Ok, since I’ve started talking about character voices and dialects… let’s do another little article about that. The topic I want to discuss here is the presence of characters who do not speak the fiction’s primary language, which is likely also the fiction’s in-universe language. That is to say, we’ll be talking about real-world language issues. And since I’m not a native speaker, I might have some insights for you that you don’t usually think about.
Alright, so I think it would be best to start by mentioning that most depictions of multilingual characters in media are pretty bad. If I had to guess why, the problem is a lack of lived experience with multilingual people or environments among authors. We know that a lot of media we are commonly (and often unfortunately) exposed to come from Americans who, if we are lucky, fluently speak one language, and that’s English (Simplified). If we’re fortunate because there are a lot of people working on writing out there, especially in the case of video games, that have, at best, a loose (maybe high-school) grasp of English.
Now, let’s get to the characters and their voices.
So, you have a character in your work of fiction who uses two or more languages with varying proficiency. Usually, for this to matter, the primary language of said character will be different from the language used by the characters they communicate with. In essence, they are the foreigner in foreign lands, at least usually. Of course, realistically, there are cases where this happens for other reasons, but we’ll not muddy the waters with that too much. What matters is that the language this character uses is not the one they hold the highest proficiency in.
If the character is very fluent in the language used around them, they might be marked with a peculiar accent that makes them stand out, and it is true that for casual speakers, even those with high fluency with additional languages, accent is something hard to get rid of. Accents come from different phonetic patterns that languages possess and then are transferred from the primary language to a secondary one. Among human languages, there are approximately 500 different recognisable sounds. A language will make use of between a dozen and well over a hundred of such sounds, so there’s a significant variance there, though the actual issue is the coverage of phonemes between languages. The less of that coverage exists, the harder it will be for a speaker to adopt a natural tone. But this goes further. Our ability to recognise phonemes is intrinsically tied to language exposure, especially at a young age. Without that exposure, we are neurologically disadvantaged at identifying phonemes and, as such, also reproducing them, lacking the ability to pick up on why we’re “saying things wrong”, so to speak. What’s important to remember is that while we don’t think about it, everyone speaks with an accent, including speaking their primary language with one. We just have the biassed tendency to recognise that as “speaking normally”. It’s also worth noting that even very strongly related languages can have divergent phonetic inventories, and regardless of their relations, languages can associate different phonemes with the same glyph in the same writing system. It is, of course, possible to train yourself to speak with a natural accent in multiple languages. However, most people speak secondary languages for utility reasons and are not interested in fleshing them out further than a level of general legibility, which generally does leave some influence from the primary language.
I’m going to level with you. I have no idea what the fuck the “th” in the is supposed to be. And at this point, I don’t even care anymore. But I’m still going to laugh any time one of you people tries to pronounce a Polish word and throw in something like “I think that was close enough” at the end when you were, in fact, not even compatible Newtonian frame of reference.
Do also note that there is the issue of tone. Some languages very strongly rely on tone to convey meaning, whereas, in other languages, it’s sparsely important. Of course, native speakers of languages where less emphasis is placed on tone will have issues communicating in languages that strongly rely upon them. Highly tonal languages are also relatively rare, and most people don’t even consider their existence. Similarly to the phonemic issues above, people who do not use tonal languages regularly lack the ability to acutely recognise tone too. In the English language, tone only serves to indicate the emotional charge of the sentence and to pose questions, which is the most common application among most (but not all) European languages.
But let us step away from accents for a moment and look at vocabulary. People who are relatively skilled with a secondary language generally do not randomly insert primary language words into conversations unless they want to show off. This is particularly common for the French, but I guess that’s what happens when you eat frogs. It is, however, also very common for fictional depictions of characters, as it is an easy way to draw attention to a character’s background. What is more common than reaching for their native vocabulary is for people under strong emotion to revert to their native grammatical structuring for sentences. That is to say, mostly word order but also the usage of some grammatical structures. Some pairs of languages can have very different grammars, while in other cases, it’s less noticeable. As an example of this, I’ve regularly encountered people who use Polish as a primary language who will omit articles when speaking English or German because they don’t exist in the Polish language. Similarly, it’s common for people who speak Polish to mix up word order when speaking more rigid languages (yes, this includes English) because, as a Slavic language, it has very flexible sentence structuring due to information baked into complex declination patterns which remove ambiguity when swapping words around.
Hold up, lemme blow your mind here…
In English, we have: “The cat ate the fish.”
But if we swap those around, we have: “The fish ate the cat.”
Which doesn’t mean the same thing.
In Polish we have: “Kot zjadł rybę.”
And if we swap that around we have: “Rybę zjadł kot.”
Which… unambiguously means the same thing.
Furthermore: “Kot rybę zjadł.” “Rybę kot zjadł.” “Zjadł kot rybę.” “Zjadł rybę kot.”
