I came across Malwina Gudowska and her work a few years ago, while in search of some meaningful bilingual parenting content on Instagram. Beautifully named @themeaningofmama1, her account captivated me. I continued consuming her content through a newsletter, thrilled to have finally found someone whose thoughts and experience align with mine. However, it was the comforting feeling of being understood that made me a loyal follower of her work.
THE BOOK
Her book “Mother Tongue Tied: On Language, Motherhood & Multilingualism –Disrupting Myths & Finding Meaning”2 came out in June 2024. The book is based on Malwina’s own experience as a multilingual (mother), backed by a body of research from (academic) literature and topped up with experiences of other women she interviewed as part of her research into multilingualism and motherhood.
EMOTIONS
For me personally, the biggest value of this book, as well as Malwina’s work in general lies in the fact that it acknowledges and recognises the emotions that go into raising multilingual children. This is especially important for us who individually act as transmitters of the minoritized language3 to our children. The feelings of discomfort I have been experiencing: loneliness, guilt, exhaustion, pressure as well as fear made me believe that something was seriously wrong with me. MTT showed me that these feelings are shared by many multilingual mothers and that there was nothing unordinary about me experiencing them.
VALUABLE LANGUAGES, DECEIPTFUL MYTHS
Being a trilingual herself, Malwina knows the real value of languages. She sends a clear message that all languages are important (pg. 12) and that one is not better than the other. The value of a language is “as simple as generations of a family being able to communicate with one another.” (pg 12) Throughout the book, she breaks many myths that sadly still exist around multilingualism. To name a couple, “Multilingualism causes speech delays” (it doesn’t!) and “True bilinguals do not have accents in any of their languages” (they may have and this doesn’t make them any less bilingual), and many more.
IT’S POLITICAL
MTT is political. It is a critique of the society. It’s feminist. I believe it should be read by many, both female and male, who even remotely have multiple languages in their lives. It draws attention to social and ethnic inequality and injustice that are reflected in our attitudes towards languages. It calls for change of the systems where monolingual ideologies prevail despite the fact that more than half of world’s population is bilingual or multilingual.
GENDERED WAY OF LOOKING AT THE SPACE AND LANGUAGE
Relevant to my personal experience, it was the gendered way of looking at the space and language that stuck with me the most. In the chapter “Home bodies & spaces of (re)production” Malwina explains how caregiving, housework and heritage language transmission all take place in the private/home sphere. Despite being essential for the family wellbeing this type of work is invisible, unpaid and therefore unrecognised. Also, it is still predominantly done by women.
The opposite of the home is the outside world. Traditionally, it belongs to the male, the bread winner. Him who is paid, who brings money into the house and whose work is therefore recognised.
The languages some of us try to raise our children with are different from the one spoken in the society. These languages are learned at home and they are usually transmitted by mothers. These languages are called heritage, minority, minoritized, HOME languages. They stand in opposition to the language spoken outside the house, called dominant, society, community, school language.
MULTILAYERED INEQUALITY
Note how even these terms signal inequality: dominant vs. minority. One is school and community language that belongs to the “present”. The other is heritage, belonging to something from the “past”, something that is “outdated” (pg. 124) Even the Serbian word for heritage language, zavčajni jezik, signifies a language that is spoken over there, in that other country my ancestors are from. But not me.
It starts with the inequality on the word level, but later grows into the much more significant disbalance when children enter adolescence, when school and peer group language take over. They threaten and often push out the already endangered languages whose destiny is to be kept within the walls of one’s home.
MY SILVER LINING
I once tried to explain this to Klara, obviously in the language that is age appropriate for her, and to that she said: “But Mama, we speak Serbian outside the house!” As always, she gave me the biggest pat on the back. The fact that I have never shied away from speaking Serbian in public with my children, even when we are in the company of non-Serbian speakers sent an unconscious message to her that speaking our language is normal. My effort may not be recognised financially, but for now it seems recognised by my six-year-old daughter and this is possibly all that matters.
HOW DID I?
How did I manage to achieve this? In order to create conditions for my children to have potential to develop bilingually, I had to consciously enter into the gendered, less paid, less visible and less recognised role. As a single constant source of Serbian in my children’s lives, I had to be present. “I am the input, when I am not there, I am also the interruption”, (pg. 21) writes Malwina towards the beginning of the book and with this sentence she perfectly describes my life in the past six years.
