Salvaging the Mother Tongue in Exile

Abstract

The dramatic increase in the number of exiles and refugees in the past 100 years has generated a substantial amount of literature written in a second language as well as a heightened sensibility towards the progressive loss of fluency in the mother tongue. Confronted by what modern linguistics has termed ‘first-language attrition’, the writings of numerous exilic translingual authors exhibit a deep sense of trauma which is often expressed through metaphors of illness and death. At the same time, most of these writers make a deliberate effort to preserve what is left from the mother tongue by attempting to increase their exposure to poems, dictionaries or native speakers of the ‘dying’ language. The present paper examines a range of attitudes towards translingualism and first language attrition through the testimonies of several exilic authors and thinkers from different countries (Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Hannah Arendt's interviews, Jorge Semprún's Quel beau dimanche! and Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, among others). Special attention will be paid to the historical frameworks that encourage most of their salvaging operations by infusing the mother tongue with categories of affect and kinship.

Global English and Political Economy

“…175 Grinding poverty and persistent deprivation, in combination with natural disasters and regional conflicts, have seen an explosion in northward migration, especially to Europe and the United States. US culpability in fomenting increased regional destabilization since 2000 and the first world's continued insistence on the developmentalist fallacy (see Chapters 1 and 4) have only exacerbated migratory pressures as populations have been displaced and economic prospects have either stagnated, or gone into reverse; in which one side effect has been increased translingualism amongst those displaced or forced to migrate (Barrera, 2017;Georgiou, 2018). Since 2015, the west has moved more emphatically to a fortress mentality on inward migration which has been accompanied, and encouraged, by a rise in protectionist xenophobic nationalism, nowhere more so than in the US and Europe.…”