Switching Codes, Switching Code: Bilinguals' Emotional Responses in ...

Switching Codes, Switching Code: Bilinguals’ Emotional Responses in English and Greek Alexia Panayiotou University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus This paper investigates the verbal construction of emotions in a bilingual/bicultural setting, the target languages and cultures being American English and Cypriot Greek. To examine whether bilingual speakers express different emotions in their respective languages, a study was carried out with 10 bilingual/bicultural professionals. A scenario was presented to them first in English and a month later in Greek and their verbal reactions were recorded. The participants’ responses were then analysed through three questions: (1) whether they translate from one language to the other; (2) whether and when codeswitching occurs; (3) whether there is a pattern in the use of emotion words. The analysis of the results shows that respondents displayed different reactions to the same story depending on the language it was read to them in. The paper argues that participants changed their social code, i.e. sociocultural expectations, with the change in linguistic code. These findings raise interesting questions about the relationship between language, emotions and cognition, and the formation of the bilingual self. Keywords: emotions, bilingualism, social constructionism, discursive psychology, Greek /English bilinguals, linguistic scenarios

Introduction This paper addresses an important theoretical question in research on the cultural construction of emotions: does one’s emotional reaction shift when the language shifts? Specifically, this paper asks: if the same scenario or situation appears in a different language and/or culture, does a person (1) interpret this scenario differently? and (2) provide a different emotional response? Working within a social constructionist framework, I explored the expression of emotions in a bilingual/bicultural setting, the target languages and cultures being American English and Cypriot Greek. In the study, 10 bilingual/ bicultural professionals were presented a scenario first in English and a month later in Greek. Their verbal reactions to the text were recorded and the subsequent responses analysed by asking whether they translated from one language to the other in the two contexts; whether codeswitching occurred and why; and whether a pattern existed in the emotion words used. The study relied on the use of bilingual/bicultural informants in order to address the issue of translatability of emotion words in English and Greek. In doing so, it also addressed the critique of previous cross-cultural psychological research which saw monolingual subjects used in this type of research as rarely equivalent (Mesquita & Frijda, 1992). Bilinguals, as people who cross physical, linguistic and cultural boundaries, offer an optimal pool 0143-4632/04/02 124-16 $20.00/0 J. OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

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for cross-cultural comparison of emotion terms because they subjectively experience two languages and two cultures. In this study then bilingualism is used as a means through which one can access emotional representations and as a phenomenon worthy of study in emotion research (see also Dewaele & Pavlenko, 2002; Pavlenko, 2002b).

The Cultural Construction of Emotions Although it is tempting to think of emotions as natural givens (Gergen, 1999) or as part of human nature, the viewpoint adopted in this study is that emotions are culturally and linguistically constructed (Armon-Jones, 1986; Averill, 1980; Parrott & Harre´, 1996; Rosaldo, 1980; Wierzbicka, 1992, 1998, 1999; Winegar, 1995) and psychologically equivalent to statements (Harre´ & Gillett, 1994: 146). I define emotions as a subcategory of feelings (Levy, 1984) which help organise thoughts and behaviour (Lutz, 1988). Emotions are ‘biologically generated elements which must be enriched by meanings before becoming emotional experiences’ (Parrott & Harre´, 1996: 2). In my analysis of the bilinguals’ responses, I relied on the following fundamental aspects of what defines an emotion: (1) a biologically manifested element, (2) bounded by a bodily experience, (3) understood as a cognitive appraisal of a situation, (4) created and learned within a particular cultural meaning-making system, (5) constituted in context and (6) located within a cultural categorisation system. In this respect, hunger is not an emotion as it violates the last four premises; stenahoria 1 is, as it fulfils all six although not necessarily sequentially. Stenahoria is a socioculturally determined pattern of experience and expression which is acquired and subsequently felt in the body and featured in specific social situations. In other words, I am not claiming that emotions begin as biologically generated elements, only that at some point they are biological as well. As shown in another study (Panayiotou, 2001), it is also possible to learn an emotion in a new language/culture (so 3, 4, 5 and 6 are met). At that point the new cultural element manifests a physiological component as well. Language, in this respect, provides a means through which one can access emotions (not only in terms of understanding another person’s emotions but also in making sense of our own) but it does not necessarily determine an emotion; in other words, the issue of whether a person actually feels sad in a given context or is just constructing an appropriate verbal response and claims to be ‘sad’, is not an issue that this study addresses nor one that could be addressed in a social constructionist framework. The study is located in the context of discursive psychology which ‘focuses on the role of linguistic practices in the formation and expression of the mind’ (Harre´, 1998: 42). Language in this study is assumed to be at the core of psychological constructs and the focus is on the use of ‘vocabularies through which emotions are described and catalogued in particular cultures’ (Harre´ & Gillett, 1994: 160). Without negating the bodily component of emotions, I argue that emotions are language dependent (Searle, 1995), as the raw or bodily experience of an emotion must be filtered through a cultural meaning-making system (Parrot & Harre´, 1996), i.e. language, before it can be defined as an

