Cradle of language

Can you pat your head and rub your belly at the same time?
Can you do the weekly shop whilst helping with maths homework over the phone? 
Can you read one language whilst hearing a second language behind it?
I recently managed the third of these multi-tasking challenges and the glow of achievement is still with me.

I work in a school in Portugal. I joined last year when it added an international wing; international in the sense that lessons are delivered in English, qualifications are certified by an organisation registered in the UK, and most pupils come from beyond Portugal. 

The school has been in existence for nearly ninety years so its supporting infrastructure was already well-established before it started offering a curriculum taught in English: policies, term planners, clothing guidelines, categories for recording pupil absence and all the other written procedures necessary for effective operation. And, naturally, all of this was in Portuguese.

A handful of teachers in the international wing are bilingual in English and Portuguese. For the rest of us there is the other language, the one which is not our mother tongue. Whatever our skill and confidence in this other language, all of us, even those that only deliver lessons in our mother tongue, have become trans-lingual. 

What I mean is that our working exchanges - conversations, discussions on MS Teams, formal reports - move back and forth across the border between Portuguese and English. Like a pair of mutually orbiting planets, each language operates under the gravitational force of the other.

There are moments when the force of one language causes a shift or wobble in the other. This happened with the role description for those teachers who take year long pastoral responsibility for a class. In Portuguese the term is diretor de turma. In the international wing of the school, this role was initially described as head teacher creating confusion because in English head teacher means the teacher responsible for running the whole school. 

After discussions, some staff began to use form tutor as an alternative, but others continued to use head teacher. As a working community we have accepted that head teacher has two meanings. And the meaning we privilege in the school's day-to-day discourse is a meaning specific to our working community. People outside our school would understand head teacher in its conventional sense of principal or school director. 

Another case is falta. In Portuguese this means a failure by a pupil to comply with some of their duties. A falta is most commonly an absence from school but there is also falta de material (failure to bring in textbooks or equipment) and falta de trabalho (missing homework). There is no single word in English to cover all these categories. As teachers, even when we’re speaking in English, we often use the word falta - it’s quicker, and more effective, and perhaps most importantly it marries with the school's online register. The word slots into place within the recording systems.

A third moment of trans-lingualism is the one that made me feel so smug. I noticed that when my Portuguese colleagues shared a document online they would often write I've already put the mid-term reports in the shared folder. 

At first I thought this was a response to a question that had been asked face-to-face: 
   spoken question: Have you shared those mid-term reports? 

   answer written on Teams: I've already put the mid-term reports in the shared folder. 

In this case the use of already is slightly defensive, or even irritated.

As I started tracking these small exchanges I realised that already was not performing its usual role in the English language. It didn't mean before the present time. It was a stand-in for the Portuguese word já. 

Já does have alliances with the word already but it is more supple and gregarious. It forms phrases like para já (at the moment, for now) and volto já (I'll be right back). As soon as I heard já hovering behind already, the phrase I've already put the mid-term reports in the shared folder made sense. The word already wasn't a reply to a previous question or a stated time-frame, it was to make it more emphatic, more lively, more like the mother tongue of the person who wrote it.