dictatorship. Language and class, language and context, etc. It's also an amazing book.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:27 AM on November 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

Elias Canetti only mentions it in passing, but growing up where he did in a corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire he was exposed to and spoke around 6 languages, including German, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Russian.

The first volume of his biography where it comes up is Die Fackel im Ohr (The Torch in my ear).
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:47 AM on November 23, 2014

There is a little about this in Speak, Memory by Nabokov (who grew up with Russian, English, and French): "I learned to read English before I could read Russian..." (chap. 4). There's also interesting stuff about synesthesia at the start of chap. 2.
posted by languagehat at 2:46 PM on November 23, 2014

Eva Hoffman writes movingly of being a Polish teenager, who was gifted in French, and then moved to Canada and started anew in English
Lost in Translation
posted by Jesse the K at 7:13 PM on November 23, 2014