Living in several languages: implications for therapy

Living in several languages: implications for therapy

Charlotte Burcka

Bilingualism and multilingualism have mainly been neglected in psy-chotherapy. This paper is based on qualitative research of subjectiveexperiences of living in more than one language, using a combinedgrounded theory and discursive approach, which raises significant issuesfor therapy. These individuals experience themselves very differently intheir different languages, and construct their languages differently.Languages acquire meanings in socio-political contexts as well as in localpersonal ones, and encode different concepts and notions of personhood.Issues of language choice within families and what it is seen to accomplishare discussed. Mothers and fathers view this issue differently. The paperargues for the importance of taking into account the differences lan-guages bring for individuals, particularly in the context of colonialismand racism. Asking about families’ experiences of their languages is afruitful way to explore cultural meanings. Multilingualism is a resourcefor mental flexibility and creativity, but there are challenges in enablingliving with its multiplicities.

Despite our reliance on language as psychotherapists, and the focuson language and narrative in the systemic literature (e.g. Andersen,1987; Anderson and Goolishian, 1988; White and Epston, 1990),issues of bilingualism and multilingualism have been almost totallyignored in psychotherapy. There are many reasons for this, includ-ing the avoidance until relatively recently in the psychotherapies, ofengaging with ‘race’ and cultural diversity (Confetti Working Party,1999). Issues of language have, with a few rare exceptions (cf. deZulueta, 1984), been addressed mainly in the context of working withrefugees and with interpreters (cf. Raval, 1996) and in relation tomigration processes (Papadopoulos and Hildebrand, 1997; Sluzki,1983). My curiosity about languages was provoked through clinicalwork, and when I was suddenly faced with the fact that I had almostentirely ignored my own experience of growing up with severallanguages. This led to the research study on which this paper is based.1

r The Association for Family Therapy 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.Journal of Family Therapy (2004) 26: 314–3390163-4445 (print); 1467-6427 (online)

a Systemic Psychotherapist and Senior Clinical Lecturer, Tavistock Clinic, 120 BelsizeLane, London NW3 5BA, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

1 A full account of the research and its findings may be found in Burck, 2005.

r 2004 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice

Language and culture are very much intertwined with each other.I regard language as ‘culture soaked’ although it is also important tokeep in mind that culture is not just language. My reason to chooselanguage as the research focus rather than culture, although there isobvious overlap, was that I thought it could enable research partici-pants to draw clearer distinctions – that it would be easier to noticelanguage distinctions. To a systemic thinker, language is of particularinterest. It allows us to consider the interconnections between in-dividual subjectivity and the social and cultural context – what StuartHall (1996) has termed the suture between the individual and culture.

Languages are intrinsically sites of ideological and social struggle,between languages, and within any one language (Bakhtin, 1981), dueto unequal power and status. Questions of how individuals manage apositioning in several languages include the meanings languagespeaking is given in the wider context, related to the power relation-ships and institutionalized practices within which individuals areembedded. Researching bilingualism and multilingualism in Britainhas also meant examining attitudes to language speaking here. It wasno surprise to discover that Britain has the most negative attitude tolanguages of any of the countries in the European Community(Zeldin, 1996), despite the more than 300 languages spoken byschoolchildren in London, making it the most linguistically diversecity in the world. More than 10 per cent of primary schoolchildrenand 9 per cent of secondary pupils have a first language other thanEnglish (TES, 2003). Researching multilingualism in Britain has totake into consideration that this is a context which does not aim tosustain it, indeed often works against it, at a time when English is adominant language in the world.

There continue to be considerable negativity and misconceptionsabout bilingualism – for example, ideas that learning two languages atan early age creates confusion and limits children’s progress. Suchnegativity was also prevalent in American and British linguisticsliterature until relatively recently, with monolingualism seen asthe norm, and research into bilingualism concentrated on deficit(Romaine, 1995). Beliefs that it could be hazardous to mental health,with statements such as ‘bilingualism can lead to a split personalityand at worst to schizophrenia’ (Adler, 1977, p. 40) were commonplace.

Informed by monolingual norms, much traditional linguistic re-search into bilingualism had focused on individual ‘language compe-tence’ rather than ‘language use’ (Cromdal, 2000). Research studieswhich took a different tack have indicated that speaking several

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languages in supportive circumstances gives individuals greater flex-ibility of thought and provides them with more interactional resourcesthan monolinguals (Ben-Zeev, 1977; Bialystok, 1991, 1997; Carringer,1974; Grosjean, 1982; Lambert, 1977; Romaine, 1995; Scott 1973;Swain and Cummins, 1979). However, these findings have been littleelaborated. More recently, studies interviewing speakers themselveshave demonstrated their fruitfulness in examining the meanings oflanguage speaking (Kanno, 2000; McKay and Wong, 1996; Miller,2000; Mills, 2001; Norton, 2000).

This literature suggests that living in several languages has im-portant effects on the construction of subjectivity and identity. Re-search in various fields had discovered significant differences whenbilingual/multilingual individuals used their different languages. In-dividuals were found to present different values and affective contentdepending on which language they used (Ervin, 1964; Ervin-Tripp,1973), individuals recalled events very differently in their differentlanguages (Javier, 1996), and, even more startling, it was reportedthat individuals could be simultaneously psychotic in one languageand coherent in another (de Zulueta, 1984). Such differences seemedparticularly pertinent to clinical and therapeutic concerns.

