Graciela Spector-Bitan
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

 
 
Introduction

Society condemns the man who falls in love with many women. He is called a Casanova, a name that possesses negative connotations. On the other hand, if he happens to fall in love with many languages, this is quite a different matter! People will admire him deeply. Multilingual persons are considered well educated, extremely intelligent and socially attractive. I will try to show here that in the strikingly extreme case I present in this paper, falling in love with many languages or with many women can represent two different expressions of the same psychological process.

Mead (1934) claimed that the acquisition of a second language system has consequences for the self. One of the reasons for this is the fact that a language can be hardly separated from its cultural associations. In fact, as Lambert and Gardner (1972) claim, to acquire a second language is to turn into an acculturated member of another ethno-linguistic group.

In my view, the new language threatens the mother tongue, or at least its centrality in the immigrant’s conception of himself. The maximal danger would be in case of complete acquisition of the new language. If the immigrant spoke the new language natively, everyone would think he is a native. What would happen then to his continuation of sameness that Erikson (1964) deems the central issue in identity maintenance? Or worse, would he become a traitor with respect to his native country?

It is likely that, in order to avoid this threatening situation, the immigrant would make use of disidentifiers (Goffman, 1961, p.146). In a previous study with Argentineans (Spector, 1986), I analyzed the role of accent as a disidentifier, a way to tell the native Israeli, “I am, but am not one of you”. Otherwise, given his relatively good Hebrew proficiency, the danger would be to ‘pass’ as a native Israeli. Other disidentifiers might take the form of deficits in the proficiency in the new language. Among adult immigrants, the selected permeability of experiences to which De Vos (1984, p. 233) referred, might find expression through language deficits that persist even after a long stay in the new country. In fact, this interpretation of language deficits is consistent with Selinker’s (1971, p. 37-38) concept offossilization, a term he employed to describe mistakes in the productive language performance “no matter the age of the learner or the amount of instruction he receives in the target language”. Trosset (1986) claims that:

[O]ne is afraid of success because to become a fluent speaker of another language is in a sense to become another person. The fear of losing one’s identity sets up a strong resistance against the completely successful acquisition of the new language. (p. 185)

Therefore, the degree of cultural identification varies among multilingual individuals. There are those who remain mono-cultural, while others become bi- or multi-cultural. In other words, most multilingual individuals possess a basic cultural-linguistic identity, clear and distinct, and the rest of the languages they speak serve mainly instrumental purposes. Other multilingual persons exhibit different degrees of cultural identification with the different languages they speak, thus exhibiting different degrees of multiculturalism. At one extreme of the continuum, between both types, we find those persons who speak all the additional languages they know at a level of proficiency that is clearly below that of their mother tongue. These persons will typically be able to carry on a basic conversation in the different languages, without mastering the highest registers of those languages, or they will master only some skills in each language. At the opposite extreme we have those persons who claim to be ‘in love’ with languages, those for whom language constitutes both a hobby and a serious endeavor. These conceive multilingualism in terms of what Lambert (1967) called additive bilingualism, an experience in which a person feels that his horizons are widened by the new cultural acquisition. An extreme case of the latter type is what I call here the Linguistic Casanova, a way of coping with an identity trauma at an early stage of life.

This is one of the twelve cases I presented in my doctoral thesis (Spector, 1997). I constructed a typology of the different kinds of relationships between language and identity, based on 144 ‘deep’ interviews I conducted among Argentinean immigrants in Israel. Although David, the participant in this case study, was not born in Argentina, but in Poland, I considered his story to be so unique and interesting that I employed it as a strong example of the relationship between identity and language in immigration.
 
Poland and Polish: Frederick

Poland was a forbidden topic for many years. Although we were close friends, I ignored the fact that Frederick was a Holocaust survivor. He used to say, “I was born in a country whose name starts with a p”. He seldom pronounced the name of his native country.

