Dr. Kalim Gonzales, a Yunshan Youth Scholarat the Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, was invited to share hisviews for an article on bilingualism published September 17th in theArizona Daily Star, the second largest newspaper serving the US state ofArizona. The article, written by columnist TimStellar, discusses a current debate in the US about whether it is appropriateto use a language other than English in an English communication context. Forexample, a Mandarin-English bilingual exchange student might pronounce theEnglish word “feng shui” not with lexical stress as in Standard English (feng-SHUI) but with lexical tones as inMandarin (fēng shuǐ). Some people would arguethat this is inappropriate because the bilingual should stick to English, theofficial language of the US. However, others would argue that the Chinese pronunciationis more appropriate because the word is historically borrowed from Chinese.
Dr. Gonzales pointed out that peopleinvolved in the debate have generally been assuming that bilinguals mixlanguages based on whether they feel mixing is appropriate or not. However,bilinguals may also mix languages unintentionally due to language interference.For example, research suggests that even when Chinese-English bilinguals intendto speak English, they may automatically activate Chinese in response to seeingan Asian rather than Caucasian face, leading to unintentional speech patterns consistentwith Chinese.
The implication is that even if everyone couldcome to a conscious agreement that when speaking English we should pronounceevery word in an English-like manner, some of us would likely continue tounintentionally do otherwise.
Read article here
Read Dr. Jing Yang's related publication on the face raceeffect here