Research methodology

In my study I wanted to pursue speakers’ perspectives of differencesin their different languages, how they constructed these, and toexplore their implications for therapy. The use of speakers’ ownaccounts allows an analysis of the meanings given to speakinglanguages in families and in the wider context. Insider accounts alsoincorporate questions of subjectivity, and enable an examination ofthe place of language speaking in individuals’ constructions of self.This allows us to attempt to address the question of how subjectivemeanings are constructed from culture, and how individuals live thedifferences between their languages and cultures. The study is locatedin a research paradigm, informed by social constructionism, whichconsiders language as constitutive and performative. It regardslanguage and power as interlinked (Foucault, 1980; Kress, 2001;Norton, 2000).

This was an exploratory study addressing areas and absences in theliterature which seemed relevant to therapeutic concerns. The ques-tions were broadly formulated in order to encapsulate the different

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levels of meaning of language speaking and the diversity of indivi-duals’ experiences and circumstances.

How do individuals construct their experiences of living life inseveral languages?What meanings are given to speaking more than one language andwhat relational issues arise?

The study involved two kinds of data – research interviews andautobiographies. I interviewed twenty-four individuals using asemi-structured interview. The interview aimed to examine whatdifferences their languages made to individuals, and covered the cir-cumstances in which individuals learned and spoke their languages,where and how they used their languages, and their views of theeffects of speaking several languages.

The research participants were a heterogeneous group in terms oftheir racialized identities, ethnicities and cultural identities, theirlanguages, and the circumstances in which they had come to live inseveral languages. None had English as their first language and alllived currently in Britain. They ranged in age from 19 to 58. Half ofthe participants had grown up with several languages, in a number ofdifferent countries – Britain, China, Zimbabwe, Belgium, Israel andKenya. Some of these participants and the other half of the researchgroup had moved into a new language later, from countries whichincluded Denmark, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Iran, Iraq, Poland,South America and South Africa. This enabled a consideration ofdifferences between childhoods and adulthoods lived in severallanguages. Some participants had undergone forced migration aschildren or as adults and others had moved voluntarily, so the impactof this could be taken into account. Half of the research participantswere women and half were men, which allowed an analysis of genderdifference. Seventeen participants were parents.

The second data source were five autobiographies of those who hadgrown up with several languages, and who had moved from onelanguage and country to another: Ariel Dorfman (1998), Eva Hoff-man (1989), Katrin Fitzherbert (1997), Edward Said (1999) and LucSante (1998). Autobiographies are narratives of identity par excellence,and therefore are particularly suited for an examination of identityconstruction. They are a different kind of self-account to thoseproduced in a research interview, involving a different process ofconstructing a life. They exist in a very public domain, namely the



writing of private stories constructed to be relevant to a wideraudience and influenced by the conventions of autobiographicalwriting. Authors use selections of lived events to highlight particularversions of themselves, reworked to produce a ‘written self ’ (Cham-berlain and Thompson, 1998) and to produce particular claims. Usingthese two data sources allowed me to consider the similarities anddifferences between spoken and written accounts.

I have considered the research accounts and autobiographies asconstructions, not as transparent accounts of what individuals have‘really’ experienced, but constructed in the context of the literarygenre of autobiography and the research interview. I used a synthe-sized approach to analyse the texts (transcripts of the interviews andpertinent extracts from the autobiographies), a combination of agrounded analysis and a discursive approach which drew on conceptsfrom narrative theory. A hybridity of methods made it possible for meto consider different aspects of the research material and to engagewith these texts at two levels, as referential, by which I mean makingreference to past events, ideas and beliefs, and as performative, that is,as actively constructing meaning and identity.

A grounded theory approach (Charnaz, 1995; Glaser and Strauss,1967; Henwood and Pidgeon, 1996) has particular value for explora-tory research questions where there has been little prior theorization.Its strength lies in its ability to generate theory about processes and todevelop conceptual analyses of social worlds. The techniques ofgrounded theory methodology were developed to help researchersmaintain self-reflexivity, and avoid being organized by prior hypo-theses, particularly important, as I was also someone who had grownup with several languages, similar in some aspects to my researchparticipants, but also different. Like others who use grounded theoryapproaches within a social constructionist paradigm (Charnaz, 1995;Henwood and Pidgeon, 1996) I consider that researchers always havetheoretical interests and hypotheses which influence the research. It isthe very close reading of the data, ensuring that researchers build uptheir analysis slowly from considerable detail, to generate coding,which helps bypass hypotheses to some extent, since these are mostoften held at a more abstract level. The iterative process, between datacollection and analysis, through which the researcher can modify theinterview format to explore concepts further fitted the study becausethis was new territory. A grounded theory approach was useful tocreate significant concepts. However, some categories called for adifferent kind of analysis.

