Finally, we are black sick (not to mention a little defensive)

I am now checking in at 6 years and almost 12 months. Or in other words, just about a week shy of 7.

The language mix-up has changed quite radically since V started first grade this autumn. She is now imbued within the system of values of the Finland-Swedish speaking world. She is a part of this social system now, she just happens to have an (American) English speaking mom. This would change, obviously, if we were to suddenly pick up and move to Argentina or Belgium or Canada. That's kind of the point: these things are arbitrary, yet so profound.

Our walks home from school in the afternoon are some of my favorite moments of each day. It's a 10-minute walk through our neighborhood, noting if there are still leaves on all of the trees, if the rabbits who live in the park are out of their burrows, that type of thing. And of course we talk about her school day.

Increasingly, she seems to be getting agitated about trying to find words to explain to me in English what they have been doing. The "What did you have for lunch?" question seems particularly challenging. She simply doesn't know what to call the school's lunch dishes in English.

"Say it in Swedish, then," I try to convince her, knowing full well that this is not a solution, either. V hates speaking Swedish to me, even if it is just a few words. This started way, way back, and has to do with the socialization of language use. Ask anyone: for the vast majority of people, switching into a different language in an already established relationship seems throws everything off. It is something that bilingual speakers just don't tend to do. This, for example, is the reason that my husband still refuses to speak Swedish to me after all these years, and why he is distinctly uncomfortable if we find ourselves in a situation where we have to speak Finnish together.

But that's a different story.

Last week, on our way home, V was talking about a fun game she had played outside with her teacher and the other children. It involved running and pretending to be different kinds of animals.

"But, Mommy, I hate it that English doesn't have a different word for 'game'!" she wailed, then launched into an extremely physical and heartfelt description of how a 'game' in English should be just the kind of thing that comes in a cardboard box and has little colored pieces and a board and maybe a spinner or some dice. What they do outside, in her bilingual opinion, is different enough to warrant a name of its own.

Well, OK, I concede that she has an interesting point, but that's only after the fact. At that exact moment, I was in no mood to admit to any perceived inadequacies of my mother tongue, which in our family situation is now officially relegated to a role of a distant second in terms of status. So I behaved like a very, very bad linguist, and I launched into a tirade all my own:

"You know, you are actually very lucky to speak English as a native language. Do you know how many people in the world try to learn English, and how hard they have to work at it? And you just speak it naturally. If you think about it, English is actually a much more useful language than Swedish. You can speak English to almost anyone in the world. You can speak Swedish here in Finland, but only to some people, and to the people in Sweden. That's it. You may not appreciate now how lucky you are to speak English, but someday you will."

At this point I am cringing as I type, because I know how thrilled (not) my Swedish-speaking friends would be to read those words. But please try to understand the emotion of that moment--it wasn't my language I was defending, after all, it was ME!

Last summer we were in the United States for about a month. V seemed to be able to hold her own in English, even with other English-speaking children, but there are definitely a few idiosyncratic features that are based on the fact that Swedish has become her dominant language. Her default English possessive (determiner) pronoun, for example, is always mine: "mine socks, mine arm, mine lunch," etc. She is not confusing this with the possessive pronouns--in other words, mine, yours, his, etc. Rather, she is conflating the Swedish possessive (determiner) pronoun min with English my.

There are various syntactic constructions she takes from Swedish, as well. One that she uses very often is "How does this see/look out?" to mean "How does this look?" Another one that she uses very often is "What is this for food (or whatever)?" to mean "What kind of food is this?" Both of these constructions are straight from Swedish, just translated into English.

Her phonology seems to be there in all languages now; the last sounds still in flux are those tricky "th" sounds in English. Every once in a while, they still come out as "t" or "d." This has little to do with her Swedish, though, in my opinion, and more to do with the fact that those sounds are among the last that any English-speaking child learns. They are tough sounds! I notice that some of her school friends, who are Swedish-speaking, obviously, have not yet mastered the trilled "r" sound of Swedish. That's a tough one for kids, too.

