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#abjhhabfujb ANYway
artsybi · 3 years
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so y'all know that bad trope that happens when a bilingual character is written by a non-bilingual author and they do that "oh it's hard to switch back sometimes" thing or just use random words from their other language when speaking to non-bilingual characters? i have realized,,,, i am the second one.
like, i'm not bilingual by any stretch, i barely speak english and it's my first and only language lol, but i am a quarter italian and my aunt spent a year in italy when she was in college, and speaks the language because of it, and, though i didn't realize it, she used a handful of italian words around me when i was growing up, and i still use some of them to this day, like, okay, example, y'all know chickpeas? garbanzo beans? yeah i always called them "ceci beans" until like,,,, literally two years ago? and it never occurred to me that ceci isn't an english word because i never wrote it down, and everyone i used it around figured it out from context, i guess? i still use ceci instead of chickpeas most of the time, i always just assumed it was another word for them. another example, when i was a kid and my aunt wanted me to like, walk faster and stop getting distracted by something every two steps she'd say "andiamo! andiamo, places to be." and again it never occurred to me that "andiamo" doesn't even sound like an english word! it's italian for "let's go", but like, i remember using it around my friends and again, not one of them ever questioned it, so like, i'm starting to wonder if my friends just, like, got used to me being "like that", or they just always figured it out from context, or if we were all young enough when i started using the words that they just assumed they were words they'd never heard, it's just like,,,, i decided to give this very specific quirk to a character in a current project of mine, and i'm trying to figure out to make it very clear to the audience that, no, i'm not a dumbass who doesn't know how to write bilingual characters, isabelle isn't bilingual, she's just half italian and her aunt integrated italian words into her vocabulary when she was young and they just stuck.
okay i got totally off track but like,,,, it's just a weird thing to think about like, i'm the closest to a shittily written bilingual character that exists in real life, so like, thanks zia, i guess.
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