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My theoretical interest in the construction of identities led to theuse of a discursive approach informed by analytic concepts fromnarrative theory (Bruner, 1986; Ricoeur, 1985) and narrative analysis(Riessman, 1993) to examine individuals’ self-accounts. I regardedthese both as constructions and as claims of identity (Linde, 1993). Adiscursive approach offered a theoretical lens to consider the ways inwhich individuals constructed their self-narratives in positing identityas constituted and reconstituted through discourse use (Davies andHarre, 1997; Wetherell, 1998). Individuals are viewed as creatingsubject positions for themselves and for others in their ongoing inter-actions, both implicitly and explicitly (Davies and Harre, 1997). It wasalso useful to consider how speakers brought into play social identities,negotiated definitions, and claimed or had had identities claimed forthem over time (Antaki et al., 1996). The notion of cultural genres(Ricoeur, 1985) helped to examine how individuals’ narratives werestructured and which ‘canonical’ stories and cultural templates theydrew on. Such an approach provided a way to scrutinize the construc-tion and claiming of identity, to theorize links between the personal,social and cultural, and to unpack connections between subjectivities andlanguage. It also had a fit with theoretical concerns in systemic therapy.

In this paper I go on to consider certain significant issues of livingin several languages which were identified through the analysis. First,I examine some of the differences created by language for individualsand the ways in which languages are seen to confer difference. I lookat ways in which individuals construct their languages and howlanguage speaking is given meaning. The place of language speakingin family relationships is analysed. I go on to discuss the implicationsfor individuals and ways in which they made use of their languagedifferences. I conclude by setting this in the context of therapy.

Differences created by language

All of the research participants and the autobiographers addresseddifferences between their languages: in how they experienced them-selves, distinctions drawn between their first and second/subsequentlanguages, what their languages allowed, and the notions of person-hood they encoded. The ways in which individuals constructed theirdifferent languages were interlinked with their experience of them-selves as speakers. Languages took on meanings for individuals bothat personal, local levels and at socio-political levels, which impacted ontheir sense of self and how they positioned themselves.



Different experiences of self

Significantly, all of these research participants and writers, whatevertheir histories and circumstances of language learning, describedexperiencing themselves differently in each of their languages. Thiswas a particularly striking similarity given their heterogeneity as agroup and differences between spoken and written accounts of a life.The following extracts were typical of the range of differences reported.

Renata: You’re, what you are, doesn’t entirely overlap. When I wasspeaking German I was a slightly different person than when Iwas speaking English.

Wasan: It’s more of a sense of maybe having a different sense of identityin the different languages.

Bernard: I’ve got a different behaviour, even with body movement. Iprobably use my hands, and my whole body would be a lot morelively and expressive than when I speak English.

The differences noted and reported by individuals included differentsenses of subjectivity, of identity and of embodiment. I will return tothe implications of these differences later in the paper. The ways inwhich individuals referred to their languages were interlinked withthe way they talked of themselves as speakers.

First languages

Individuals commonly drew distinctions between their first andsubsequent languages – and these meanings were very much con-structed in relation to each other. A very common distinction madebetween languages related to emotional expressiveness, with firstlanguages mostly connoted as the language for intimacy, both signify-ing and engendering closeness – by this I mean that speaking a firstlanguage was a marker of closeness, and the effect of speaking one’sfirst language conveyed closeness. The prosodic elements of a firstlanguage, its sounds, rhythms, ebbs and flows, its music, were drawnattention to, in its absence. Naadir, who had moved to Britain fromIraq as a young adult, expressed this as follows:

It’s easier and closer if you say it in your own language because it meansdifferent. You put it with a flavour. . . . More intimate. So it becomesmuch closer.

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First languages were commonly attributed with special qualities,described as the language for creativity, for poetry, play and humour.The ease in a first language, in which individuals are positionedunselfconsciously, in comparison to a struggle in a subsequent lan-guage, could provide a sense of ‘being at home’ in it. A first languagecould engender a sense of belonging and a sense of authenticity.These meanings given to first languages were also constitutive of thespeaker – individuals saw themselves as expressive, humorous,‘themselves’ and so on in this language. A first language could alsocarry a symbolic meaning, of national identity, and could therefore beused to make political claims.

Second/subsequent languages

Subsequent languages were mainly positioned in relation to theconstruction of first languages, and were commonly viewed as moreformal and constraining, and definitely difficult to make jokes in.

One of the most prevalent constructions of second languages wasthat it introduced distance. Individuals spoke of this distance in avariety of ways. Sante, in his autobiography of his move from Belgiumto the USA when a child, constructed English, his second language, asdistancing him from experience and from feelings: ‘No one will everbreak his heart with English words, he thinks. It is at home [in French]that he is naked’ (1998, p. 238). Here, Sante connoted the distance asprotective. Other individuals noted that a second language distancedthem from themselves, and from language itself.

A number of individuals saw their second language as allowingthem a greater freedom of expressiveness. Those who had moved intoa new language as young adults, like Estelle and Henka, particularlyexpressed this idea.

Estelle: Mmm, I think sometimes it’s easier for me to speak English about[pause] I always remember that thing where, you know, when Istarted speaking English I could swear [laughs]. I could say reallyterrible words.

Henka: I might be more intimate in certain things in English, because theywould feel so uncomfortable. It’s a foreign language . . . it’s kind ofartificial. In Polish it would be very disclosing . . . in English, it isthis artificialness that the, the, the, that I’ve learned the meaningof the word, that gives me, you know, more of eh, um, gives memore courage to use it.



This distance which a second language brought was from constraintsexperienced by individuals in their first language. This enabledindividuals to take greater risks, or indeed to change in other ways.Saskia’s comment typified such a construction:

Saskia: It was one of the attractions at the time – speaking a differentlanguage and living in a different country allows you to be adifferent person.