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emotion. Language, then, is assumed to both actively construct and reconstruct emotions (Pavlenko, 2002a).

Research Design Objective The purpose of this study was to explore the construction of emotions in verbal responses of bilingual/bicultural Greek/English2 speakers elicited through a scenario presented in the two languages. Sample In exploring the question ‘does one’s experience of emotions shift when language shifts?’, bicultural bilinguals offer an optimal cross-cultural comparison pool since, as noted above, these people subjectively experience two languages and two cultures. The cross-cultural comparison exists then within the individual because he or she is simultaneously the vehicle of two cultures; it is neither a comparison to another group nor a comparison between two individuals as is usually the case for cross-cultural studies (e.g. Hoffman et al ., 1986; Kitayama et al ., 1995). In the present study, bilingual interviewees acted simultaneously as informants and as native anthropologists; a methodological approach which has not been used in previous studies. The participant pool consisted of five English /Greek bilinguals and five Greek/English bilinguals, two men and eight women, middle to upper class, between the ages of 25 and 50, living in Boston, Massachusetts and Nicosia, Cyprus, at the time of the interview.3 I used only 10 participants because this number allowed me to conduct an in-depth qualitative analysis. One of the participants did not offer any direct responses to the scenario but agreed to be interviewed on her emotional experiences as a bilingual/ bicultural person, so her insights are included as they informed the general findings of the study. For the purposes of this paper, I used Romaine’s (1989) basic criteria of what a bilingual is (having a native-like control of two languages) but with the realisation that a completely balanced bilingual is more a utopian than a realistic term (Snow, 1993). For the purposes of this study, it was important to include people who could effectively communicate their experience of emotions in two languages, regardless of any strictly defined criteria for competency and proficiency in the two languages. The criteria, in other words, were less stringent: if a person was able to talk to me about experiencing emotions in two languages, they were included in the study. It is also important to note that even though the participants were bilingual, parity between English and any other language is not possible in the current world hierarchy where English is clearly the higher-status language (Duranti, 1997). Not surprisingly, nine out of ten speakers regarded English as their dominant language in the work settings but eight saw Greek as their dominant language in family and personal settings. Lastly, it must be noted that in this study I focused specifically on bilingual and bicultural people; in other words, people who are not only cognitively knowledgeable about a language, but who also