Being constantly reminded that “I will see” once the school starts, I’ve felt pressured and rushed to cram as much Serbian language and experience in the Serbian language into my kids before they start school. The aim was to create Serbian language emotional reserve they would be able to come back to once school and teenage years pass.
I’ve learnt from the book that what I have been doing is called “the language maintenance strategy” (pg. 125). This strategy can be especially valuable if one of the parents speaks the societal language. In our case the father.
MULTILINGUAL/NATIONAL COUPLES
This brings us to the topic of multilingual couples. Malwina acknowledges that dating a person who doesn’t speak your language can be fresh, fun, sexy even, but when children come, these multilingual/national relationships “can turn hostile” (pg 165). In our marriage, I feel it is always about competition of what language/culture the kids will be more exposed to. I insist English is in the more advantageous position since the father is mostly monolingual as well as the school. As the owner of our invisible home and heritage language sphere, I always feel like I am losing, but unlike the English language, I do not think my English partner is winning either.
IT COULD BE A LOT WORSE
My bilingual mothering experience can very often be the source of my anger, bitterness, powerlessness, jealousy and tears. But what MMT has explicitly showed me is that I am in a far better place than many. My language is not on the verge of extinction (not yet!). I can still, with some effort, surround my children with other Yugoslav language speakers and resources. My husband is learning Serbian and he says for himself that he is code-switching. He tries to use Serbian often when the four of us are together.
We live in London and I still haven’t had a negative experience for speaking Serbian in public and I speak it all the time. This is not to say that I haven’t been judged by my accent (Malwina writes about accentism and listener’s perception of accents in detail in the book). I am white. I speak English well, albeit with an accent. Even though I have been on the receiving end of the question “Where is your accent from?” I personally haven’t felt traumatized by it.
However, as carefully recorded in the book, there are many people who are experiencing the complete opposite. So, in that respect I am lucky. This luck, sadly, doesn’t make my bilingual mothering experience any less emotionally and physically hard, but it is there to remind me that it could be a lot worse.
“HOW DOES A LANGUAGE DIE?”
In the chapter entitled “How does a language die?”, Malwina quotes Joshua A. Fishman’s three generation theory. It stuck with me, so I’ll try to paraphrase: The first generation of immigrants incorporates the new societal language to their heritage language repertoire (this is me for example); second generation is bilingual (Klara and Oliver); and the third generation (K’s and O’s kids provided they live in the English-speaking country) are predominantly monolingual. Depending on many factors, this process can last longer, but also shorter “A language can be lost from one generation to the next. One generation – like mother to child” (pg 52.) and for me this sentence carries so much emotional weight.
Together with Klara & Oliver, Malwina belongs to the second immigrant generation. Despite the fact that her dominant language is English, she decided to raise her children in Polish and I deeply admire her for that.
Malwina’s example brings a trace of hope that maybe, just maybe one of my children may decide to raise their child(ren) in Serbian. Or maybe this is too much to hope for. Regardless, if I didn’t believe my kids would love and speak Serbian in future, I wouldn’t do what I have been doing for the past six years.
IN PLACE OF CONCLUSION
Getting acquainted with Malwina’s work for me meant I have gained an imaginary friend. A friend who is a few years ahead of me in raising multilingual children and one that will, if nothing else, at times say: “It is completely normal you feel the way you do”. So, when she announced her book can be pre-ordered, I believe I was one of the first ones in the queue. Trust me, I have never pre-ordered a book in my life. I also had the honour of being invited to and meeting her at the MTT book launch in West London back in June.
In this post, I did not touch upon all the very important issues related to multilingualism Malwina writes about in the book. Instead, I have addressed some that I consider relevant to my life. But I hope I tickled your interest. If I did, I warmly suggest you read the whole book & I hope you learn from it as much as I did.
- @motherlingual is the current name of Malwina’s Instagram account. ↩︎
- MTT further in the text. ↩︎
- Malwina introduces the term minoritized language in the book instead of minority language “as it is the way the language is perceived, as opposed its true value” (pg. x). ↩︎