Was thinking about how monolingual writers write bilingual characters sometimes like
„whoops I forgot to switch languages 🤪“
as an attempt at a subtle way to drop in their language skills after reading this post on vocables
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Because they’re a soooo so much easier and much more natural way to do this and you can keep using them throughout the whole text, not just once or twice in the beginning to establish that the character is bilingual.
Those little reactionary/ filler not-quite-words seem so natural and universal but they aren’t. They’re very much specific to the speaker’s respective language.
I used to have that typical bilingual child dynamic with my parents where they speak entirely in Russian and I respond entirely in German, including those vocables. But with the pandemic and some other circumstances afterwards I’ve been surrounded by much more Russian than German for a while which made me really notice the difference in vocables because I suddenly have to correct myself when I accidentally use them with German speakers. Most of the time I catch myself before it happens but they do slip through sometimes and people do notice.
„Ну…“ (Nu) instead of „Naja…“ (meaning „well…“)
„Чю?“ (Chyo?) instead of „Hä?“ or „Was?“ („Huh?“ or „What?“)
Most of these are full words but as you can see that even goes for just sounds we make, like the „hä“/„huh“ difference. Even screams aren’t safe. Have you ever watched an anime where they didn’t bother to dub the scream and you can just hear the Japanese in it?
Tldr easy way to show your character is bilingual without those „whoops forgot to switch“ type situations is to just sprinkle in vocables of their other language in their dialogue.