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know the culture encoded in the scripts and narratives that a certain group shares (LeVine, 1997).4 The Appendix gives a brief description of the participants although, as mentioned earlier, as a sociolinguistic study, this paper gives less importance to the individual psychological profiles of the respondents than to the language they use to describe emotions. Also, as already noted, my primary selection criterion was whether respondents are bilingual and bicultural. Other participant characteristics / such as gender, age of second language acquisition, years in the native and adopted country, and frequency of travel between the two cultures / are only included as part of my subject description. With regard to gender, the sample was not balanced as I could not locate any more American /Cypriot bilingual males who fulfilled my competency criteria. This is not surprising, given that the reason most Americans live in Cyprus are family-related and, typically, an American man married to a Greek Cypriot woman would not migrate to or live in Cyprus. Although much research has indicated gender differences in regard to the different emotional development of men and women, the different situations in which men and women express emotions, and the different discourses used by men and women to talk about emotions (Chodorow, 1999; Cohen, 1990; Gilligan, 1991; Josselson, 1992; Tannen, 1994), in this study I did not include gender as a primary category in my subject selection for two reasons. The first reason is that the focus of my study is the linguistic and cultural untranslatability of emotions and how people talk about this untranslatability; I do not assume that either issue is influenced by gender. Secondly, I am focusing on language use, as it is filtered through cultural knowledge, and the experiential shift that may accompany a language shift, and I do not assume that these factors are influenced by gender either. I do acknowledge that language and culture influence gender construction (and vice versa) but the interplay of these categories, alongside the construction of emotions, could be the subject of future work. Finally, it is worth mentioning that some of the participants were either multicultural or multilingual, with two American English informants not having American English as their mother tongue but Spanish and Arabic. While these characteristics may add another layer of complexity to my subject description, this complexity was not problematic in my data collection as my primary objective was to understand how these participants talk about their emotions in the two languages and cultures in which they were immersed and fluent. Rather, the fact that the American speakers form a less homogeneous group than the Greek /Cypriot informants is simply indicative of the diversity of the USA versus the relative homogeneity of Cyprus. Recruitment and screening My primary recruitment method was snowballing, that is, using one contact to recruit another contact, who in turn put me in touch with someone else (Valentine, 1997: 116). In terms of screening interested volunteers, I conducted a brief screening interview in which I spoke briefly about my work and interest in bilingual and bicultural experiences and asked them questions in Greek and English to explore (1) whether they were comfortable in both


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languages; and (2) whether they defined themselves as and were indeed bicultural (the latter was accomplished by looking at their cultural sensitivities and references, e.g. acknowledgment of status differences in Cyprus, food associations, etc.). I also ensured that the pool was limited to (1) people who had lived in both countries for at least three years,5 (2) people who continued to speak both Greek and English, and (3) people who continued to travel between the two cultural settings. If interested participants did not meet the criterion of bilingual/bicultural, they were screened out. The participants chosen for the study were explicitly told what was required of them, and informed of the time commitment expected, the general purpose of the study and the possible use of the data. At that point, a consent form was signed. Data collection The scenario presented to the participants involved, in its two cultural versions, Andy, an American, and Andreas, a Cypriot who live, respectively, in the USA and Cyprus.6 I asked the participants to assume that Andy/Andreas is a person close to them. The English story is as follows: Andy, a person close to you, is a 30-year-old Harvard graduate. He has an MBA (Master’s in Business Administration). He is an accomplished, successful and driven young man who is currently working as a business analyst for a large multinational corporation in Boston. He says that he is very ambitious and that his ultimate goal is to manage his own company. He works late hours and, at the sacrifice of his friendships and family obligations, including his elderly divorced mother and his girlfriend, he has devoted all of his time and energy to his work. He says that this is absolutely necessary if he is going to become successful. To give a culturally appropriate account in Greek, the main character, Andreas, was an honours graduate from the Athens School of Engineering (Ethniko Metsoveio Polytechneio )7: O Antro´ aw, o´ na stono´ soy a´tomo, oi´ nai 30 xronvń kai apo´8oitow toy Polytoxnoi´ oy Auhnvń sth mhxanikh´. Mota´ tiw motaptyxiako´ w toy spoydo´ w sto Londi´ no, opo´ stroco sthn Ky´pro kai tv´ra orga´zotai gia mia moga´lh poloodomikh´ otairi´ a ston idivtiko´ tomo´ a sth Loykvsi´ a. Ei´ nai h´dh potyxhmo´ now ston tomo´ a toy kai o´ xoi si´ goyra kalo´ w prooptiko´ w gia thn hliki´ a toy. Erga´zotai sklhra´ kai syxna´ jonykta´ sth doyloia´ toy, mo apoto´ losma na mh blo´ poi poly´ th xh´ra mhto´ ra toy, toyw paidikoy´w toy 8i´ loyw h´ thn arrabvniastikia´ toy. Lo´ oi o´ti ayto´ pro´ poi na kańoi an pro´koitai na poty´xoi ston tomo´ a toy kai na jokinh´soi th dikh´ toy doyloia´. Andreas, a person close to you, is a 30-year-old engineering graduate of the ‘Athens School of Engineering’. After completing his graduate studies in London, he returned to Cyprus and now works for a large construction company in the private sector in Nicosia. He is successful for his age and has many prospects. He works hard and often stays at his job until late at night, so he does not spend enough time with his elderly