One evening, we were chatting in one of those Israeli gatherings in which many languages are spoken simultaneously. We always spoke Spanish, since Frederick lived in Argentina for several years, and we met in that country. That evening, however, we started speaking English, as a sort of joke, and all of a sudden I found myself listening to a strange story about death, hunger, lost fortunes in an English bank, a mother who played Chopin and a father who would die of hunger in the ghetto.

That evening Frederick told me about a 12 year old boy who was brutally taken away from a comfortable and warm childhood into a nightmare that took place in a seemingly distant country, which only happened to coincide with the territory of his mother country. He said, “I lived in Poland until the age of 12. Then I spent three years in several concentration camps.” Frederick’s parents were Jewish, although extremely assimilated. He remembers his mother playing Chopin on a beautiful dark piano. About his father, he vaguely remembers his warm look, a delicate mustache and the perfume of his white handkerchief. He was a businessman who traveled frequently. He was, “a real gentleman”, as David told me (with an added effort of memory one can superpose on this image that of a very thin man, clothed in rags, blindly wandering the ghetto streets, until he finally falls down and dies from hunger).

Frederick was 12 when the family moved into the Jewish ghetto. Until that moment, he had almost no contact with other Jews. He knew he was a Jew, and he even witnessed several anti-Semitic incidents, but he had never really associated himself with them. He was a Pole, as his perfect native accent testified. These dreams were cruelly shattered when things became worse and the Jews were forced to move into the ghetto.

There he experienced his first contact with the Yiddish language, which he quickly learned in order to be able to communicate with other people. His contact with Judaism was sudden and harsh. Nevertheless, he loved the language. Frederick does not remember many details about his life in the ghetto, only that both his parents died, and that he was taken into several concentration camps. He was 15 when the war ended, and he arrived in Israel by the age of 17. Belonging to a much assimilated family, Frederick developed a deep love for the Polish language and culture. He remembers his early love for poetry, the tales his nanny told him, and their visits to the Catholic Church and the strong impression they had upon him. Everyone in his family was extremely proud of not having a Jewish accent in Polish. ‘They’, the poor fellows of the Jewish neighborhood, had an accent. The feeling of belonging to the Polish mainstream society was destroyed when Jews were forced to move into the Jewish ghetto and then taken into concentration camps.
 
The psychological importance of the mother country

The expression mother country allows me to compare the attitude of a country towards its citizens, to that of a mother towards her sons. Thus, we can contend that a brutal rejection from the country of origin may have strong negative consequences on the basic trust of the individual, in a similar fashion to those stemming from maternal rejection.

When Frederick grew up, he developed feelings of love and belonging towards his country, its culture and its language. When a country rejects a person’s ethnic group and treats him as unwelcome, he experiences a great deal of suffering and humiliation. These kinds of feelings permanently appear in the literature about refugees and victims of the Shoah.

Even if the notion of country is relatively new, some researchers (see for example Sarbin & Scheibe, 1983) claimed that the notion of national identity possesses a psychological existence. Thus, since it is difficult for someone to live without belonging to a country, the rejected person will look for an adoptive country. When this process takes place during early childhood, one can hypothesize that the original feelings of love and belonging will be transferred onto the new country. The libidinal charge attached to the previous country will find a new object. In this case, the child might forget his mother tongue and arrive at its total replacement by the language of the adoptive country. If at a later stage in life this child will emigrate from the adoptive country, he will behave as if he were born in it, displaying language loyalty(Weinreich, 1953) towards the previous language. We have then a central linguistic identity, a central cultural identification, and the immigrant’s habitual strategies to cope with the new country.

In contrast, if the contact with the new country takes place later in life, it seems difficult to perform this transference of love and belonging to the new country, and thus the libidinal charge remains attached to its primary object. This is the reason for which adult immigrants generally do not forget their native tongue and culture, even after they feel they have completely adapted in the new country.
 