I used to be able to keep up pretty well with these Swedish-isms in her English, but lately she has thrown me off a few times. Most recently, it was during our fabled walk home from school, and she was explaining how one friend seemed to be hurt that she was playing with a different friend. "I think he was black sick," she announced.

"Black sick?" I queried.

"Yes, you know, he felt bad."

I really couldn't figure that one out, but my husband got it right away. Swedish svartsjuk is literally translated into English as 'black sick,' but it means 'jealous.' First of all, what a wonderfully expressive word in Swedish (which I later realized is the same idea in Finnish, as well). Second, things are getting interesting on a whole different level as her language skills expand and grow as a result of starting school and entering into a new phase in her life.

Hang on to your hat, linguist mamma!

21 months and counting

There have been a lot of changes in the past month or so. Sentences are coming out like crazy! Most of the sentences are quite basic, with just copular verbs (she often deletes the copula, but that's hardly surprising): "Cava sleeping." "Pappa drinking." That kind of thing. This morning I heard her use her first successful prepositional phrase in English, which excited me (remember, I am dorky linguist; things like this excite me): "Juice is on the table."

Her use of one language over another has always seemed to depend on to whom she was talking. Lately, though, there seems to be more mixing of codes, which I can only speculate has to do with what she learns in what context, or what she is thinking about. This morning, for example, I was dressing her to get her ready for her babysitter, and she started saying, "Mekko," which means 'dress' in Finnish. She knows the word dress in English, but I guess because she was thinking about her babysitter, the word came out in Finnish.

She has been using quite a few words in Finnish, actually, which makes me think that she probably has a rather large vocabulary in Finnish already. Again, it seems to depend on the context, if a situation makes her think of her babysitter, then she'll say the word in Finnish. For example, she says apina 'monkey' when she is hanging or goofing around, and if she stands on something that is maybe a bit precarious, she says, "Seiso!" ('Stand!')

She has also been throwing a fair amount of Swedish into the mixture lately. For example, she seems to know andra 'other' in Swedish more than in English--even though I do think I have heard her say other in English, too. I guess this is just a case of competing forms.

She is quite adept now at mimicking entire sentences or phrases, and it's quite funny that if she doesn't know all the words -- a string with a lot of short words, for example -- she'll babble part of the sentence. So, for example, if I say, "Do you want some more blueberries, or is that enough?" she might repeat, "Na na want more blueberries, do do dat enough?" And the final word is always emphasized. Oh, and the intonation is always right on target. It cracks me up when she does that!

Another thing she has been saying a lot in English lately is "My goodness!" I know she can only get this from one obvious source, and I am quite embarrassed that I would say this enough for her to catch it ...

One thing V does, and I am uncertain if this is common or not, is to pay close attention to people's names. In a large group of people she is very careful about noting who is there, what their names are, and she always notices if someone has left the room. She points to a person and repeats their first name over and over. She also remembers names. Yesterday, for example, she surprised me when we were looking at a magazine, and she pointed to some ads and said the names of several people we met when we were on vacation a few weeks ago. I didn't think she would have such a repository of names after so much time.

More morphemes

Tonight I was actually quite shocked to hear V use the English plural. The plural form she used was "balls." I am pretty sure it was not an accident, because she very readily uses the singular form when she sees just one ball. In this case, there were a bunch of tiny balls inside a plastic toy she has. I think I can pretty safely say that this is her second morpheme. The first was the possessive -s, now comes the plural -s.

Wordstock

One week ago, clear as a bell, came V's first complete sentence in Swedish. Her sister had just shown up, as well as our dog, Cava, and so naturally V was very excited. The trouble is that Cava is somewhat advanced in years and usually hides from V. V was wandering around the apartment, repeating, "Cava, Cava." Finally, she came to Nova and me and asked, "Var är Cava?" It was so clearly enunciated that we could barely believe our ears. Too bad her dad wasn't there to hear it!

I have mentioned many times that she is very good at mimicking. Lately, I have noticed that she has picked up certain key features of the English intonation system, which, believe me, differs greatly from that of Finnish and Swedish. For example, in English we tend to use a rising intonation when we ask a question--otherwise it sounds like a statement. If you don't use the rising intonation, people might be confused as to whether or not you are asking a question, so in other words the rising intonation actually carries meaning. These days, a lot of people in the United States also use this rising intonation feature when they make statements, which, you might guess, makes them sound like they are always asking questions. I am sure you have noticed this--I know I have, especially since I moved away from the States. It's interesting that this so-called "uptalk" seems to be a feature of white speech only, from what I understand.