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widowed mother, his childhood friends or his fianceé. He says that this is absolutely necessary if he is going to become successful and start his own company. The first reading of the scenario was in American English and the participants were asked to describe their emotional reaction to the story. About a month later, the participants were read the same story in Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and questioned again about their emotional reaction. SMG was a culturally appropriate choice here given that Cypriot Greek is rarely used in writing; the participants were, however, explicitly told that they could use Cypriot Greek in their responses. In addition, I spoke in the dialect throughout the interview, thus encouraging them to respond in this way.8 Both readings were completed in the same cultural setting; in other words, if a participant was presented the English story in the USA, he or she was also presented the Greek story in the USA, since this was determined by the accessibility of the participant. Although it may have been better to have the English story read in an American context and the Greek story in a Cypriot context, or vice versa, the constraints of the study did not allow for this. Leonidas, George, Christina and Camille were interviewed in Boston while the other participants were interviewed in Nicosia. The two questions after each story were: (1) What would you say to Andy/Andreas if he were a person close to you? (2) How do you feel about Andy/Andreas? Subsequent questions inquired about any differences in the two accounts.9 This approach provided me with the participant’s interpretation of the difference. The participants were, therefore, shown a transcript of their two accounts and asked: . . .

.

Do you see a difference in the two accounts? What is different? (Or, how are these the same?) Why are these lists different, you think? (Or, why are these lists just a translation of each other?) What would you identify as your predominant (main) emotion in the English list? In the Greek list? Can you tell me why?

The participants’ reactions were recorded and subsequently transcribed, with codeswitching marked throughout in bold. In the absence of a videotape and wanting to establish the overall emotional experience and state of the respondents, I transcribed every intonation change, every pause, ‘um’ and word spoken. I should also note that the transcription of the Greek interviews was in the spoken Greek Cypriot dialect, although the written form of this dialect is not widely used. I kept the dialect to maintain the authenticity of the participants’ voices. The difficulties arising from transposing an oral text to a written one were compounded by the difficulties of translating a narrative from one language to another, so, in this respect translation in a study such as this one becomes ‘intimately linked to ethnography’ (Duranti, 1997: 154) as my choices reflected the larger sociopolitical context to which both I and my interviewees belong as

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bilinguals. In order to establish the accuracy of the transcription, translation and analysis, the transcriptions and translations were read both by the participants themselves and by two bilingual bicultural colleagues.

Findings and Analysis The summary of the responses to the two scenarios is given in Table 1. The Greek responses are given in English translation in italics and codeswitching is marked in bold. It is interesting to note that some participants opted for Greek when the scenario was presented in English and vice versa. I used the participants’ responses to the two scenarios to address the following questions: (1) Do participants offer translation equivalents of emotion terms in their responses to the two stories? (2) Is there any codeswitching where participants use emotion terms from the other language? (3) Are there certain emotion words that are repeated by participants in each language? (In other words, is there a pattern in the words used?) At first glance, what Table 1 shows is that the respondents had different reactions to the two stories. There appears to be a greater overall concern for Andreas and either indifference or disapproval for Andy. For Andreas, respondents used words such as ‘I am concerned; I would warn him; He should not overdo it; I can sympathise with him; I feel sadness; I would tell him to be careful; I would ask him what he is doing all this for’. They also made several comments regarding his relationships, none of which came up in responses to the English version. Four respondents wondered about his mother and two said that they felt sorry for her; two respondents also showed concern about his romantic relationship. Andy’s situation appears somewhat different: in the eyes of the respondents he came across as a less likeable person who is simply following the rules to get ahead and doing what is required of ‘men that age’. One respondent said that he felt ‘frustrated and disapproval, because his priorities are wrong’ and two said that they felt sorry for him or sad. None, however, mentioned his relationship or his mother, which is an intriguing finding. Although I expected a greater acceptance of Andy, given the American work ethic that the interviewees picked up on, the opposite was true / there was greater concern and understanding for Andreas. To my surprise, what two respondents said is that Andreas sounded like ‘he needed to work, maybe because of his mom and because he is getting married’, while Andy to them sounded ‘purely selfish’. The interviewees are, therefore, interpreting the two versions of the story differently, creating a different scenario each time. Some mentioned that the ‘widow mom’ has different connotations in Greek and English. At my questioning whether this is because she is a ‘widow’, respondents said that ‘a divorced mom in Cyprus of a person that age would be unlikely anyway’ but that mostly it was the image of a Cypriot mom that influenced their reactions / ‘knowing what Cypriot moms are like, just living around their children and having their children be