These individuals had used a second language to construct themselvesanew.

Experiences of inarticulacy in a second language also impactedprofoundly on some individuals’ constructions of themselves asspeakers. Many individuals spoke of the difficulties they experiencedwith humour in their second languages, with the result that theybecame known and thought of themselves as lacking a sense ofhumour altogether, rather than being seen as an effect of being asecond language speaker. Individuals mainly used metaphors ofutilitarian articles for their second/subsequent language, in contrastwith the notion of being inside one’s first language. Images such as‘ill-fitting shoes’ and ‘pianos with keys missing’ conjured up theinsufficiencies of second languages.

What languages allow and compel

Individuals’ languages were also considered to differ with regard toconcepts they encoded. Such differences were apparent between alllanguages – although some individuals’ languages differed from eachother more than others. Di-Yin had grown up multilingually in main-land China beforemoving as a young adult to live in England. She spokeof how she presented herself differently in her different languages:

Speaking English helps me be more aggressive but even with that, Icouldn’t be, sometimes I really could be successfully aggressive, but onlyafter that I could feel such an energy drain.

Di-Yin spoke of being able to ‘perform’ aggressiveness, to ‘performherself ’ as aggressive in English even though this was difficult, whichshe did not do/could not do in Mandarin or Shanghai dialect. She alsodescribed experiencing different feelings in English from those sheexperienced in her Chinese languages:

Angry, yes, also in English. Especially in Chinese culture, being angryyou should suppress it. So it’s much easier to express it in English. So

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even if I don’t need to express it, sometimes I keep it to myself,nevertheless I feel it in English.

Di-Yin only experienced anger in English because she only everexpressed anger in English. ‘It is not experience that organisesexpression, but the other way around – expression organises experi-ence’ (Volosinov, 1986, p. 85). Di-Yin’s languages named, specifiedand ‘allowed’ different emotional states. Slobin (1996), in his study ofhow children speaking different languages describe pictures differ-ently, has proposed that we learn ‘thinking for speaking’, that we learnto pick out salient features of an event which are encodable inlanguage. In a similar way, Di-Yin had learned ‘feeling for speaking’in English differently to the way she did so in Mandarin or ShanghaiDialect. Vygotsky’s (1934/1962) idea of the way speech becomesinternalized as thinking could also be said to be demonstrated here.What was also significant was that a positioning in more than onelanguage enabled individuals to notice the ways in which emotion wassocially constructed.

Languages differ, then, in what they enable us, or even in whatthey require us to say or not to say. Different languages speak usdifferently.

Languages encode different notions of personhood

A further difference between individuals’ languages related to thenotion of personhood they encoded. Wasan’s sense of himself ashaving a different identity in each of his languages related to suchdifferences:

Where I might connect more in Gujarati um would be through stories,[indistinct] a lot of the stories are very much about what you should belike, and as a son, what you should be like, and as the eldest son, so thereare lots of, kind of, stories . . . all about duty to your parents and thatkind of thing.

Wasan referenced his Gujarati identity as constituted within his family,drawing on cultural templates which specified particular roles andresponsibilities in his relationships – a very different sense of himselffrom how he experienced himself in English. Di-Yin similarly spokeabout Chinese concepts important to her sense of herself in Chinese,proverbs about how to be at certain ages. Here different constructionsof subjectivity within each language informed the way individualsexperienced themselves.



Languages are constitutive of meaning – the very different conceptsthey encode make profound differences to their speakers.

Socio-political meanings of language speaking

Languages acquired socio-political meanings in relation to differencesin power and status in the wider context. This was highlighted mostclearly in a colonial context, where those whose languages had leaststatus and least power spoke the most languages. Petiri, a blackZimbabwean whose first language was Shona, grew up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe speaking five languages, while Onno, a white SouthAfrican, was a monolingual Afrikaans speaker until late adolescence.Petiri talked of how he now perceived the effect of being educated inEnglish.

It had an impact in the sense that personally I began to feel that Englishwas superior to Shona, therefore, there was some degree of culturalimperialism going there, I was aware of that, and also, the more fluent Ibecame in English, the more I wanted to speak English to people I knewdidn’t speak it. . . . I would use more complicated words, which I knewthey didn’t understand, almost as a way of showing off. You know, I canspeak English better than you. . . . It becomes very much like inter-nalized racism where you actually become ashamed to speak Shona.

Through the use of discourses of postcolonialism Petiri placed hislearning of the colonizers’ language as a powerful aspect of colonizingand racializing processes. He commented on ways in which he himselfhad participated in these processes, now viewed as mistaken. He hadsince developed a very different relationship to Shona.

Onno, a white South African, had a different struggle, having hadto accept that Afrikaans, his language for emotional expressivenessand intimacy, was viewed by others as the language of oppression andevil. He had viewed learning English as offering an escape from thesecontradictory meanings, but he continued to struggle with how torework the meanings of his first language.

Positioning and being positioned in language

Living in more than one language and culture varied considerablydepending on an individual’s racialization. In these research partici-pants’ and writers’ accounts, speaking a minoritized language acted asa marker of their difference, and this intersected with individuals’racialization to help construct ethnicity and cultural identity.