In search of a new mother country

Sometimes, as a consequence of his country’s rejection, a person might repress his first national identity. Thus, he will consequently try to replace this first national-cultural-linguistic identity with a more accepted new one. He will have the illusion of transferring the affective charge attached to his first identity to the new one, in an effort to repress the pain and humiliation that are related to his rejection. The new identity has to replace the denied one and provide the individual with a positive identity, a positive self-image and the feelings of being accepted and loved by the new mother country.
 
David

During his early adolescence, Frederick suffered very harsh experiences, the death of both parents, his mother country’s cruel rejection, and he survived in an almost unbearable environment, surrounded by pain and death. At 17, he faced a new challenge: he had to cope with adapting to a new country, a new language and a new culture. Nevertheless, he was able to do it extremely well. He learned Hebrew to a degree of perfection. To help himself to do so, he refused to speak Polish, while he devoted himself to reading endlessly in Hebrew. After several months in the new country, he even wrote poems in the new language. He was strongly determined to replace his native tongue with the new one. He was a new man, and he would therefore erase all traces of the hated language. He wanted to completely forget his belonging to Poland, the loathed country that had deprived him of his childhood, led to the death of his entire family, and forced him to live under constant suffering and humiliation.

Israel symbolized quite the opposite: a young and brave country that offered him automatic full citizenship, a uniform and a gun with which to defend himself and his new country. He changed his status as a prisoner for that of a brave soldier. His body and his soul fortified, he was imbued with feelings of love and appreciation for his new country. He felt he was not Frederick any more. This deep change, symbolizing the new man in him, was represented by his new name, David.

Hebrew acquisition was almost complete. He recalls that he felt the need to speak the language as a native, or better than a native. He acquired Hebrew in the same way he would acquire all of the languages he knows, by reading. David believes that it is not necessary to learn formal grammar. One should read a lot, try to know as much as possible about the culture of the language in question including its history, folklore, customs, music, food, etc. Then you simply speak the language! David rejects the position of learner of a language in a formal context. He wants to learn languages in their natural context.

David wanted very much to continue his academic studies, and after a couple of years he moved to Jerusalem, where he attended university. He started to teach at a high school, and after ten years in Israel, he went to different countries in Europe and Africa in order to work with local Jewish youth, as a representative of the Jewish Agency. He learned very quickly the languages of each of those countries and he also became interested in the people, the literature and the food in every place he stayed.

One of these trips took him to Argentina, where he remained for many years. He fell in love and married an Argentinean Jew, and then decided to study psychology. Again, the acquisition of Spanish, even at the high standard required for university studies, was extremely easy. His profession and his family life turned him into a “true Argentinean”, as he told me. He read profusely and also wrote poems in Spanish. David defines himself as an Argentinean. He loves the country, the language, the people, and the city of Buenos Aires. The couple had two children. When David was 43, he and his family decided to return to Israel. He declares his central belonging to Israel, which he deems his country, and he claims that he is essentially an Israeli. He is also very proud of his perfect Hebrew proficiency. He feels that this language holds a very special place among the languages he masters. With respect to Polish and Poland, he claims to have perfect Polish, and he tells me, “This is the only language I speak with a native accent”. He feels a total rejection for Poland, and he claims to possess almost no Polish attributes, except perhaps a ‘romantic approach to life’. He also misses certain places and odors from his childhood.
 
Linguistic reflections of the new identity

We see that each new country started anew the process of adoption in David. He took in a new identity, trying to compensate for his lack of a central identity. At a linguistic level, this is reflected in the almost perfect language acquisition process. He seemed to search all the time for a new and true mother tongue that will replace the hated Polish language. He masters seven languages, at least four of them to a degree of proficiency similar -in my view- to what Coppieters (1987) calls near-native proficiency. David describes his proficiency in these languages as “clearly native”. He also claims to feel culturally identified with all these languages and feels he belongs to the corresponding linguistic communities. He reads the literature, loves the food and misses the places, the music and the friends he left in the different countries in which he lived.