Anyway, about the question intonation. V already has this feature mastered, which points toward its great importance in effective communication in English. Other languages, such as Finnish, don't make use of intonation for meaning, which might be hard to imagine if you are really used to English. Finnish has other stuff, mostly suffixes, that indicate whether, for example, something is a question or a statement.

Here is another example about intonation. You know how moms talk incessant nonsense to their babies, right? Today I was doing that when I was dressing her to leave. I asked her, "Are we going to go see your babysitter?"

V looked up at me and issued a pitch perfect, "Mmmm-hmmm!" What was so funny about it was that it sounded exactly like people in the Southern United States. Picture someone from the Plantation South, for example, talking about if they like pecan pie. "Do I like pecan pie? Mmmm-hmmm!" And that's what V did--like a perfect little Southerner.


Here are a few words that are new on the lexical front: avocado, sockies, milk, pretty.

Just for fun, I thought I would try to list out all of her current wordstock. I'll stick to just the English words for now, because I would have to think too hard to come up with the Swedish and Finnish words (!).

These are the things that she can answer "What does the X say?": cat, cow, horse, duck, clock, chicken, dog, pig (the horse sound is REALLY cute!)

These are words that she uses at will, in no particular order: star, dog, cat, duck, bear, brush, diaper, shoes, bath, ball, no, socks, hat, baby, cheese, banana, avocado, milk, bottle, clock, cookie, bread, book, lamp, toes, nose, mouth, eyes, more, uh-oh, shhhhhh (does that count?), kiss . There are also some dozen or so proper names that she knows, names for friends and family.

It shouldn't be surprising that her comprehension is far greater than her production. Any of us who try to speak a foreign language know about this linguistic truism. For example, she understands the words finger, nice, sleeping, but she doesn't say any of them--yet.

Fireworks

V's speech has left me speechless several times during the last few days. She constantly surprises me with what she has stored, what she can mimic, and how adept she is at using what she knows to get her point across. It's like an explosion of skills.

Here is a good example of using what she knows to get her point across: when she wants to go outside, she says "woof." It's not because she hears a dog or sees a picture of a dog, but because she knows, of course, that when we go out we see dogs. She accompanies the little woofs by pointing out the window, for extra measure. Here is another example: yesterday she went to the front door and repeated "baby, baby" and her little friend's name. She was also pointing up. I got the message loud and clear: she was bored with me and wanted to play with her baby friend who lives upstairs. When I grabbed her and carried her out the door, she laughed with delight, no doubt at least in part because she had succeeded in communicating--but mostly because she was going to play.

V is learning when the same word applies across concepts. For a long time, the only "nose" was her mamma's, or maybe pappa's (but of course his nose is a näsa). A couple of days ago she had her rubber ducky, which, oddly, is one of her favorite things in the world, and she pointed to the little beak and said, "nose." Since, she has done the same thing to her teddy bears.

It seems to be the case that, officially, V has learned her first word in Finnish. We were listening to her repeat a word that sounded close to mamma, but not quite. This didn't make sense, since mamma is one of her most distinctly articulated words. We realized that she was saying mennään, which means "let's go" in Finnish. I asked V's babysitter, and she verified: yes, V has learned that word from her time with the babysitter and the other kids.

New words at this point include brush (brushing her teeth is now part of the nightly ritual), uh-oh (not exactly new; she mimicked it before but now knows what it means), eyes, mouth, yes, no, and Swedish nej.

Now a word about nonverbals. V expresses her love for something by patting and petting, and she often says, "Oooooh," to accompany her pats. Lucky creatures who receive this treatment include me, her pappa, our dog, her goodnight bear, her rubber ducky, and her friend from upstairs. I am not sure where she learned this behavior, although her favorite book for a long time has been Pat the Bunny. That might explain the patting, anyway.