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Research participants who had grown up speaking a minoritylanguage recalled that this positioned them as different, and oftenas ‘inferior’. As children they had avoided speaking their firstlanguages outside of the home, wanting to claim an identity as adominant language speaker. Here individuals’ racialization hadplayed a crucial role, well illustrated by Quinlan, a young womanborn in Hong Kong who had lived in Britain since the age of 5, in heraccount of her experiences at school.

She [teacher] came up to me and she said ‘if you need any help with yourEnglish, or if you need any help with . . .’ just this, this preconceived ideathat because I’m Chinese, I can’t, and then I’ve had English teacherswho are in total disbelief that my mother tongue isn’t English. Just like,‘how is that possible?’ Ugh, ugh. I mean it’s something I’ve had to dealwith all my life.

For Quinlan, her fluency in both her languages was never taken forgranted by others. The other Chinese, South Asian, Arabic, Israeli andZimbabwean research participants often had their claims as Englishspeakers questioned in ongoing ways.

White research participants’ claims of identity were challenged lesscontinually. Their whiteness sometimes became signified as an Englishidentity. However, with a few exceptions, they did not present them-selves as aware of any privileges due to their racialization, particularlyif they had been preoccupied with the ways in which they had beenviewed as different when children.

Languages are not only constitutive of meaning but are also contextswithin which individuals position themselves and are positioned.

Summary of differences created by language

Individuals’ experience of themselves as different in each of theirlanguages was complexly related to their construction of their lan-guages and the differences their languages conferred. First andsecond languages were spoken of and experienced very differently– most commonly first languages as enabling emotional expressive-ness and second/subsequent languages as introducing distance,although some individuals discovered that their second languageshad enabled them to express themselves more fully when releasedfrom constraints embedded in their first languages. Languagesdiffered in their encoding of constructs of personhood and waysin which emotions were constructed and expressed, and therefore



constituted speakers differently. The different statuses of languagesalso affected speakers, and offered different subject positionings toindividuals, intersecting with racialization processes.

Family relationships and language use

Meanings of language speaking were also constructed within familyrelationships, and linguistic identities were claimed and refused aspart of relational processes. It is perhaps not surprising that issuesaround language use within families are significantly gendered, inparticular interlinked with how mothering and fathering have beenconceptualized. In this section I analyse the ways in which women andmen constructed their parenting and language use in different ways.

Most of the research participants were in cross-language partner-ships which were on the whole conducted in English. Their partnershad sometimes attempted to learn their first language but this wasrarely sustained. When individuals became parents, new questionshad been raised about language, although not always explicitlydiscussed. Significantly many individuals had parented for some ofthe time in their first/childhood languages in the context of livingtheir lives in the dominant language. Despite considerable culturalvariations between the research participants, mothers generally talkedabout language use differently from fathers.

Mothering, fathering and first languages

In the context of becoming mothers in Britain and living in English,most of these women had spoken their first/childhood languages totheir babies from birth.

Ffionn: When my daughter was born, in the hospital when she was born,and I saw her for the first time and I picked her up and talked toher, I had to talk to her in Welsh. I just couldn’t speak to her inEnglish and I still can’t.

Renata: With my children there was a kind of intimate vocabulary and that’sprobably why with my daughter I spoke a lot of German becausethat kind of tender playfulness came much more naturally inGerman, playful, what you do with little children, that sort of thing.

The notion of the ‘naturalness’ of using their first/childhood languagefor mothering was referenced by most of these women. Motheringitself has been predominantly constructed as ‘natural’ despite feminist

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work to deconstruct this notion (cf. Phoenix and Woollett, 1991). Theoverlapping constructions of ‘naturalness’ of mothering and of a firstlanguage underpinned the implicit concept of ‘mother tongue’embedded in these accounts. The two women, who had spokenEnglish to their children, also positioned themselves in relation tothis notion. Therese, for example, referred to having assimilated‘too quickly’, disrupting the ‘naturalness’ of using her first language tomother.

Fathers did not use their first language with their babies from birth,except for the only father who spoke this with his wife, but someswitched into their first language when their children were older.Bernard explained that he read in French, his first language, to hischildren, rather than speaking this with them:

Bernard: We never actually spoke French. Um, except for reading, whichwe read with a loud voice and I would, well I was teaching herFrench, yes, but we didn’t speak French in normal conversation.We had our little sessions, but (2) I never forced that on to thechildren. It was not a natural thing to do in a way, like the mothertongue. A mother who is, say, born in France and come toEngland and marry and had a first baby, she might tend to speakFrench to her children when they were babies.

CB: Did you ever have that feeling?

Bernard: No. Never had that feeling. I didn’t feel very comfortablespeaking it to my babies in the language in the context. For meit was out of context in a funny way.

Bernard uses the notion of ‘mother tongue’ here, as excluding him asa father. Some of these fathers’ constructions of a lack of context inwhich to speak their first language to their children contrasts with thewomen’s accounts. As men often rely on their partners’ relationshipwith their children as a base for their fathering relationship (Burckand Daniel, 1995), the most significant factor in their decision-makingabout language use as a parent may have been that their partners didnot speak these men’s first language to their children. And wherewomen connoted their first language as one for intimacy and playful-ness in parenting, fathers referred to their language differently.‘Father tongue’ is never named in these accounts, but Bernard, likeother fathers, constructed language speaking as educational and forcarrying cultural continuity.



