It really disturbed me when they talked in mixed languages. Maybe it was because I could hardly understand a single one in a long conversation and the combination of the two was very tiring since they were both foreign languages. Thinking a little back I realized I have been doing this for a while.
I remember, back in Turkey as I thought SPSS lectures to the sophomores as a senior, one of the students had critisized my lectures for being discomforting becuase of constantly talking in two languages- Turkish and English. I hated that too but if I talked only in English about statistics and computers, more than half of the class could not follow the lectures. And I had asked which language they would like me to talk at the lectures at the beginning of the year, and people had voted for multilingual lecturing.
Still, I don't like this mumbling and bumbling in many languages at the same time. Since I came to Abkhazia, constantly I talk in 4 languages- Turkish, English, Abkhaz and Russian. Sometimes, I feel like I am going to have a brain emboli. Or as some repatirants will start to create my own language- of mendacious words, ungrammatical mixed language sentences, full rubbish.
This language issue is really interesting. In my life I have met so many bilingual and multilingual people. I think if you are multilingual since early ages it is easier to add new languages to your knowledge. And it becomes less disturbing to talk in many languages in a day. I myself, am not a multilingual child. I learned English with the encouragement of my mother. She was importing English language text books and reading books to Turkey.
My French is a disaster though I finished 4th level of study in high school as electives.
My grandfather was not so succesfull in teaching Adyghe neither to his children nor to grandchildren, though he started to tell the Nart stories he knew from his childhood in Adyghe just before he died... I studied for 3 months in Adygeya but it seems to be lost as I started learning Abkhaz since these languages are really close to each other.
My Russian has tolerated 5 different teachers of Russian language, and seems to survive and even develop in the recent month so I can say the best teacher has been the field work in Abkhazia!
We are doing a research at the Center for Strategic Studies on the topic of Multinguality and Culture. I printed 1000 copies of questionnaires in 6 months from an ordinary printer. (I hated myself in most days that I had to sit infront of the computer for hours just printing!)
For the last month they have been distributing the questionnaires around but the total sample has reached to 37 only!!! So within a year they will finish than I can tell you about the situation about this multilinguality in Abkhazia.
