Mourning the Mother Tongue: Language and Identity in Akvilina Cicėnaitė Anglų Kalbos Žodynas [the English Language Dictionary]

Abstract Book of the 4th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities in the 21st Century

Year: 2025

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Mourning the Mother Tongue: Language and Identity in Akvilina Cicėnaitė Anglų Kalbos Žodynas [the English Language Dictionary]

Laima Vince Sruoginis

ABSTRACT:

Akvilina Cicėnaitė’s autobiographical novel, Anglų kalbos žodynas [The English Language Dictionary] (2022) struck a nerve with Lithuanian readers who have experienced nearly a third of their population migrating abroad since independence from the Soviet Union. This paper applies the concept of language and identity to reflect on the novel’s narrator’s sense of mourning regarding loss of self, national identity, and home while living for a decade as a migrant woman in Australia. The narrative is structured around a road trip the narrator and her husband take across Australia. Each chapter is framed by a letter from the English alphabet, relating to emotionally charged words that explore untranslatability, loss of memory, and how the predominance of English as a global language subsumes the significance of experience of people from small language groups. Subsummation of her mother tongue has erased the narrator’s sense of inner identity. Her husband similarly has abandoned his mother tongue, French. The couple struggles with expressing intimacy and connection in a second language. The author reflects on East European women shedding their mother tongues, realizing that replacing a deep wellspring of linguistic expression for a shallow superficial knowledge of English stunts them emotionally and in their intimate relationships. The novel opens up discourse about language and social interaction as Cicėnaitė raises questions about the emotional and psychological costs non-English speakers pay to participate in the global economy and community through English.

Keywords: English as a Foreign Language; Language and Identity; Language and Social Interaction; Lithuanian; Migrant Experience