Personal stories of native language attrition are not rare in our immigrant society, and they are often spoken or written with a deeply felt anxiety about losing connection with one’s heritage. This is especially true in my case. Albanian identity was founded primarily on a common language, which has made it even more important for me to maintain a high level of literacy, and not allow the nasal sounds of my American English interfere with the round pronunciation of Albanian vowels. I also grew up speaking Italian which is a big part of my identity, and I have continued to use both of my native languages throughout my life. But English has been my main language for most of my life now, and my fluency in my native languages has changed with the amount of exposure and use at different times in my life. I also use French and Spanish and have been trying to become fluent in French for some time, but my family life has made learning Japanese a priority.  I acquire languages primarily by exposure, and to maintain fluency of my native languages and improve my French and Japanese, I must make a conscious effort to be exposed to these languages regularly.

Because of graduate school, and the isolation imposed on all of us by the pandemic I have made no conscious effort to study other languages, and have had few opportunities to interact with my European friends and family. In this project I set out to measure how much exposure to languages other than English happens “organically”, without a conscious effort. I want to investigate which conditions help me actively interact with a particular language. I am especially interested to see the ways in which I am exposed to Japanese. How much time do I spend speaking, listening to, or reading in languages other than English, and how do they interact with my interests and social life? Are there any patterns in the type of contact I have with each language? As such I am the primary audience for this project, but these findings might be of interest to scholars and researchers investigating language acquisition and retention, and the conditions that make these possible in a multi-lingual environment. It might also be of interest to current and future students of the Introduction to Data Visualization students to observe this particular use of visualizations.

The data showed that I spent a total of 14hours 15minutes (855 minutes) listening, speaking, or reading in a language other than English over this period. This was a shockingly small amount of time, considering that most of my family speaks no English and the fact that I communicate in Italian with many of my close friends. I started with two visualizations (see above) that could give an overview of this project. I mapped out the locations where the language interactions take place, because a map is a literal overview but also it contains an important geographic breakdown of interactions. Not surprisingly the map shows that I use most languages at home, and Japanese rules Central Park, which is where I usually meet Japanese friends. Next I chose a pie chart as an ideal way to show the breakdown of percentages of amount of exposure for each language. I expected Albanian to make up the largest slice of this pie chart, but Japanese makes up almost half of the chart.

A little disappointed by the limited Albanian use, I wanted to visualize the nature of my interactions with each language, which also speaks to how I engaged with the language. This is where I struggled with how I categorized this observation in my data: after a few experiments, I decided to think of this observation as the platform or setting through which I was exposed to the language. This would speak to the way of interaction as well. For example a non-fiction book and a graphic novel are clearly read, and conversations involve speaking and listening etc. The bar chart shows that over this period I only used Albanian over FaceTime with my family and only read in Italian. This visualization reveals that Japanese is not only the most used language: it is also a language I interact with through more diverse platforms and settings.

But what are these interactions about? What interests and topics facilitate so much interaction in Japanese? I chose the bubbles because it is a minimalist way to convey size and display information in a fun and lighthearted way. Although being entirely lighthearted is apparently impossible during our darkest timeline, with Global Warming makes an appearance. These two visualizations show that not surprisingly Princess Mako’s recent decision to leave the Japanese royal family and her move to the Upper West Side was our favorite topic of conversation in Japanese.

I built the data by recording my exposure to languages other than English over eleven days, dividing it into different categories including, conversations that took place entirely or partially in another language, speaking, listening, and reading. I also marked the time, place, and type of interaction or content I was exposed to. I collected data from FaceTime conversations, streaming from YouTube and Netflix, and reading. I recorded the primary language of a conversation and marked if and how English was used, subtracting the time that the conversation turned entirely to English. I ignored interactions that were simple one word greetings, but recorded conversations that included a few sentences and were at least 30 seconds long. Having data that covers a longer period, and measures specifically how much I speak, listen to, write, and read in other languages would reveal patterns of engagement with particular languages and correlations with which conditions facilitate exposure. The next step of this project is to put the exposure to a particular language with my proficiency in each language. This would be possible at a larger scale, with data collected over a longer period, combining it with data on changing language proficiency levels. Proficiency could be measured by tests, but also tasks such as, reading a Japanese book beyond elementary school level, or my long goal of reading A Sheep’s Chase in Japanese.