Selves in Two Languages

Michèle Koven . Selves in Two Languages: Bilinguals' Verbal Enactments of Identity in French and Portuguese ( Studies in Bilingualism, 34 ). Amsterdam, The Netherlands/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : John Benjamins . 2007 . 327 pp . Hb (9789027241450) €110.00/$149.00 . Reviewed by Rosemary Wilson It is sometimes hard to remember that, as recently as the 1960s, bilingualism was seen as a deviation from the monolingual norm and therefore at best unwanted and at worst unhealthy. More recently, the dual linguistic competence of bilingual individuals has encouraged the view that bilinguals may be ‘dual’ in other ways such as their thought processes, personality and emotions. A substantial body of autobiographical writing by bilingual authors has presented reflections on these differences in themselves but experimental studies have to date been limited. A major study by Michèle Koven, one that has been reported in tantalising sections over the last ten years, is now published in her book Selves in Two Languages: Bilinguals' Verbal Enactments of Identity in French and Portuguese. By combining participant introspection, discourse analysis and listener perceptions, Koven presents a systematic empirical approach to the investigation of the role of language in self-identities and emotion. Part 1 (Chapters 1-3) provides the background to this study, which focuses on a group of young French-Portuguese bilingual women. Koven provides a review of previous studies of how bilinguals ‘perform’ in different languages. She points out that, in most studies, the actual language used by respondents was translated into English before it was coded so that content is considered separately from form; in this way, Koven clearly differentiates her own research from other studies. The next chapter sets the context of the study with a description of Portuguese immigration to France and the position of a typical Luso-descendant (LD). Koven makes the point that, despite the fact that members of this community are keen to maintain links both with Portugal and the Portuguese language, LDs speak ‘monolingual-like French’ (p. 43) that reflects their age group and educational level while in Portuguese they can seem uneducated or from an earlier age because of the influence of their parents' language. Part 2 (Chapters 4-6) covers the methodology and findings of the study. Koven first analyses participants' own accounts of how they feel in their two languages, using narrative analysis as her framework. Selected comments by participants illustrate Koven's conclusion that requests for metapragmatic reflections of this kind can lead to waffle - to quote Linda, ‘I tell myself it's maybe that, but I can't tell you, y'know’ (p. 65) - but all the participants report differences in themselves, variously attributed to personality, behaviour or feelings. The next chapter presents the methodology of the core study, in which each participant was interviewed by another LD and encouraged to recount at least six stories of personal experience, once in French and once in Portuguese. The resulting transcripts were then analysed in terms of the speaker roles that the participants adopted in each story and the registers they used. The results of this extensive analysis show clear differences between how the participants present themselves in their two languages. The next chapter describes one of the most fascinating parts of the study: LD listeners' perceptions of participants from the recorded interviews. Their caustic comments demonstrate their own views of language and social class in the LD community; in some cases, I found myself hoping that the participants would not recognise themselves should they read the book! Part 3 of the book (Chapters 8-10) focuses in detail on two participants, Teresa and Isabel, and provides a more in-depth analysis of the relationship between the stories the women told, their self-reports and the listeners' perceptions. Koven emphasises that neither of these two women can be seen as representative of the sample, let alone of LDs as a whole, but these detailed accounts enable a link to be made between the three parts of the study and to show how the patterns found in the group of participants as a whole come to life in two individuals. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications of the study for the use of these three methodologies in future investigations of bilingualism. The major contribution of this study is not only how it draws on different methodologies but also the way that participants have been able to choose to respond in their own languages. A recent large scale study provided insights into how individuals feel when they use different languages and suggested the source of such feelings (Pavlenko 2006) but respondents were restricted to commenting in English. Other studies have compared attitudes to the same situation in different linguistic contexts by respondents' reactions and use of vocabulary in different languages (Panayiotou 2006), or have drawn on third-person observations of participants to support their different reactions in two languages (Hull 1990). The emotional aspects of language use, in particular the expression of anger and the use of swear words, that come out in the LD participants' personal stories have been discussed at length (Dewaele 2004, 2006) but by means of respondents' reflections, again in English, rather than an analysis of their language use. Koven's study brings these different approaches together in a way that is both complex and ultimately logical. By the end, we know how the participants not only feel about themselves but also how they appear to others, with these necessarily impressionistic views underpinned by detailed linguistic analysis. This volume is a very welcome addition not only to studies in bilingualism but more generally to research in the humanities. Koven's lucid style and attention to detail make it a model of academic writing that could usefully be read by students and researchers in other fields. A counterbalance to the more theoretical sections is provided by the inclusion of lengthy transcripts, although readers may be slightly disconcerted by the sometimes extreme vulgarity of this group of educated young professional women. But one question remains unanswered: why were no men included in the study? We could speculate as to what their stories might have produced. Perhaps Koven will let us hear their voices at another occasion

Art · Cognitive psychology · Competence (human resources · Identity (music · Introspection · Linguistics · Multilingualism · Neuroscience of multilingualism · Norm (philosophy · Pedagogy · Portuguese · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Psychology · Social Psychology

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