"Was hast du mit deinem Türkisch gemacht?" "Weggeworfen."

[muckefuck]

Tonight, we watched Gegen die Wand. (English title: Head-On; literal translation: Against the Wall.) Nuphy told me I'd really enjoy it because of all the code-switching; Nuphy so totally has my number.

The female protagonist is German-born, but her parents are Turkish immigrants; her male counterpart moved to Hamburg from Turkey as a child. (The same is true for the actors who play them.) The male protagonist's best friend speaks just enough German to order a beer, so they always chat in Turkish. Yet when he meets the female lead's brother, the latter tells him (in German) that his Turkish is a mess and asks him what he's done with it. "Thrown it away," he mumbles.

Unlike in Monsoon Wedding, where Hindi, Punjabi, and English alternate so freely that only three minor characters ever confine themselves to one, the switching in this film all appears well-motivated. For instance, three Turkish men are playing rummy jack with the male lead and chatting entirely in German. One invites him to join them at a brothel, but he responds, "Why don't y'all fuck your own wives?" The man becomes infuriated and tells him "NEVER use the word 'fuck' in conjunction with our wives!" When the protagonist reacts coolly, he screams "DO YOU UNDERSTAND?" in Turkish. (Not because he thinks the protagonist will understand it better--he knows how bad his Turkish is--but merely for added emphasis. Meanwhile, the wives are in the other conversing in Turkish--about fucking.)

One of the oddest bits of it comes late in the film when the male lead is trying to track down the female lead in Istanbul. He speaks to her cousin in Turkish because she doesn't know any German. But when he's trying to talk about his emotional connexion to the other woman, he switches--to English. (Again, for emphasis; I speculate he chose English since it's something he knew a hotel manager in Turkey would understand.) Earlier, his cabbie had asked him where he was from; although he's previously answered this question with "Mersin", his birthplace on the Mediterranean near Adana, he says, "Hamburg." The driver immediately switches to German. "I'm from Munich!" "Oh no, does that mean you're a Bavarian?"

Unfortunately, I expected we'd be watching either 8 femmes or 阿飛正傳 (Days of Being Wild), so I had my Cantonese grammar with me but not my Turkish one and missed a lot of subtleties. (Without it, I can only recognise a few words--"mine", "there isn't", "no", and the like.) Just as well--I don't really have time for Turkish right now.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying it's odd. My model of "well-motivated code-switching" is exemplified by the work of Poplack among Spanish-English bilinguals in the USA. She found the choice of language was often motivated by the speaker's emotional attitude, the clearest example being a man trying to quit smoking who tended to use English for more objective statements and Spanish when the content was more emotive.

In other cases, the languages are simply used for contrast irrespective of their emotional associations in other contexts. Woolard, working among Catalan-Spanish bilinguals in Barcelona (the vast majority of which have Catalan as their home language), describes an acquaintance switching into Spanish to express his body's rebellion at being forced to give up smoking. When asked, he said switching to Catalan during a conversation in Spanish would've produced the same effect. These is overwhelmingly the kind of code-switching we have in Gegen die Wand: People do it for emphasis and it would probably suit their purposes just as well to switch from Turkish to German as it does to switch from German to Turkish.

But then Swigart, working among French-Wolof bilinguals in Dakar, found that the unusual cases were those where people spoke solely French or solely Wolof, something which only occurred in formal situations like a job interviews or religious ceremonies. Otherwise, the languages got mixed more-or-less indiscriminately. That's the kind of code-switching I saw in Monsoon Wedding. The only characters who spoke in only one language were (1) the grandmother, who presumably doesn't have any English; (2) a guest on a talk show, who the host berates saying, "You think just because you speak Hindi and wear homespun, you speak for the common man, but you don't", implying that her use of "pure Hindi" is put-on; and (3) an Indian-American who either doesn't speak Hindi or is too embarrassed by his poor grasp of it. Absolutely everyone else uses some mix of English, Hindi and/or Punjabi with--as far as I could see--no strong emotional or topical factors governing the choice, i.e. it's not like some people use only Hindi when talking about being in love and English when haggling over prices, or vice-versa. Did you notice anything of the kind?

[maozed.livejournal.com]

Like I said, it's been a long time since I saw it, so I probably wouldn't remember the motivating factors in their code-switching. This has renewed my interested in code-switching, however.

[bunj.livejournal.com]

Having just had some experience with this (having traveled with my wife's family in Spain), some observations:

-e usually spoke in English except when talking to a pure Spanish speaker. This includes times when other non-English speakers were in the room, and I (the only non-Spanish speaker) was not.

-e's mom (a native Italian speaker who learned English as a child and Spanish later on) almost always spoke Spanish, even when around English speakers. She would switch to English to speak to me.

-e's dad was the most interesting (he's a native Spanish speaker who learned English in his 30s). He would often switch back and forth in the same sentence, and speak English to Spanish speakers (and vice versa) without noticing. Generally, what he spoke depended on what language he had just heard (not necessarily addressed to him).