However, when fathers did switch to speaking their first or child-hood languages with their children after having parented in English,they experienced this as conferring intimacy to their relationships inmuch the same way as women. As one father put it: ‘It brought uscloser together.’ The phrase ‘mother tongue’, which continues to be soprevalent in the literature, seemed to these research participants tomean that the language in which one was mothered was for mother-ing, not for fathering. As such, it may be crucial to challenge itsunquestioned use.

Parenting in a second language

What of the choice and effect of parenting in a second language?Some research participants chose English to parent, and othersswitched gradually from their first language to English. I examinedhow individuals warranted their decisions, and the advantages anddisadvantages of parenting in a second language.

There were difficulties for women in sustaining their mothering intheir first languages due to concerns about excluding fathers. Theywere held responsible and held themselves responsible for theirinclusion by switching to English, rather than their partners learningthe other language. English-speaking husbands thus sided withEnglish dominance.

Some parents had chosen to parent in English for reasons of facili-tating their children’s inclusion in the community and to support theirchildren’s success in education. Several individuals thought parentingin a second language enabled them to connect to their children’sconcerns, which would have been impossible in their first language.

The distance which a second language brought also had unex-pected effects on parenting. Ursula described how the distance ofEnglish protected her from replicating her own mother’s parentingwhich had been abusive, and allowed her a different kind of closenesswith her child:

Inmy very downmoments, I actually, when I spoke Danish, I heardmyselfas mymother. I thought God, and so I think, yes it was always a relief to getout of that mood, so, it allowed me to distance myself from myself, Isuppose . . . but it certainly, yes English, doing it in English was easier.

This distance brought by a second language seemed to introduce aspace for self-reflexivity, enabling a parent to do their parentingdifferently. As one father put it, it stopped him ‘firing from the hip’.

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Children’s claims

It was not only parents who made language choices within families. Aschildren grew older they played a major role in making choices aboutlanguage. Saskia’s son began to refuse to speak her first language:

But my son also said things like, he didn’t want to speak German whenhe was little, ‘I’m an English boy, not German.’

Saskia’s son made a claim to an English identity through refusing tospeak German. Children were acutely aware that speaking a minoritylanguage constructed cultural identity. Similar to many research par-ticipants who had grown up with minority languages, they longed toclaim a dominant language identity, which was clearly constructed asmonolingual.

Summary of language use and family relationships

Language use in families accomplished several different aims. Parent-ing in a first language engendered intimacy, and could also act as aclaim for a linguistic and cultural identity, both for the parent and thechild. This needed a commitment by both parents not to be experi-enced as an excluding alliance. Parenting in a second languageinvolved language loss in the next generation and a loss of diversity,a loss of emotional nuances, and of historical and local knowledge.Parents became unable to draw on the richness of their first languageand ways it encoded cultural concepts. However, some parentsconstructed parenting in their second language as supporting theirchildren to be successful in the dominant culture. It also emerged inthe analysis that a second language had enabled some parents tobe more of the kinds of parents they wanted to be, aiding ‘doing’parenting differently.

But what was most striking was how persistent parents needed to beto maintain their first language speaking in their families in thecontext of Britain.

Implications of language differences

Being bilingual/multilingual for the individuals in this study meantexperiencing themselves differently in each of their languages andtherefore having to find a way to position themselves in relation tothese differences, which inevitably included contradictions and ten-sions, and unequal relationships. They had to find ways to live with



the idea that translation between their languages was both possibleand impossible, as Derrida (1978/1997, 1985) put it. All of the auto-biographical writers and many of the research participants wereconcerned with discontinuities in the switch from one language toanother. This was particularly evident for those individuals who hadexperienced major disruption throughmoving country and language.

Here it was helpful to identify the discursive work (Wetherell et al.,2001) which individuals carried out in the interviews and autobio-graphies in relation to their language differences. Individuals drew ona number of different constructions to address their multiplicities. Iparticularly want to consider the use of a construct of ‘doubleness’and to examine hybridization.

Doubleness

Many of these individuals made use of an idea of doubleness, of adouble self, in a number of different ways.

Individuals who were brought up in families speaking a minoritylanguage experienced home and the outside world as demarcated bylanguage differences. Angela, brought up in Britain, exemplified this:

You became quite good at acting because you had to act in a differentway in the English-speaking community and then suddenly you’re in theSicilian community, to the point of dress, clothes, language.

Linked to this idea of a ‘doubled world’ Angela talked of herself as‘doubled’:

And you live in no man’s land, especially language-wise. You’re neitherone nor the other. And it’s quite, it’s quite, and in childhood, it’s quite anisolating factor in your life. Um. You have this dual personality. Onlywhen you get older do you appreciate it, and you look back.

This is a particularly poignant construct of doubleness, that of a‘neither/nor’ identity, rather than a ‘both/and’ identity, which had alsobeen referenced as ‘outsider-ness’ in each of her contexts.

Those who had migrated as young adults, such as Ihsan andUrsula, drew on a somewhat different construct of doubleness.

Ihsan: So you have that little amount of language and then you come outand then you go to another culture, another language, so you leavewhatever you left behind, so whatever you go back to. . . . Andsomebody actually did tell me that, I speak with them in Farsi andthey said to me, ‘You sound like a young man.’

330 Charlotte Burck


Ursula: But all the understanding that I had gained in English, I hadn’ttransferred to the Danish me at all. That was still the, thetroublesome teenager locked away into a world of her own there.