This process repeated itself in each new country. He tells me that he falls in love with each new language, as if it were the first time, the first linguistic experience. His deep love for languages is reflected also on the demands he puts on himself and others as to what is in his opinion good language proficiency. For him, it must include all of the registers, and a sound knowledge of history, literature, theater, cinema, music, etc.
 
Native proficiency or imagined proficiency?

I will explain why I describe David’s linguistic competence as similar to a native speaker, while David claims to possess a native proficiency in four of the seven languages he masters. According to my evaluation of these four languages, I have detected mistakes which could never appear in a native speaker. In English, it is the rather odd construction of the sentences, some collocations and some problems in register sensitivity. In Spanish, some verbs are misused, since he constantly translates from French, a language he had acquired prior to Spanish, and these mistakes constitute what Selinker (1971) calls fossilization.

In Hebrew, some native speakers pointed to his super-correctness, which in my opinion constitutes a disidentifier (Goffman, 1959). In French, his pronunciation is -in the words of a French native speaker- unbearable. He told me it is really difficult to understand the way in which David utters certain words. I take into consideration here the typically high linguistic intolerance of French speakers towards deviance in pronunciation. Nevertheless, since I am trying to assess the native quality of these languages, it is important to state these judgments. We see then that David’s self-assessment of his proficiency in these four languages is what makes him into a Linguistic Casanova. The measured proficiency is that of a common multilingual.

The interesting question is how it is possible that David, a sophisticated speaker of varied languages, claims to possess native proficiency while external judges so easily detect mistakes in these languages (the kind of mistakes a native speaker would never make)? Let me add here a small anecdote. During the interviews, after he told me that he feels Argentinean and speaks Spanish natively, I asked him, a bit ironically, “Do you really mean you speak Spanish as I do?” To my astonishment, he answered in the affirmative. I laughed and started inserting the kind of everyday slang words which he -of course- could not know. When he perceived what was happening, he became pale and lost his confidence for a while. After a moment, he found the solution,” Well, Graciela! Not every Argentinean speaks the way you do. Your Spanish is superb!” This charming reply closed the topic. I could not even explain to him that these words were not -as he supposed- highly educated but quite the opposite.

In my opinion, this self-assessed proficiency is an especially strong example of what I called imagined proficiency (Spector, 1997). When we ask people to assess their own proficiency, they try to describe it from the point of view of an external, objective observer, as they would assess the proficiency of any other person. This evaluation is based on knowledge, experience and the comparison to other people’s proficiency. Nevertheless, in the process of evaluation, the internal world of the person interferes, leading to a far more subjective assessment than desired by the person. The imagined proficiency is related to the internal self. The internal self is the one that builds the life story and that relates the internal world to the events of the external world in what Winnicott called the transitional space. Winnicott (1971) claimed that there is no individual, free from the tension of connecting the inner reality with the outer world and that relief is provided by:

[A]n intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated. (p. 2)

Instead of thinking about the inner and the outer world as possessing clear-cut limits, Winnicott invites us to think about a third world, which intersects with the other two. It is at the same time a transition between the two worlds, and in my view also the place of the interpretation of reality. We humans have to understand the external world. We cannot live with the feeling that it is chaotic. The imagined proficiency is the product of a similar process. It is not chosen consciously but imposed on the person unconsciously as the only way to go on being himself. It constitutes a part of the continuation of his sameness (Erikson, 1964).

In a previous paper (Spector, 1986), I referred to the self-assessment of Spanish accented in Hebrew among Argentinean immigrants to Israel. While the self-assessment of most Hebrew skills was moderately correlated with their tested assessment, accent showed an almost zero correlation. On the other hand, the respondents’ self-assessment of accent was moderately correlated with attitudes towards their national sub-identities and their feelings of adaptation in Israel. I claimed that, since accent is related to identity issues, the speaker could not objectively assess it. Judges and respondents evaluated different things when they assessed accent. In my doctoral research, the self-assessment of other skills functioned in the same way. The imagined proficiency implies a kind of self-deceit. It has elements in common with the mechanisms of defense. These are the kind of ‘lies’ our Ego employs throughout our lives in order to be able to negotiate between the demands of reality and those of the Super-Ego. However, it is not a lie, but a mechanism of self-deceit.
 