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Table 1 Summary of responses to the Andy/Andreas story Responses to the English version

Responses to the Greek version

Leonidas

He’s just doing what everyone does at that age; he’s just following the rules; I feel indifferent to this .

He’s just immature; I would probably warn him about the future (to be careful); he just shouldn’t overdo it; I guess I am concerned.

George

Frustrated; disapproval because his priorities are wrong. I don’t feel much sympathy for him, he is not excused in my eyes.

I can sympathise with him even though I don’t agree with his thinking process. I feel some admiration but some sadness as well if he feels he has no other choice. It feels that he has a need to do this.

Lydia

I feel sorry for him; that sounds like [a mutual acquaintance] so I think he sounds pathetic, I could never live this way; he is missing out on life.

Mana mou re [Greek expression of sympathy]. . . What is his financial situation though? Is he doing it for his mom you mean?

Christina

He’s trying to get ahead; he’s doing whatever it takes in the society we live in; good for him to be able to work so hard.

He’s just doing what everyone in the private sector is doing here; he’s young, let him work while he can */ that’s what I do; I just feel sorry for his mom.

Nefeli

I don’t really know anyone like that except for doctors here [the USA] but if this is what he wants, let him be! I don’t really feel anything about him.

Will his engagement survive? If he were a friend I would tell him to be careful, this is a trap and people are not aware of this sometimes.

Lila

I feel sorry for him but maybe he is just doing what he has to do as a 30-year-old male. No, he would not be a friend.

I pity him. Isn’t this the same story pretty much as last time? If he were my son I would feel that I failed as a mother.

Jackie

I don’t feel anything in particular about him; that’s just the American work ethic, what everyone does.

I don’t know about him but I feel sorry for his mom.

Julia

N/A

N/A

Camille

I am so not in touch with people like him, on purpose. . . because I knew too many like him, so I guess I feel resentful for people like that. I distance myself from these gogetter types.

I feel sad because I feel that it’s this American mentality that is transferring all over the world; maybe worried too because of that. Does his mom live with him though?

Sofia

I feel sad that he has to prove himself this way. . .

His woman will find someone else! What is he doing all that for?

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their whole lives’ (Christina, translated from Greek). Jackie also agreed that ‘somehow when I think of a Cypriot mom there’s a different image that comes to mind than an American mom, although it shouldn’t be that way but maybe it’s because I think of my mom and (her husband’s) mom. . .’. Camille agreed, asking whether Andreas’ mom lived with him ‘since that would make a difference’. She also noted that maybe the question was deeply related to the status of women in both countries and ‘how important family is (in Cyprus)’. Clearly then, the terms given in response to the English story are not a translation of the terms given for the Greek story and what bilinguals are reacting to is the different cultural context of each story. There also seems to be a pattern of concern for the family in the Greek scenario / particularly for the widowed mother / that does not appear in the American scenario. Finally, what is interesting is the codeswitching noted in several instances, from Greek to English words and expressions, such as ‘indifferent’, ‘concerned’, ‘frustrated’, ‘priorities’, ‘sympathy’, ‘I can sympathise with him’, and ‘the American work ethic’. When respondents were asked about these terms, they said that the reason they switched to English was either because they could not think of the Greek word or because the Greek word did not sound right. In the case of ‘frustrated’ and ‘the American work ethic’, the respondents said that these terms simply could not be translated into Greek (Panayiotou, 2004). The term ‘sympathy’ was also interesting as the Greek equivalent seems inadequate for expressing what George wanted to say. This codeswitching is particularly noteworthy because it shows that bilinguals are indeed ‘delving into the bag of emotion terms’ and choosing what they find as most appropriate when speaking with another bilingual, regardless of the language context. In other words, if ‘sympathy’ is the appropriate term, then they will use this term in a Cypriot scenario presented in the Greek language without really thinking about it. So, although different cultural contexts seem to be tied to different emotional reactions, these reactions are not inherently tied to a particular language. In sum, this analysis shows that (1) one’s emotional reaction shifts with language (and cultural context) and (2) all emotion terms (and reactions) are available to bilingual speakers, almost regardless of the context. This last finding suggests that the experience of emotions is a unified experience, despite its strong cultural component. In other words, although different cultural scenarios evoke different reactions, these reactions are not linguistically or culturally monolithic / they include terms and possibly experiences that ‘cross over’.