Here the sense of doubleness was related to separate periods of theirlives lived in different languages as well as in different places: a youngperson in one language, an adult in another. For some individualsthese notions of doubleness encompassed a primary sense of self, mostoften the first language self; for others it did not.

Another notion of a doubled self had particular salience in acontext in which the first language and culture had been attackedor disqualified. Here the ‘first language self ’ was considered ‘authen-tic’, encompassing a cultural identity which could counter the pro-cesses of colonization, while the second language self was seen as akind of ‘false self ’ constructed through subject positions offered in thecolonizers’ language. This usage made important identity claims inorder to challenge colonization processes, but may have created otherdilemmas, such as essentializing the first language self.

The use of a construct of ‘doubleness’ seems particularly striking ata time when we have come to think of ourselves as multiple. Is thisreflective of the dualism so inherent in many Western discourses? Orshould we consider this a canonical narrative of identity – Du Bois’(1903/1989) African-American ‘double consciousness’ – ‘two souls, twothoughts, two unreconciled strivings’? Laing (1965) and Winnicott(1960) also offered concepts of doubleness with ideas of the ‘true’ and‘false’ self.

What I have come to believe is that individuals, living with dis-juncture and contradictions, in constructing themselves as doubled,accomplish a sense of coherence. In relation to our culture’s privile-ging of coherence and developmental narratives, individuals seemedto work hard to maintain a sense of their own continuity andconsistency. Referring to oneself as doubled may be viewed as a wayto paradoxically both attain cohesiveness and sustain differences – ittransforms discontinuity into two distinct developmental narratives.However, individuals also made use of other notions of multiplicity.

Hybridization

When individuals ‘owned’ their sense of multiplicity, despite inherentcontradictions, they were more able to find ways to use their differentperspectives. Those who had grown up with a minoritized languagehad mainly encountered a perceived demand for a unitary and



singular identity, predisposing them to leave out aspects of them-selves. Here contextual resources were crucial. A number of indivi-duals noted that they had later encountered a context which hadrendered the tensions in their language differences irrelevant. Angelahad experienced learning French as releasing her from unresolvedquestions about her identity. Others had found that a move to a newcountry, or a multiracial friendship group, provided a ‘third space’ asBhabha (1994) would put it, where polarizations were unsettled, andmultiplicities could be acknowledged in a new way.

A sense of the multiplicities of their languages engendered adifferent relationship to language and to meaning. Hoffman (1989,p. 275) wrote of this as follows:

Because I have learned the relativity of cultural meanings on my skin,I can never take any one set of meanings as final. . . . I know thatI’ve been written in a variety of languages; I know to what extent I’ma script.

Such a self-reflexive positioning enabled individuals to bring togethertheir different perspectives, to develop a hybridization, despite thecontradictions this involved. Individuals in this study employed anumber of different strategies of hybridization, making use of theinteraction of their language differences in their everyday lives. A fewindividuals would explicitly switch between their languages if stuckwith a dilemma, in order to try to generate new ideas. Researchparticipants referred to the advantages of always having anotherlanguage perspective to draw on. Ihsan reported that he had foundthat he paid attention at two different levels in a conversation:speaking in English and getting a sense of the person in Farsi. Onlyone research participant felt very split by his languages; he had neverfound a context in which his multiplicities had been validated.

In the analysis of the autobiographies, it became evident thatauthors were ‘working’ their discontinuities, making connectionsbetween their different language perspectives, which had proveddifficult during their growing up. Said (1999) explicitly referred toways he had found to use his Arabic and English perspectives in hisacademic writing, using a musical metaphor, ‘contrapuntal’ – eachperspective positioned and changing position in relation to the otherin turn, in order to create new thinking.

As individuals shifted between contexts, they also moved betweensuch claims of their multiplicity as generating creativity and thestruggles of living with their inevitable contradictions.

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Summary of the implications of language differences

Taking a discursive approach to examine ways in which individualsconstructed themselves in the interviews and autobiographies high-lighted the use of a construct of doubleness, which I have argued maybe considered as a strategy to manage differences in the face ofdemands for singularity and coherence. Individuals’ abilities to makeuse of their multiple language perspectives linked to their contextualresources. Just as being bilingual in supportive circumstances hasbeen found to give children mental flexibility and greater creativity(Bialystok, 1991, 1997; Grosjean, 1982; Lambert, 1977; Romaine,1995), adults in this study, on the whole, constructed their multi-lingualism as advantageous, creative, and even radical.

Implications for therapy

What are the implications of this research for therapy? This study hashighlighted how using different languages has different effects andmeanings for individuals and their relationships, and therefore fortherapy. When we neglect to explore issues of language with families,significant aspects of self and relationships are left out. These aspectsare perhaps most in danger of neglect when family members arefluent in English.

Krause (2002) has argued cogently that therapists need to take risksand find ways to explore the ‘doxic’ (Bourdieu, 1991), the culturalpatterning of meanings – aspects of families’ lives, as well as their own,which are not explicit. My proposition here is that explorations concern-ing a family’s languages are a particularly rewarding way to do so. Manyof the questions I asked research participants in this study are pertinentto therapeutic sessions – to explore the differential effects of language onsubjectivity and on relationships, and to take into account the effects ofcolonization and racialization. The ease with which individuals were ableto reflect on their relationships with and in language, and the significanceof these relationships for their lives indicate how important and produc-tive this area is for therapy. At times reflections on the differences theirlanguages encoded provided a recontextualization, which generatednew ideas and moved a story from blame towards curiosity. Inviting aself-reflexive stance to language and its effects can open up a range ofresources for families and for therapy.

