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I was born in a multilingual environment as both my parents speak several languages: my father was born in Cambodia and mostly grew up in Vietnam from a wealthy Chinese family. Back then, when he was a child, he spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese. Furthermore, with his parents, he would speak two Chinese dialects: Hakka with his father and, with his mother, Teochew (Chaozhou dialect) which is the most common Chinese dialect among Han merchants in South-East Asia. As my father had been educated in French, he has also mastered this language and now that he has returned to Phnom Pehn, he can also speak everyday Khmer. My mother was born in Taipei, also from a Hakkanese family. Then, in her childhood, she was already trilingual: she would speak Hakka with her parents, with her brothers and friends she would use Holo (or Taiwanese) dialect and Mandarin at school. As she studied in Tokyo, she speaks perfectly Japanese and now that she has been living in France for twenty years, she’s also fluent in French.
Thus, my first twenty years were crippled by the drama of not being able to speak another language than French: from my recollection, my parents never spoke to me in Chinese. In fact, my mother must have spoken to me in mandarin when I was an infant as she couldn’t speak French yet at that time. I was living in a small town of Morocco and, according to my parents, once I came back from kindergarten to decree that from then on I would only speak French. My parents are definitively too liberal and I am still offended by the fact that they had accepted my whim with such easiness! In fact it was quite convenient for my parents that my brother and I couldn’t speak a word of Chinese: they would argue and discuss private matters without having to worry about preserving our innocence. I must say that children have a more developed intuition than what parents think as we were able to recognize and memorize at an early stage most of the vulgarities often used. Also, I missed a second opportunity of becoming a bilingual when I was four years old. I had started to take some classes of Arabic, after a few days, my father asked me what I had learnt and I just said loudly “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”). But my father probably thought that I was too young for that kind of education and he immediately removed me from the class. Soon after, we moved to Paris where I carried on my education in French.
At the age of 20, by a twist of fate, I enrolled in a Chinese Language and Culture Degree in a university of Paris and started to learn the language as a beginner. I have to admit that I studied Chinese in a rather dilettante fashion. However I managed to graduate and decided to take off for a year to study Chinese in a language center in Taipei. Chinese language centers are miniatures of the Tower of Babel: I had the chance to be in a small structure where people of the different countries were too few to form segregated gangs. There I dramatically improved my English and also discovered with pleasant amazement that I was even able to speak Spanish! (Actually I had learnt the language at school during seven years without having ever used it.) Suddenly I was no longer a miserable unilingual and soon I discovered the joys of speaking, thinking and even dreaming in other languages. This superimposition of languages in my family and, now, in my everyday environment triggers sometimes the most curious and interesting situations. Last summer, my mother came to visit, accompanied for the first time by her French companion and my brother. We decided to ride the Taipei cable car and I offered my Colombian friend to accompany us. We entered the car with a Taiwanese couple who gaped at us while we were chatting: my Colombian friend would speak in Chinese to my mother and I would translate in French to my brother and my mom’s companion, speaking in English or in Spanish to my friend. The couple must have found it strange that a foreigner could speak Chinese fluently while my brother who looked evidently Taiwanese was not able to mutter a word in mandarin!
My temporary conclusion is that Asia might just be one of the most suitable places to become multilingual.
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Alice finds her own way into multilingual communication
Your Tongue, My Tongue
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