Story time

I read somewhere there were only three municipal libraries in all Beirut. If so, I’ve been very fortunate to live where I do. Not only is there a little park within walking distance, but within the park itself is a tiny gem of a library. It’s a great discovery for my Beirut baby who appreciates the books more than the slide and the swings right now.

Last Saturday we finally got to attend the storytelling (thanks to a tip from my friend M.). Adapting to her audience, which grew to at least a dozen kids over the course of the readings, the librarian began with a picture book in French, and then, apologetically, two stories in Lebanese.

She felt bad speaking her mother tongue, and that of all of the kids present, because it was a language my little one wouldn’t understand, as if she ought to speak a European language, as if it was somehow better.

You come across this a lot in Beirut, and it can make it harder to learn Lebanese in two ways. Firstly people assume they ought to speak French or English with you. Their ease with switching languages has helped me out in many a confused situation, and I particularly appreciated understanding and knowing I was understood in hospital when giving birth. But in everyday life I’d much rather people spoke Lebanese to me and am happy when they do.

Secondly, when you ask people a word in Lebanese, they have a habit of telling you a word they never use. Instead of the everyday word, they tell you the classical Arabic. This has happened to me frequently ever since I arrived in Lebanon. Sometimes they tell you the Lebanese but also the Arabic and you end up confused. They’ll say X, then they’ll correct themselves, “but the real/right word is Y.”

 Now I would love to know both languages and I do believe that you need a certain amount of modern standard Arabic if you want to really understand the Lebanese. Of course, it’s vital for reading or listening to the news. But it’s interesting to see how people are reluctant to offer only Lebanese, to tell you the words they really say, the ones they’ve used in everyday life all their life. When people know I’m learning Lebanese they even greet me with Kayfa halouki. That may be what the books say, but I’d rather people greet me in the same way as they do all the other people in the room. I want to learn to talk like them, not some imaginary character in a book.

I didn’t have a name for this phenomenon until I came across this article on linguistic prestige. I just drank it up, because a lot of it applies to exactly the situations I encounter in Lebanon.

The cross-reference to diglossia actually notes that those who are “proficient in the high prestige dialect will commonly try to avoid using the vernacular dialect with foreigners and may even deny its existence, even though the vernacular is the only socially appropriate one for them themselves to use when speaking to their relatives and friends.” You can find more on this in my earlier post But how do YOU say it, together with a link to a fascinating essay on so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ dialects.

However, the Lebanese are a contradictory bunch, and the opposite is always true for someone. Interestingly, there exists a kind of ‘covert prestige’ in not speaking classical Arabic well for some Christians who favour learning French  – not just as well as Arabic but instead of it.

Although story-telling sessions are common in libraries around the world as a way to entice children into the world of books, I’m especially happy to have found this little group. Not only do we love it but I can only imagine how unappealing reading would be for Lebanese kids when they first try to read a book to find it’s all written in another dialect (or language, by my standards). Even the most basic vocabulary such as pseiné (cat) changes to qatt, not to mention prepositions, plurals and the syntax. Reading clearly isn’t as favoured a pastime as in other countries, and I figure these kids can use a helping hand.

Jeitaoui Library story-telling is at 11am on Saturdays. You can borrow Arabic, English and French books for just 10,000LL for life. Feel free to post where your favourite libraries are.

The acquisition of language is a fascinating thing… at least for me. We are using a fairly classical bilingual approach with our Beirut baby, that is, the one-person-one-language system. I speak English, my husband French. It’s nothing compared to kids growing up in countries where three or four languages are the norm. Still there are some surprises.

The first surprise was that she wasn’t slow to talk, as it’s widely held that a slight delay is standard for bilingual kids. But when I looked it up, more recent reports suggest there is not necessarily a language delay at all. Which makes sense or I guess pretty much all Indian, most African, and a good many Lebanese kids would all talk “late”. Perhaps a misconception born out of the huge bulk of research being carried out in monolingual cultures?

Of course it’s different if one language comes from the parents and the second from the community. That’s a whole different type of bilingualism. If a child in that situation is assessed when starting school, they’ll be behind the other kids in the community language, but may speak as well or better in their home language.

Still within a few years both languages will be “native” and (in most countries) a few years later still the community language will be dominant unless efforts are made to build on the home language. Especially if the child never learns how to write in the home language, a problem compounded if the two languages are written in different alphabets.

In Lebanon this doesn’t really apply. Here the community speaks not one but several languages. You can play this one of two ways. Either parents can use it to reinforce the home language or to contrast with it since they can opt for schooling in French or English. So parents can, to a degree, “choose” a community language. Many Christian Lebanese kids grow up with French only learning Lebanese dialect as a second language, with classical Arabic coming a poor third or fourth. In Achrafieh the default mode is to speak French to any kids … even if you speak Lebanese with their parents. It especially makes me giggle when Filipina maids sing French nursery rhymes to my daughter.

Of course at 19 months, the community language – whatever it may be – has only a very minor role since she is not at nursery. Since daddy telecommutes, she gets a lot of time with both of us.  So balancing the influence of English against French is fairly simple.  However, we do speak more English between ourselves than French and that clearly shows in her vocabulary. By the end of 18 months she used about 50 French words compared to 70 English words, apart from 25 “neutral” words, such as names, Lebanese words and words which sound the same in both languages.

However you could also put it down to my mild obsession with language, which makes me more pedagogical whereas daddy is more playful! At any rate she’s learning both ways. She’s at ease translating words between the two languages. If she points and says “pawapluie” I only have to ask, “How does mummy say it?” and she responds “umbwella”.

Another surprise for me was that once my Beirut baby learns a word in one language she isn’t slower to learn it in the second language. Her first words were all for different things, not French AND English for the same thing (eg cat and chat) and it seemed to be a case of whether I got there first, or my husband did. But now the crossover of her two vocabularies is almost total. I thought that once the need was filled there would be less motivation to learn the equivalent word, but it actually comes quicker, as if the hard part is nailing the concept and getting a label on it, but then adding alternative names to the same notion is easy. Has anybody else found this?

We don’t know where we will end up living, so for now we are aiming for a good balance of the two languages at home. With time we’d appreciate an extra boost for French from the community to fight the international dominance of English. Ideally we’d also have the chance for our daughter to learn Lebanese in the playground when starting school, and literary Arabic a bit later in class.

Some parents focus so much on English or French that their kids find learning written Arabic a big chore, but if we were to leave Lebanon this is one major opportunity my Beirut baby would miss out on, as neither of us are able to teach her properly ourselves.