Bilingual Couples Talk: The Discursive Construction of Hybridity (review)

When my daughter was seven, a visiting playmate, noticing that she spoke German to me, asked her if she was German. ‘No’, my daughter replied quite offended, ‘I’m bilingual’. The role of bilingualism in establishing identities is the crux of Piller’s book.

The field of bilingualism has been enriched in the past decade not only by many important contributions to language contact theory and the study of language maintenance and bilingual speech processing, but also by a spate of descriptions of bilingual families, leading to advice on how to raise children in more than one language. P’s book is unique and different in a number of ways. First, the focus is on the bilingual couple and not on the transmission of bilingualism to the next generation. Indeed, it is not until the ninth of ten chapters that we learn which of the couples have children (although there is mention in some case studies in Ch. 4). This makes it possible to stress issues of new hybrid and multiple identity, ideology (and its relation to identity), and polyphony (juggling the various facets of identity in language use patterns). Second, there is little analysis of the actual speech of the informants, their codeswitching, the incidence of attrition, or grammatical change. This book is about the discourse on bilingualism, mainly in interactions between partners in an intercultural relationship. The book marries discourse analysis with postmodernist notions of deconstructing hybridity and crossing. It also contributes to the sparse literature on couples outside of psychology and women’s studies. Through the analysis of 184 extracts—English, German (with the author’s translations), or mixed/switched—P demonstrates the important issues of language, identity, and language attitudes among the informants and the range of positions including in-family disagreements. The first six chapters discuss the methodology and the case studies, how the couples were selected, their language backgrounds, and their language use patterns. The next four chapters draw on the extracts to discuss issues of identity, ideology, and family language policy.

The contradiction between ‘coupleness’ as a collective and dichotomies—two individuals, genders, languages, and cultures—is brought out nicely throughout the book. English and German are the main languages in contact in the case studies of the thirty-six bilingual ‘core couples’ whose biographies are outlined. P collected self-recorded tapes of conversations between the couples (totaling 18 hours 44 minutes) on specific topics relating to their practices of and attitudes toward bilingualism and cross-cultural communication based on stimuli in a discussion paper. This corpus is supplemented by further tapes, newsletters on bilingualism, and even some guidebooks on bilingual families. The couples who were selected had been recruited by the author or had responded to advertisements. Many never met the researcher. Most currently live in Germany, Britain, or the US. All except one couple are heterosexual. Not all of them are run-of-the-mill German-English bilingual couples; some were themselves brought up bilingually or come from multilingual/multicultural backgrounds. Many of them have lived in different parts of the world or have studied in a country where the ‘other’ language is spoken. In some cases, the interest in the ‘other’ language resulted from romantic attachment, but in others, the emotional contact was with the language before the individual (for instance, through study and teaching of the language). P initiates discussion on an issue absent from linguistic literature but which has been addressed in fiction—how love of a language leads to an erotic relationship with a speaker of that language.

The stated language of interpersonal communication at home varies from English to German via ‘heavy switching’, ‘duallinguality’ (both people speak their own language; 24), and a different code choice according to which country one finds oneself in, the day of the week, or some other consideration. However, the evidence from the tapes sometimes does not correspond to the stated home language situation.

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