Acquired Tongues: Language Acquisition and the Bilingual Literary Imagination

Abstract

This essay argues that the neurobiology and timing of bilingual language acquisition leave a discernible formal signature on translingual literature. Drawing psycholinguistics and literary criticism into dialogue, it contends that the maturational asymmetry between early and late bilingualism, the difference between an entrenched, automatic first system and an effortfully monitored later one, corresponds to two distinct translingual poetics. Writers who acquired their languages within the plastic window of childhood tend toward a poetics of plenitude: an exuberant code-meshing that treats English and the vernacular as one continuous repertoire. Writers who acquire a literary language in adulthood tend toward a poetics of estrangement, marked by restraint, literalism, and metalinguistic self-consciousness. Building on recent accounts of the neurobiological, cognitive, and social differences between childhood and adult learning, and on scholarship analyzing code-switching in South Asian Anglophone writing, the essay reframes the established categories of translingual practice and the translingual imagination as acquisition-sensitive. It proposes that literary form remembers the conditions under which language was learned, and that critical-period research offers literary studies a principled vocabulary for distinguishing kinds of multilingual creativity rather than collapsing them into a single celebratory figure of hybridity