cynical-roll asked:
Hi, hope you're having a great morning/noon/night and I'd just like to say I love your blog!
If possible, could you give me some advice on how to write bi- or multi-lingualism, please? Either stereotypes to avoid or things mono-linguals like me tend to get wrong, or common experiences to include for relatability?
For context, I'm thinking of writing fanfics for various anime/manga where the characters all speak Japanese, but non-natives also speak their own languages with each other.
One main question I have is: when you've got groups of people where some of them speak only their own language and some of them speak more than one, can it happen that the multi-linguals not only forget to switch between the right language to the right group, but also not necessarily even realise that they're speaking the wrong language to the wrong group in the first place?
Hope that makes sense
Hi, yes it’s a beautiful morning outside :)
I have made a post about that, but it’s quite a few years old, I think it was one of my first big writing help posts and I’m not sure I completely agree with it anymore. But you can check it out here, I will probably re-write it sometime.
To answer your main questions: it can happen that they forget which language to speak, but in my opinion it would depend on their mindset in that moment and how well they speak the other language. If both languages are their mother tongue, it’s not as likely as if one was their native and the other one was one they learned.
That they not realise that they are speaking the wrong language is a given, since they forgot which language to speak, but I would definitely say that it depends on a few things. They would have to be thinking in that language in that moment and probably be preoccupied with something else, so that they don’t realise who they are really talking to. But they would probably realise that pretty soon.
It definitely happened to me before as an au-pair with an American best friend and a lot of German friends, where we would always speak English and then don’t switch back to German, even though the American left. Or I would be thinking about something else and my American friend would ask me something and I would answer with ‘ja’ instead of 'yes’. And I went to a few Model United Nations that were entirely in English and my group was completely German except for one girl and while we were at a conference, my group all gossiped in German to each other, so I accidently asked this girl something in German, because she was right next to me and we all had to whisper, which really confused her, because I just had forgotten that she couldn’t understand me, even though we’ve known each other for a while now.
I hope this is helpful for you and good luck!
- Jana