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Day 9: Multilingual books from South Africa, Germany and Poland

Today I was working with several multilingual books, including one with eleven, yes eleven languages. I’ll outline three here to give you a feel for the range.

The first book entitled The Rights of a Child (2004) is a book about the ten principles of the United Nations Declaration of Children’s Rights presented in the eleven national languages of South Africa: Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZula, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, and Xitsong. English, however,  dominates the cover and front matter (including a foreword from Desmond Tutu) of the book. I have read that the ANC has promoted English as the language of government, so maybe this explains its dominance in this book.

I also examined Tsunami Mein Verlorenes Paradies/ My Lost Paradise/ Mon paradis perdu/ Mi paraiso perdido which is a book published by the Kinders Kunt Museum (Museum of Children’s Art) of Berlin recording voices and artistry of children who survived the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 in German, English, French and Spanish. The outer of the book features only the first word of the title ‘Tsunami’ a borrowed word from Japanese in all of the languages featured on the front cover. Except for one page the text isn’t about the actual tsunami, but instead it records the children’s hopes for a peaceful earth where people care for the environment.

Thekla i Jej Chlopakowy Swiat/Thekla et les garcons/Thekla and the boys (Dubas, 2010) is a picturebook featuring photographs teeling the story of a little girl and her family life with her three brothers and parents. The story is told in three languages: Polish, French and English. Polish is the most common langauge spoken in Poland (95%) followed by English (20%), then Russian (14%), German (13%) and French (3%) (Language Knowledge, 2017b), so the language used in this book reflect the langauge context to a large degree. The choice of French rather than other more commonly spoken languages in the Polish context (Russian and German) can be understood when the text on one page of the bidy of the book is read: “English in school, Polish at home, French on the telephone. Ukranian with my babysitter. But I understand.” (no page). It is clear that the family of the author and photographer in this book use these three langauges mostly in their daily lives.

I still have more multilingual books to analyse, but I am certainly getting a feel for a whole range of sociolinguistic settings as I read.

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