imagined-community

Before I moved to New England I had never heard anyone couple the words “leaf” and “peeping” in order to describe viewing fall foliage. And its not because Wisconsinites don’t appreciate a beautiful fall season; the leaves are gorgeous along the St. Croix River and in Door County (that’s near Green Bay). We just didn’t have a name for enjoying the changing leaf colors.

But here in New England “leaf peeping” is THE water cooler conversation du jour. At first I thought this leafing thing was just one more sign of some radical, inexplicable difference between people from Wisconsin and people from New England. A google search quickly showed me it had nothing to do with region-based character traits. It turns out that the term “leaf peeping” only entered our daily language within the last seven years (after I left Wisconsin for North Carolina to bury myself in my graduate studies). The first reference to leaf peeping was made in an episode of the West Wing in 2000. It’s amazing to me that a term born on a television show has been so thoroughly incorporated into everyday usage. This year the term “leaf peeper” even made its debut in the Collins dictionary! Who says TV doesn’t shape us? Do people use the word in Canada too? In Britain? In Australia? One would think that “leaf peeping” would have currency in any English speaking country where the West Wing is aired.

Next year I think we should mix things up and start calling leaf peeping Momijigari. That’s what they call it in Japan. Sorkin?

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Fusion View has been hosting a fascinating discussion about the development of language personas and what it feels like to move from the personality of your mother tongue to that of a second (third, fourth, or fifth) language. If you haven’t heard Yang-May’s Two Voices podcast, I highly recommend it. I would like to add to the conversation with these two excerpts on growing a second persona along with your second language. The first excerpt is about adjusting to language immersion by opening up to your new language persona from Georgetown university:

You cannot expect to function in the same way as in your L1, and it is important, in order to succeed in an immersion situation, to refrain from trying to “be yourself” in the L2. You will need to find, to invent a modus operandi (culturally, communicatively, behaviorally, linguistically) that will more or less differ from your “native” mode, and that will be adapted to your new environment. In other words, you have to learn to become another person or, more exactly, to grow a second persona specific to the L2 that will be added to your L1 persona without replacing it. Linguistic development per se is only part of this transformation, and you will encounter (great) difficulties if you attempt to keep functioning in your normal mode, but in another language: ideally, you are going to learn how to be differently—not just speak, but move, laugh, eat, play, joke, get mad, think differently.

And Baljit Bhela notes in her discussion of second language adoption by children of immigrant families that, “In learning a language, one adopts a ‘language ego’ which refers to the way in which one’s self-concept and sense of self-esteem are intertwined with language and the degree to which, in language transactions, one’s ego is exposed.” Adults learning a new language in an immersion setting know how the vulnerability of being unable to communicate facilitates, even requires, a reversion to a childlike, undeveloped ego state, which can be more or less threatening to the language learner. Bhela goes on to write, “As non-native speaking children increase their proficiency in a second language, they will inevitably begin to take on a second identity. The prospect of becoming fluent in English then takes on a pervasive psychological dimension. The identity that the immigrant child has grown comfortable with encounters a ‘host’ self that thinks, feels and acts differently. As they begin to take on that new persona, they also begin to take on the culture of the ‘host’ language.”

I remember there was a point in my junior year of college when I was simultaneously studying French and German. At this time I was also trying to make decisions about my future (graduate school - in what? - or law school?). I remember experiencing my language personas quite keenly, especially their differences, because I went directly from French class to German class. In my flailing about trying to make a decision about my future studies, I came up with the lame idea that if I could figure out which language persona felt more authentic to the real me, this would help me understand myself and where I should go with my studies : ) Well, this plan just exacerbated my confusion and I now believe that those very different language personas are all the real me, just the real me expressed in different idioms.

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