What is “talking normal”?

In my transnational and bilingual family, we are reminded time and time again by strangers, teachers, and family members on both sides of the Atlantic that the way we speak is somehow “not normal”. Not bad, yet somehow not normal. In our home, we try not to set any judgmental precedents about linguistic normalcy, so I was surprised when my three-year old son (let’s call him E) asked me a few months ago if his friend Ruth “talks normal”.

“What do you mean?”, I asked.

E looked at me impatiently and repeated: “I said: Does. She. Talk. NORMAL?”

Hm. Coming from the child who makes up a new word every day, who calls breakfast “cereal time” and who says other unique and delightful things like “I love you infinito in a heart”, what could he possibly mean by “normal”? To find out, I would need to do what I do best: ethnographically observe his three-year old social world.

I fully expected to find that E’s question was linked to a basic language barrier issue of Ruth using German and E using English, rather than using their shared language of Italian. But I was wrong: they know exactly which linguistic resources to draw on in order to communicate with each other, even though their way of speaking might be exclusive to their specific linguistic repertoires and how they overlap (much like Gru and his Minions).

What about family idiolect and made-up words? E calls his pinky finger a pinnicchino (one of our many family neologisms), but in highly contextualized interaction this doesn’t appear to cause comprehension issues. “Ho fatto male al pinnicchino”, accompanied by E holding up his pinky finger, seems to be perfectly understood by other children who speak Italian, like Ruth, as “I hurt my pinky”.

Maybe Kid Italian could contribute to a “not normal” label? “Ho corrato forte” or “Mi ha spingiato”* are common developmentally appropriate “mistakes” that children make in Italian, but E and Ruth make the same ones. In fact, these verb tense “mistakes” might even be easier to understand than irregular verbs because they “incorrectly” follow the rule for regular past tense verbs.

What about accent or pronunciation? How broad is a bilingual child’s definition of “normal accent” when all of their family members could potentially be perceived as having accents? E has never seemed fazed by differences in pronunciation, so I don’t know why he would perceive Ruth differently.

After careful observation, the only near-conclusion I arrived at regarding E’s conception of “talking normal” is drawn from observations of what E and Ruth communicated about. When so much communication between children relies on play, a mismatch between their respective interests may seem to each of them as somehow “not normal”, even if it has nothing to do with purely linguistic attributes of their speech. In fact, when they saw each other last night for the first time in months, they spent the whole evening talking about Pokémon. E had no questions about Ruth’s “normal” speech this time.

Observing how children learn to participate in the infinite complexity of their social worlds always reminds me that our own (adult) perspectives are probably equally ephemeral and feelings-based. They may feel natural and obvious, but they are highly ideological and socially constructed. Our concepts of standard language, academic language, appropriate language, correct speech, good speakers, live only in our imaginations: none of us has ever observed them in real life, since “normal” doesn’t really exist!

( * ) Roughly “I runned fast” and “He pushed me”. E overextends the pattern for creating past tense verbs by applying the very common –ato participle ending to two irregular verbs, turning correre (which should be ‘corso’ in the past tense) into corrato and spingere (which should be spinto in the past tense) into spingiato.