Discussion What the aforementioned findings show is that a change in codes (languages) implies, at least to a certain extent, a change in the cultural or social code used, but also vice versa / that a change in context implies a shift in language. Since bilinguals are able to ‘read’ the context of a situation / cultural and otherwise / it seems that they consciously or unconsciously connect this context to the relevant language. It is almost as if in describing a feeling of frustration, which cannot be translated into Greek, for example, a


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bilingual can reach into the bag of emotion terms and pick out the one that is most suitable, provided that the interlocutor is also bilingual. This explanation would be consistent with what I was told in one of my interviews, that being bilingual is like having a palette with more colours: whereas monolinguals have some colours with which to paint their emotions, bilinguals have even more and can thus use a greater variety of emotions.10 What the participants stressed is that language and culture are deeply intertwined. Leonidas, for example, said that he felt stenahorimenos regarding Andy’s relationship with his mom. When asked in the subsequent explanatory interview why he had not used the term in the English interview (although he had used Greek in his answer), he said that he cannot feel stenahoria in English ‘not just because the word doesn’t exist but because that kind of situation would never arise’. Lila said that she felt the same way about ypohreosi, ‘this deep sense of a cultural and social obligation which could never arise in the US’. This ypohreosi is not something that Andy would feel, but Andreas would, or should. And marazi , the deep sense of sadness accompanied by images of ‘mothers dressed in black mourning for lost soldiers’ is also culture- and language-specific, according to the participants. Christina, for example, noted that while it is likely that Andreas’ mother felt marazi both for her son and for her widowhood, Andy’s mother would not, and it is for this reason that she ‘(felt) sorry for his mom’. These responses suggest that to the extent that language use implies a certain cultural context, certain experiences can occur only within the context of a specific language. This finding is consistent with Lutz’s (1988) argument that the Ifaluk’s fago can only be experienced in that language and culture, Wierzbicka’s (1998) argument about German angst , Doi’s (1962) argument about the Japanese amae, and with much of the literature that supports the idea of culturally and linguistically specific emotions. In addition, the literature on linguistically translatable but culturally untranslatable emotions mentions that certain terms, such as love (Derne´, 1994), anger (Averill, 1982) and guilt and shame (Ekman, 1972; Kitayama et al ., 1995; Wallbott & Scherer, 1995), mean different things in different contexts. What this literature does not examine, however, is how the same person might experience ‘love’ in three cultures (taken from Derne´, 1994). Is it the same experience? Although this is not the pertinent question of this study, it is an important issue to address in future research as my respondents are indicating that even the experience of emotions may differ based on the linguistic and cultural context. Furthermore, the participants’ responses point to the construction of a different emotional space for bilinguals. One can begin to ask if bilinguals have one emotional space in which the labels for the various emotions appear simultaneously (‘shame’ in English, ntropi in Greek) and are mapped onto one construct, OR if they have two distinct emotional spaces, which are connected but separated, so that ‘shame’ is in one space (like ‘frustrated’) and ntropi in another (along with stenahoria ). What my findings show then is that bilingualism may act, on some level, as a metalanguage for emotions. It is likely, in other words, that a person’s ability to ‘express feelings, emotions and thoughts in both languages equally well’


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(Julia) may give him or her a metalanguage through which to think about his or her two (or more) languages. As Nefeli said, I think that being bilingual gives me the ability to be more analytical about certain things. . . Sometimes I think I was really lucky to learn English at such an early age because I realised, early in life, how relative and meaningless words could be. . . Inevitably, I think, you become more analytical because you no longer take things for granted, you learn that almost everything is an either/or, that nothing is just ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but an issue of interpretation. . . . Nefeli then added that being bilingual enables her to think about Greek words in a different frame of mind, to analyse certain concepts ‘like an outsider would’. Christina also said that being a bilingual/bicultural person is ‘like being able to stand back and watch yourself, hear what you are saying, and analyse it like a listener of yourself or how a spectator would’. It is these observations and experiences of the people interviewed that bring me to the conclusion that being a bilingual is like having ‘the other within the self’ (Panayiotou, 2001).