As Thomas (1995, 2001) has argued, an examination of the mean-ings of language is particularly crucial in the context of colonialism



and racism. Instead of taking the language in which therapy isconducted for granted, seen as a neutral medium, the effects of acolonizing language on the ways individuals position or repositionthemselves benefit from explicit attention. Unpacking these meaningsin therapy enables therapists and families to consider their effectseven when they need to use the dominant language to communicatewith each other. Incorporating notions of dominant and subjugatedlanguages, alongside those of dominant and subjugated discourseswithin any one language (cf. White and Epson, 1990), may enablesuch conversations to develop further.

Individuals accomplish different things in their different lan-guages. Speaking in one’s first language in therapy may be significantbecause of the meanings it has acquired for the individual in thecontext of a new language. Individuals’ idiosyncratic use of languagecan itself construct issues of significance (DiNicola, 1997), which are indanger of getting lost in translation. Concerns are constructed indissimilar ways in different languages. Certain experiences can best,and possibly only, be elicited in a first language. This is why it is soimportant to work with interpreters, although as Raval (1996), amongothers has pointed out, there are considerable complexities in suchwork, in relation to some of the impossibilities of translation, theinterpreter’s position of managing the in-between of languages whichencode very different meanings, and the number of relationshipswhich need attention.

However, if the disconnection from meanings encoded in the firstlanguage is experienced as disruptive for some individuals, for othersa second language may offer a freedom from perceived constraintsand be relished. Second languages have their use in therapy. Thedistance a second language can bring to an individual may beprotective and enable, among other things, the bringing into lan-guage of traumatic experience impossible in a first language.

Speaking in a second language can also facilitate experimentation,a way of doing something differently, something new. As was identi-fied in the research, many individuals used their new language tochange and were changed by their new language. Some individuals inthis study saw parenting in a second language as facilitating theirbeing the kind of parent they wished to be. Using a second languagecan also focus attention on crucial aspects of communication, becauseof the struggle to do so. Of course, it can also construct misunder-standings, perhaps particularly when we neglect the effects of being asecond language speaker.

334 Charlotte Burck


Language speaking is also interwoven with claims and counter-claimsof identity, sometimes in response to racism and exclusions in the widercontext. Issues of language are intertwined with other transformationalprocesses of migration. Falicov (2002) has suggested that migration pro-cesses are characterized by ambiguous loss and tensions betweenpresence and absence. Language speaking can come to signify loyaltiesto the past or present as family members renegotiate their sense ofthemselves and their relationships. Tensions about how to interrelatethe different languages and cultures are often played out within thefamily. Families often present for help when different perspectives havebecome polarized. Finding ways to enable everyone to struggle withthe inevitable contradictions between different languages, rather thanhaving these lodged, as they so often are, between parents and chil-dren, opens up opportunities of making use of these differences.

When parents have different first languages, there are questions ofwhich languages to use to conduct family relationships. A convictionthat being bilingual is advantageous and a belief that alliances will bemainly benign seem crucial to support the speaking of a language noteveryone understands. This study has highlighted the importance ofunpacking implicit decision-making of language use for parenting.The speaking of a first/childhood language conferred a sense ofintimacy and closeness to parent–child relationships, as well as pre-serving language and cultural richness. However, contextual influ-ences meant that English easily gained ground in family talk. Thisresearch has brought home how determined individuals need to be topersist in living multilingually in Britain, and how easily languages arelost. This is a concern held worldwide (Abley, 2003).

Challenging negative constructions of ‘bilingualism’ and generat-ing the potential of making use of multiple language perspectiveswould benefit from more explicit attention. If an individual andfamily can use all their languages within a therapeutic session, acontext may be created in which their multiplicities, contradictionsand loyalties will be helpfully explored (see e.g. DiNicola, 1998;Falicov, 1998). Individuals and families can switch between theirown languages even when the therapist is monolingual. The experi-ence of speaking in one’s first language and then translating oneselfcan provide another way to elicit different perspectives and affectivedescriptions, and to make use of language differences. An explorationof how individuals use their different languages for diverse accom-plishments may foster self-reflexive positionings, and helpfully de-construct demands for singularity.



These issues are pertinent for multilingual therapists too, who maybe able to make use of the distance of a second language to facilitateconnection to difficult issues (Burck, 1997), as well as to face chal-lenges of including in their first language experiences. Developingtheir self-reflexivity further about their positioning in several lan-guages may enable therapists to use their language differences moreexplicitly.

Having several languages is a resource, as well as a site ofcontestation, for families and for therapists. Constructing a milieuwhich enables living with multiplicity is challenging for us all. Findingways to subvert the silencing of other language perspectives to whichwe as therapists have so often contributed may enable us better tosupport the flexibility that enables multiplicity to be lived as resilience,and to make our own contribution to the preservation of language.

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the invaluable contributions made to this workby Professor Ann Phoenix and Professor Margaret Wetherell, whosethinking have profoundly informedmy own, and the generosity of theresearch participants without whom it would not have been possible.

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Living in several languages: implications for therapy