Multilingualism and the Formation of Political Consciousness: Stories From Hungary and Beyond

Introduction: Multilingualism And Autoethnography

This chapter tracks the formation of a political consciousness, mine, the pathways to which intersected time and again with multilingual contexts, people who were multilingual, and my own personal experiences with languages. It thus illustrates how political consciousness can emerge as a critical (if not always) expected affordance of multilingualism.

I only recognized these intersections after several iterations of this chapter (as is typical of the writing process), after initially setting out to to consider and reflect on my life (in brief) in and with languages. But as I prepared to write the first draft, I realized I first had to answer a question: Am I multilingual? I grew up speaking only English until I took Spanish in high school, the one language offered in the small rural district where our family farm was. Our teacher was the wonderful, wonderfully eccentric Mrs. Menn—dressed always in long flowery gowns from the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, her red hair piled in buns and ringlets and exotic French twists. To quote her obituary after she passed at age 92, “she had the spectacular millinery and high heels for any occasion” (Vossetieg, 2016), millinery and heels which we, as students, were often privileged to witness for an occasion as simple as 6th hour Spanish. Mrs. Menn joyfully taught her students dialogues I remember to this day: ¡Hola! ¿Qué tal? Bien, ¿Y tú? Then, in study hall, my best friend Rosita and I Pepita listened to audiotapes reel to reel, repeating the dialogues we heard faithfully with exaggerated emotion. Mrs. Menn not only ascribed to me a new identity with the name “Pepita,” which I loved as it had the word “pep” in it, she inspired in me dreams of el camino cutting through misty Spanish mountains or zigzagging across the desert of a country whose middle letter “x” was pronounced “h” (as was its “j”). The language was as wondrous as she was, with its upside-down punctuation marks and its exotic rolling “r”s I practiced and practiced, not unlike how I learned to double-tongue while playing flute, which, incidentally, leads to another–universal–language I was studying at that time: music (Gottlieb, 2019). I was in no way politically conscious at that time. But was I already at least on my way to becoming multilingual?

Aronin and Singleton (2012) help me answer this question. They explain how definitions of bilingualism and multilingualism are manifold, diverse, and debated: these definitions span a wide spectrum, from the very rigid and problematic “native-like control of two or more languages” (Bloomfield, 1933, as cited in Aronin & Singleton, 2012, p. 2), to Wei’s (2000) inclusion of “the many people in the world who have varying degrees of proficiency in and interchangeably use three, four or even more languages” (as cited in Aronin & Singleton, 2012, p. 4). Gilstein (2020) lends further nuance to understandings of multilingualism, noting how the definition of “multilingual” can even include those who only use “basic phrases in multiple languages.” Cenoz (2013) brings a critically important dimension to the definitions: that I as a speaker of a (currently) globally dominant language, English, have developed abilities in other languages through “additive multilingualism” since I learned and acquired other languages after English, even as I made (and could make) the teaching of learners of English and the teaching of multilingual writers my profession. Conversely and tragically, Cenoz (2013) observes, “subtractive multilingualism” perpetuates the notion that a new, dominant language (e.g., English) should replace the home languages of learners: primarily immigrant students, an ideology which has for too long troubled the teaching of (as just one instance) K-12 English learners in the United States.