Conclusion This paper explored the verbal construction of emotions in a bilingual/ bicultural setting; specifically, it sought to explore the responses of 10 English/ Greek bilingual speakers to two culturally similar scenarios that were presented to them in the two languages. The findings showed that bilinguals reacted differently to the two versions of the story, offering culturally appropriate emotional responses. The verbal responses were not direct translations of each other. Codeswitching was used when certain emotion terms were seen as more appropriate in one language versus the other. It appears then that bilinguals offer an optimal pool for cross-cultural comparison of emotion terms and this finding is an important contribution to the study of emotions. These findings also offer useful directions for other types of inquiry, in particular a study of self-construction, grounded in examinations of the relationship between language, culture and emotions. Bilinguals manage to create coherent, viable selves through which they experience and make sense of the world. The present study indicates that the bilingual self may be contextual, one which is found and founded in two languages. The self can be multilayered, both English and Greek, both satisfied and confused, both at home and at a loss. Maybe searching for one description of the self or even one language of the self is problematic and guided only by our need to make sense through categories and our finite human ability to grasp the complexity of the multilayered self. While Harre´ (1984, 1986), in his work on the construction of emotions, does not explicitly address the case of bilinguals, I see his theory as useful in the differentiation between self and person. If we assume that a bilingual person is two persons, based on Harre´’s definition / i.e. two personalities that are ‘identifiable by public criteria. . . and interpreted within a social frame-


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work’ (1984: 76) / but one self , in the experiential, maybe even constructivist sense that he describes, then a bilingual person/self is one who must learn to (socially) orchestrate the two persons but who is, nonetheless, always the ‘experiencer’ of ‘unified perceptions, feelings, and beliefs’ (1984: 77). In other words, although the interpretation of an experience may differ based on the language and culture that one is in, the manifestation of the experience only involves one self. To use the example of bicultural emotions, ‘angry’ may be interpreted differently by a bilingual/bicultural person depending on the context, but the actual experience of this emotion may be the same. While any kind of a definitive answer is premature at this point, the present study indicates that there seems to be a close relationship between language and the construction and interpretation of emotions. Bilingualism complicates this relationship to a great degree and further research is needed to fully understand the complexity of this relationship. Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank the two editors, the three anonymous reviewers, and George Kassinis for their valuable insights and comments during the preparation of this article and Miranda Christou and Spyros Spyrou for their useful contributions during the analysis of the data. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Alexia Panayiotou, University of Cyprus, 75 Kallipoleos Street, Nicosia 1678, Cyprus (alexiap@ ucy.ac.cy). Notes 1. A Greek emotion which, using Lutz’s (1988) connotation, can be loosely translated as sadness/discomfort/suffocation. 2. ‘Greek’ includes both Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and the Cypriot dialect; ‘English’ refers to Standard American English (SAE). 3. I chose to focus on Greek/English bilingual/bicultural adults (This notation includes both Greek/English and English/Greek bilinguals) who live in the Cypriot and American cultural contexts specifically because these are the languages and cultures in which I am ‘fluent’. As explained elsewhere (Panayiotou, 2001), fluency is crucial for conducting a thorough analysis both of the emotion terms used and of the explanation of those terms (see also Denzin and Lincoln, 1998; Maxwell, 1996). As the Cypriot culture is distinct from the Greek culture / despite the many similarities and shared history / and the Greek Cypriot dialect is different from SMG, for the purposes of the study, I recruited Greek/English bilinguals who were Greek Cypriots (and thus knowledgeable of both SMG and the Cypriot dialect) and English/Greek bilinguals who were fluent in both SMG and the Cypriot dialect and had Cyprus as their home base for at least three years (Birdsong, 1992). 4. Admittedly, by treating the American and Cypriot cultures as distinct conceptual categories, I seem to be neglecting the multiple subcultures present in both. As I am focusing on the manifestation of linguistic phenomena, however, I believe that for this study it is not problematic to treat ‘American’ as that culture which is intertwined with the (American) English language and ‘Cypriot’ as that culture which is connected to the (Cypriot) Greek language.

