Author(s)

Yulia Kostogorova-Beller

Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship, Montclair, NJ, USA.

A child born into a dual-language speaking family has the potential to grow into an accent-free bilingual; yet, with all the ubiquity of bilingualism, this tongue is rare. While the mere occurrence of such uniqueness, emerging in a nearly monolingual environment, deserves attention, experiencing the child being accent-free allures the mind of the accent-stamped bilingual parent. Through an autoethnographic inquiry, the author questions why this rare tongue arises in her child’s psyche, reasoning that, since it cannot be the child’s choice, it must inevitably stem from the parent. Involuntary projection of the unconscious contents turns the child’s tongue into what it appears to the parent, not the child. Therefore, the understanding of emerging childhood bilingualism, conventionally perceived as dual language, is subject to parental interpretation and its inherent subjectivity. Influenced by the sensation of being accent-free, the author’s perception of her child’s bilingualism associates not with two languages but one, shaped by an intuitively grasped collective image. It is the parent’s attitude toward the child’s language that ultimately renders him speaking his only bilingual mother tongue.

Accent-Free Bilingualism, Analytic Autoethnography, Analytic Psychology, Childhood First Language Acquisition, Acquired Bilingualism, Bilingual Mind and Experience, Psychology of Consciousness and the Collective Unconscious, Jungian Theory

Kostogorova-Beller, Y. (2024) When Language Becomes the Accent-Free Bilingual Tongue. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 14, 840-859. doi: 10.4236/ojml.2024.145045.