The return of the repressed: the Linguistic Casanova

Among my respondents (Spector, 1997), the average respondent knew two languages, apart from Hebrew and Spanish. It is possible, then, to claim that most of them were multilingual. Nevertheless, they claimed to be mono or bi-cultural at the most, and none of them -except David- felt he belonged to the language community of the other languages he spoke. They were clearly bound by language loyalty, i.e. the need not to betray their mother tongue. They could acquire new languages, but at a lower degree of proficiency.

This is the reason why I call David a Linguistic Casanova. In his case, he stressed that he tries to acquire every new language at a native level. He seems free from any loyalties. Moreover, he loathes his mother tongue. Nevertheless, beyond all the languages that David masters, the native tongue is ever-present, with its untouched charge of love and hatred. If publicly repudiated, it appears in dreams and fantasies. The accent constitutes the Cain mark, revealing his true basic identity. David’s Polish accent is clear and exact, as if time had not elapsed since he was twelve. This a-temporality is typical of deep unconscious psychological processes. For most people, the second language will never be capable of eliciting language loyalty (Weinreich, 1953). Thus, in David’s case, to be multilingual is a way of trying to solve the lack of a basic identity. In an endless search for the true native tongue, he constantly falls in love with languages without being faithful to any of them. Each new language is expected to be capable of filling the empty place of a mother tongue, negated and repressed. Each trial leads to a new failure, since repression is doomed to failure. The libidinal charge attached to the mother tongue will remain there forever. The lack of a central identity can be compared to a bottomless barrel. The individual tries to fill it with the different languages he acquires, but these are not kept inside the barrel. It is like a black hole, impossible to fill, since it sucks up all the languages, and all that remains is a permanent thirst for more.

We see that the prestige of multilingualism can sometimes hide the lack of a central identity. As in the case of Casanova, the Linguistic Casanova falls in love again and again, truly thinking that “this is the real one”. After a while, all this enthusiasm is transferred onto the next language. Rank (1922) claimed that the many women, whom he (Don Juan) must always replace anew, represent for him the one irreplaceable mother. In the same fashion, the Linguistic Casanova must replace anew many languages, which represent the only and irreplaceable mother tongue.
 
Conclusion

It seems then that healthy linguistic behavior is precisely that of having a basic ethno-linguistic identity (Giles and Johnson, 1967), an organizing language, around which all the different languages constitute satellites as it were. The centrality of the mother tongue is ensured through the partial acquisition of the added languages, and the implementation of different language defense mechanisms, or language disidentifiers (Goffman, 1959).

This central linguistic identity allows the individual to feel connected, belonging to a certain human group. It would constitute the linguistic equivalent of what Erikson (1964, p. 96) called sameness as an essential dimension of identity: the possibility of maintaining certain patterns throughout the process of change. It is the possibility of sounding the same, although speaking different languages.

De Vos (1984: 235) explained difficulties in second language acquisition as based on the need to protect a previous identity, “in order to maintain one’s valued identity, a person may forego an openness to new experiences”. On the other hand, we see that an excessive openness towards new experiences can point to the lack of a central identity and the illusory search for the true identity. The imagined proficiency is the reflection of the psychological processes related to second language acquisition and national identity. Thus I can say, “Tell me how you speak, and I will tell you who you are”. It really means, “Tell me about your imagined proficiency and I will tell you who you need to think you are”. And this is all we can know. There is neither truth nor lie, nor fact nor fiction. We imagine that we speak the language that is spoken in the place we think we live. Like the dreamer who dreams he is dreaming.
 
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