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5. Birdsong (1992), for example, reported that adult learners of a second language who achieve native-like competence in this second language, have it by about the end of a three year period of immersion in the second language environment. 6. Similar work with Chinese/English bilinguals was conducted by Hoffman and her colleagues (1986). In this study, Hoffman et al . found that bilingual speakers may develop different impressions of a person depending on which language they were using when forming an impression. 7. The story was made culturally relevant using the help of a focus group. 8. For a discussion of the differences between SMG and the Cypriot dialect, see, for example, Hadjioannou (1996). 9. Tannen (1980) used a similar method with Greek Americans when she asked them to talk about a film they saw (further details about this film in Chafe, 1984). 10. Interviews were also conducted with the 10 participants as part of a larger study on the cultural construction of emotions (see Panayiotou, 2001). 11. All names have been changed to ensure confidentiality and anonymity.

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Appendix: Descriptions of participants11 Leonidas Leonidas is a 30-year-old Greek Cypriot who spent the first few years of his life in the USA and then went back for his university studies at the age of 20. As a child, he spoke English with his family, even upon returning to Cyprus, but stopped doing so a few years after entering elementary school. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in the USA and then worked for a well known East Coast consulting firm for several years. Currently, his home is in Cyprus where he works as an accountant; he is married to a Greek Cypriot. George George is a Greek Cypriot who attended English-speaking schools all his life. He is an engineer who studied and then worked in the USA for nearly 10 years. Recently married to a Greek Cypriot, he had just returned to Cyprus when I interviewed him. Nefeli Nefeli is a Greek Cypriot artist living in the USA. She is married to a Greek Cypriot and is the mother of a young bilingual girl. She learned English at the age of five when she moved with her family to the USA for a few years. She spoke English with her sister and parents until she graduated from high school. Lydia Lydia is a Greek Cypriot architect in her late 30s. She has two young children and is married to a Greek Cypriot. She learned English in the USA at the age of 11 when her family moved there for three years and then returned to the USA as a college student for an additional five years. Christina Christina is a Greek Cypriot who had learned English in Cyprus at a young age and lived in New York for 10 years as an adolescent and young adult. In her late 30s, she says that she feels like a New Yorker at heart and had it not been for family circumstances she would have lived there ‘for ever and ever’. She has a young son to whom she speaks only in English. Christina runs her own company and is married to a Greek Cypriot who only recently learned English. Sofia Sofia’s first language is Spanish as she was born in South America. She learned English as a child when her family immigrated to the USA and had lived in the USA until she married her Greek Cypriot husband. She speaks several languages and has lived all over the world. She has been living in


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Cyprus for the last seven years with her husband and two children. Sofia holds a degree in the social sciences and is in her early 40s. Lila Lila is a multilingual, born in Lebanon to a Lebanese father and a German mother. Her first languages were Arabic and German but all of her education was in English, even while attending a Cypriot high school for three years. She has lived all over the world and moved to the USA when she was an adolescent. There she met her Greek Cypriot husband and, after living in the USA for seven years, they moved back to Cyprus. She has been living in Cyprus for the last 13 years and is a lecturer at a private college and a businesswoman. She is in her early 40s and has two trilingual children. Julia Julia is a multilingual American in her late 40s, married to a German. She has lived in Cyprus for the last three years. She is a language teacher who learned Greek in her early 20s when she met her first husband, a Greek. Before going to Cyprus she had lived in Greece for 10 years and then in various countries around the world. Camille Camille is an American in her late 30s who has been living in Cyprus for the last four years. She is married to a Greek and before coming to Cyprus she lived all over the world. She has a toddler whom she is raising as a bilingual Greek/English speaker. Camille is a researcher with an advanced degree in the humanities from a US university. Jackie Jackie is an American who has been living in Cyprus for the last 12 years after she married her Greek Cypriot husband. She has three bilingual children and runs her own business. She holds a bachelor’s in social sciences from a US university.