What Language Does Your City Speak?
That a metropolis is multilingual is often taken as a given, but multilingualism takes many forms.
Usually, multilingualism comes from recent immigration, as first- and second-generation immigrants continue to speak their ancestral tongue. In that regard, such multilingualism may be seen as a challenge to the existing norm. In Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley, just east of downtown Los Angeles, the population is mostly of Chinese descent and, as one might expect, most commercial signs are in Chinese. Every so often, the language of signs in the valley becomes a political issue, as the area’s longer-established non-Chinese residents wonder whether signs should be required to contain English or even be English-only.
I recently visited Dublin, which was very homogeneous when I grew up there but which has recently received many immigrants from eastern Europe. I was a little surprised, when wandering around, to see café signs advertising IHTEPHET (Russian for “internet”). Clearly, commercial signs follow bottom-up demand from the local inhabitants, since the signs are there to cater to them and to attract their attention.
Vying with this natural use of language is a more top-down form of language planning. This may be done to foster use of an official language seen as being under threat, such as French in Montreal, or Gaelic in Dublin, where, for example, all buses headed downtown bear the sign An Lár (”the centre”), even though nobody would use that in normal English speech. Although I largely support this use of language planning, this may be seen as action by a government which does not trust that the official language can survive commercial competition.
Another use of bilingualism may be to foster a historical sense of place or even of pride. All streetsigns in Dublin are bilingual — Irish Gaelic and English — although, confusingly, streetmaps are invariably available in English only. Complicating the issue is the question of how to translate streetnames. Some streets in Dublin have completely different names in each official language — for example, Molesworth Street in English is Sráid Theach Laighean (”Leinster House Street”) in Irish Gaelic. Dawson Street ends up being translated phonetically on an apparently ad hoc basis (see photo above). You’ve read about the dispute over renaming Park Avenue in Montreal after former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa. Maybe we could follow Dublin’s example and have completely distinct French and English versions of the street!
Recently, I visited Toulouse, where the streetsigns are bilingual — Occitan and French — even though the languages most commonly heard on the streets of Toulouse are French, Arabic and English. I doubt even one person in a hundred would know how to respond if addressed in Occitan.
But even when it is the two main languages of a city that are official, such as French and Dutch in Brussels, there are problems. I recemember a trip there with my brother and sister. Sitting in a taxi, we were trying to remember the address of the hotel in which we were staying. My sister, whose husband had studied in nearby Dutch-speaking Antwerp, remembered the Dutch version of the streetname, Leuvensweg. The taxi driver said he didn’t know where that was. Eventually, I tried translating the Dutch version into French and said, “Chaussée de Louvain.” Exclaiming, “Ça, c’est mieux!” he brought us there straight away. Something tells me he understood us the first time.
All this relates to what is the common language of communication of a city. I am always excited by but slightly dread that moment before initiating contact with a stranger in Montréal. I always use French, to be polite, but if the listener is indeed francophone, he or she will often enough recognize me as an anglophone and, in an apparent vote of no confidence, switch to English. On the other hand, I now use English rather than French or Dutch in Brussels, as getting it wrong seems, as in the case of the taxi driver, to cause offence.
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