The Bilingual Dinner: An Examination

Last night I went to a dinner with a group of friends: three other American language assistants and three French students. A dinner among seven people has its social particularities to begin with: for example, distance limits conversation between the whole group in a way that makes divisions spring up. Tension arises between areas of lively conversation and areas of silence; one person may have to strain to hear the conversation she is interested in or may find herself between two people who are very interested in a subject she cares not at all for. You might think having two languages in which to carry out our discourses would make the dinner more interesting, as having more tools at our disposal expands the possibilities; and in a removed, intellectual way, it does. In practice, however, it complicates things by adding new decisions. You have to figure out which language you're going to start in every time you try to defeat the silence. Should I speak in a language that is easier for me, or should I risk embarrassing mistakes by being polite and speaking my listener's native language? And then when you're speaking to a person of your same native language, do you do what's easy and speak in that language at the risk of alienating the people around you, or do you limit the depth of subject and wittiness of your utterances in the effort to be polite? Or should it be a matter of geography - should the whole group stick exclusively to French since we are, after all, physically situated in France?

I watched my companions struggle with these questions again and again last night, and they came up with many solutions. A friend who is weaker in French began speaking in English to avoid getting mired down with problems of expression because she judged that her listener's English was better than her French. In conversation with a French person I had never met before, I spoke in French since I didn't know his level of English and we were limited to surface topics anyway since we had just met. In the end, I believe we migrated toward a pattern of using the language that is most likely to be understood. That is the point of language, after all; it is more worth having your listener comprehend your meaning than expressing that meaning in a pleasantly ego-inflating way.

After living in Nantes for four months and now Toulouse for two and a half, I have attended many, many bilingual dinners of various shapes and sizes. It is a skill to do it elegantly. But even if you can't do it elegantly, it is a successful dinner if you have fought that language barrier and understood a little something about the person you sat next to.