All of the above are also correct and unambiguously mean the same thing. However, in practice, some of those choices would be seen as more natural, and some would be used in different contexts or as answers to differently formulated questions.
“Co zjadł kot?” “Kot zjadł rybę.”
“Kto zjadł rybę?” “Rybę zjadł kot.”
Or in English:
“What did the cat eat?” “The cat ate the fish.”
“Who ate the fish?” “The cat ate the fish.”
Oh, and before you ask about “The fish was eaten by the cat”, in Polish, that’s “Ryba została zjedzona przez kota”, which falls under flexible sentence structuring as well.
As such, it’s possible for someone of Slavic descent to randomly reorder words when in a state of heightened emotion or when not paying attention. Comparatively, since German and English have relatively similar grammar, a native German speaker would be very unlikely to produce an English sentence with unusual word order. But, of course, Germans cannot say numbers correctly, and the utterance of many numbers in the language is an affront to Yog-Sothoth and the sacred mathematics of the universe.
And here we have the big issue with representing mistakes in language use: to do so realistically, you require knowledge of both languages on a sufficient level where you are able to guess at realistic errors one might make. This becomes harder as we move on to less fluent speakers. Of course, the stereotype here is that cartoonish, overdone “caveman speak”, which is often used to denote non-fluent speakers. This isn’t something that happens in real life, though, nor in naturalistic writing. So what do we find instead?
One case we might deal with is people who use far too rigid sentence structures when speaking a secondary language. These people were usually taught to use specific ways of formulating their thoughts when they learned a secondary language. For example, when being taught English in school, I was never shown how to begin sentences pertaining to a person without using a pronoun at the very start of the sentence. Granted, English does have a tendency to do this, but it’s very much bad form to write longer bodies of text and have every sentence start with “I”, “you”, or “he/she”. It also comes out pretty unnatural when attempted in casual conversation. While I do try to avoid this in my writing, when chatting or in a hurry, I will fall back onto this pattern just to save mental processing power, I guess. Either that or cat brain empty, no thoughts found. I’ll blow another hole in your skull here. While the Polish language possesses pronouns, they are extremely rarely used in actual speech or writing because they are redundant with declinations.
“I’m from Poland” might be translated as “Ja jestem z Polski”, but what actually would be said in most situations is just “Jestem z Polski” since the “jestem” form already explicitly applies to “me”. There are still some cases where they are used, of course. Similarly to what I said before, there are some questions where an answer might be most natural if it contained a pronoun.
“A ty skąd jesteś?” “Ja jestem z Polski.”
“And you, where are you from?” “I’m from Poland.”
Do also note that due to this baking in of pronouns, it’s very hard to introduce additional language genders to Polish and other Slavic languages. The rules for grammatical gender are simple, though there is only a fleshed-out male and female form. Sapient things decide which grammatical gender they use for themselves, and when referring to something sapient, you likewise use their preferred gender. For animals, you usually go by biological gender, and for anything, past that you… get this… use a form based on the spelling of the name. So, for example, a “komputer”/”computer” is male, but a “sztuczna inteligencja”/”artificial intelligence” is female. If you’ve ever noticed a Slav seemingly at random assigning genders to things, that is simply how we do. It’s a mechanism for dealing with a messy implementation of grammatical gender in this general family of language.
So, getting back to the topic, rather than caveman speak, we should expect correct but overly formal, rigid and simplistic sentences, or, as I’ve described above, attempts to apply primary language grammar to secondary language expression. And this could happen even under normal circumstances. It is after all someone trying their best.
Another typical case for lower fluency speakers is that they can, due to vocabulary issues, use the wrong words, or even rely on primary language words to fill out holes in their vocabulary. People with very low competency will also result to just speaking in their primary language when they found themselves unable to express themselves in the secondary language they were attempting to speak. This is often done with the hope that the primary language can be interpreted by the speaker, but realistically, in most cases, it just leads to frustration on both sides. Do note, however, that this is not done as a speech quirk. It’s an act of frustration or helplessness in the face of an unsuccessful attempt to communicate.
Writing low-fluency speakers is quite frankly absurdly tricky because it requires making mistakes that are no longer natural to someone with fluency over the secondary language (which is the language we’re trying to have the low-fluency speaker communicate in, mind you). As such, since all mistakes seem unnatural, it’s easy to rely on errors that would have never been made. Really, that’s exactly what the stereotypical caveman speech is.
What I can say to finish this off is that non-native speakers have a tendency to express themselves in ways that are formally correct but not naturalistic. They use the right words, but not the ones that would most casually fit in the context, and build their sentences in a grammatically correct but rigid and repetitive way. That’s at least within the range of legible secondary language use.
I hope the anecdotal explanations using Polish and English serve well to illustrate the issues and where they come from and give at least a glimpse of insight into how this works.
Esoteric Musings... 