Language: Bilingual writing sample from an African immigrant

[Nouveau Yathrib]

Monsieur F is a licensed physician and an African immigrant who came here as a young man. While he was raised in a Francophone country and speaks French as his mother tongue, he has spent more than half of his life here in the Colony. He is one of very few Nirbhaya Clinic fellows who have avoided running afoul of the Party. Despite his suspected cosmopolitan and secularist political views, Monsieur F has been indispensable to the Multilingualism Campaign through his effective outreach to recent African immigrants and ethnic Chinese converts to Islam.

In the following essay, he reflects on the tension between his first language and his dominant language in his mind, as the Voltaire and Hugo of his schoolboy lessons collides with the dry, academic English of his medical training.

Okay, je vais essayer.

En fait, ça dépend.

Like, if I’m talking to an English speaker, or to my little sister, who moved here when she was 8, I speak mostly in English, with a few phrases of French here and there. In fact, rien que de penser à elle, I start thinking in English.

But if I’m talking to my dad, plus de 95% des mots sont en français. Au fait, je n’utilise des mots anglais que quand je parle de médecine ou quelque chose dans le genre, et que je n’arrive pas a me rappeler un certain terme. Par exemple, comment dit-on board certification en français? Aucune idée, mais vraiment aucune. Et il y en a plein, des expressions pareilles que je ne connais pas en français. Par exemple, j’ai des patients à l'hopital. Quand il s’agit d’ecrire des notes dans leur… dossier, on dit charting. Qu’est-ce qu’on dit en français? Aucune idée. Same thing when I need to discharge a patient. How do you say that in French? No clue. So I resort to using long strings of words to convey what could be said in a word. My hyper-cumbersome translation for discharge is renvoyer à la maison, which means send back home. But no French physician would ever say that.

So, I just go back and forth. Mostly, I now think in English. I’ve been living in an English speaking world for more than half my life at this point. But all I have to do is think of my mom or someone I grew up with, et je me retrouve à penser et à parler en français.

The most interesting part is that the percentage of French words in my conversation changes depending on the comfort level of my interlocutor. So, j’ai un cousin pharmacien. He lives in *redacted*. He moved to the *Colony* when he was 18. Donc la plupart du temps, quand on commence à parler, c’est en français qu’on parle. Mais, as soon as we want to discuss something a bit weightier and more complex, like religion or politics, we start speaking English. Why? Probably because we’ve spent so much time here in the US that we’re both more comfortable with English now. But we retain the ability to switch to French if and when we want. But at this point, my French is filled with anglicisms that have inexorably crept in, and that I couldn’t entirely exorcise away, even if I tried.

RL version: https://www.quora.com/If-you-are-biling ... abib-Fanny