6 ms·
It's interesting that the article starts with the line "True bilingualism is a relatively rare thing". That's probably the case in the US or English-speaking wo
by freyfogle 9y ago
It's interesting that the article starts with the line "True bilingualism is a relatively rare thing". That's probably the case in the US or English-speaking world, but definitely not the case in many other areas. I live in Catalonia, it is very normal for locals to be fully fluent in Catalan and Spanish, I've seen the same in the Basque region. Go to India and almost every person you meet at all levels of society speaks several languages.
In many parts of the world bilingualism is the norm.
I don't recall the exact book, but I remember reading a Jared Diamond book about societies in remote Papua New Guinea and meeting indigenous peoples who all spoke several different languages. If I recall correctly he argues that being monolingual is the historic oddity.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bousaid 9y agoIn Tunisia everyone grows up learning French and Arabic. Additionally most learn English in school.
- jfaucett 9y agoAs a US spanish speaker, saying Catalan is another language is kind of debateable at least IMHO and gets into the interesting difference between a dialect and a language, namely - a flag and an army :) Still, though I think true bilingualism is extremely rare, If by "True" you mean being able to do anything you can in one language in the other language without any hiccups and word-searching and at the same speed and eloquence and precision in all possible situations and contexts. I've studied at a university level in 3 different languages and am highly fluent in all of them, still there are a lot of contexts where I don't know the specific vocabulary in one particular language or might have problems finding the right word in one language because I'm getting interference from the other ones. Also, I've known a lot of bi/tri/quad linguals in my life (whole family, extended family, friends, etc), and in my studies and I have yet to encounter even one truely bilingual person as I defined it above.
- joeyspn 9y ago> As a US spanish speaker, saying Catalan is another language is kind of debateable at least IMHO and gets into the interesting difference between a dialect and a language A spaniard who doesn't speak catalan won't understand 95% of a normal convo... Catalan [0] is lexically as distant from the spanish as the Portuguese is [1]... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language [1] https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/ https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among...
- p1esk 9y agoInteresting, I thought Spanish and Portuguese are extremely similar, so that a native speaker of one should understand most of the other.
- joeyspn 9y agoYeah, that’s a common misconception, but the reality is different. Just because they’re in the same linguistic group (Romance-derived languages) doesn’t mean they’re the same. It’s like saying that german, dutch and english (Germanic languages) are extremely similar… =)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jeeceebees 9y agoGerman and Dutch are extremely similar. As a fluent Dutch speaker without any formal German lessons whatsoever I can read German pretty well. Speaking and understanding are more difficult, but I'd say most Dutch/Germans would be able to make smalltalk in a bar if they took it slow and used a lot of hand gestures.
- vacri 9y agowhile English has germanic grammar, 40% of its words come from romance/french origins, so it really is a mongrel language. Word origins in english are roughly 30/30/25/15 french/latin/germanic/other, with more fancy words ('newspaper english'[1]) from romance and more daily words from germanic. [1]https://youtu.be/2OynrY8JCDM?t=6m43s https://youtu.be/2OynrY8JCDM?t=6m43s - interesting video overall
- Tade0 9y agoI don't think it really counts if you speak two languages from the same group that are spoken in the same territory.
- saint_fiasco 9y agoThen consider not Spain, but its former colonies. In Paraguay, Bolivia, northern Argentina and some other countries it's common for people to speak two languages. The one native to the region and the one the conquistadores used. In Africa it's the same thing, but the European language is more likely to be French than Spanish.
- Tade0 9y agoNow that's bilingualism.
- Manishearth 9y agoDefine "territory". Does India count? China? Russia? Spain? France? India has tons of mutually unintelligible languages. China does too (some call them dialects). Spain has multiple partially mutually intelligible languages -- and Basque is an isolate (and mutually unintelligible). IIRC Occitan and French are not that compatible either.
- yaantc 9y ago> IIRC Occitan and French are not that compatible either. Maybe you're thinking about the Basque language instead? I'm from the south of France, Occitanie really. Occitan is certainly different from French, but not completely alien. It's a bit similar to Spanish in closeness. Basque on the other hand is very different and is an isolated language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language
- Manishearth 9y agoI mentioned Basque, but Basque is in Spain. No, I know that Occitan and French are not that different, but they're still pretty different. Like you say, similar to Spanish in closeness -- I would definitely consider them distinct languages that take effort to learn.
- charlesism 9y agoIt depends on what one means by truly bilingual. In the context of this article, I took it to mean "no accent" and able to speak in one language as comfortably as the other. Bilingual people are a dime a dozen, but it's fair to say truly bilingual people are pretty rare, and almost invariably learned both languages at a young age.
- lucaspiller 9y agoI'd argue that it again depends on the region - as GP said in some places it's very common to speak multiple languages. I'm English and live in Lithuania now, and many of my Lithuanian friends can speak perfectly good English without an 'accent'. It's also not uncommon to speak a third language like Russian or Polish, especially if the family has their roots in that country. These languages do have some shared sounds, but are definatly not just dialects of each other.
- geomark 9y agoA bit OT but the idea of no accent is kind of funny. My kid goes to an international school in Thailand. I hear my kid's classmates speak English with Australian, British, Canadian and northeastern American accents plus an accent we call "international school accent". I'm from California and of course I think I don't have an accent. Same as those kids and their parents. Yet I have a hard time understanding some of them.
- vacri 9y agoWell, you can't literally have no accent. I think that the GP means that there is no 'tell' that the people are eastern european when they speak. In the UK itself, it's estimated that there's a different regional accent every 25 miles or so.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoOccasionally I manage to do a "Henry Higgins" and detect a main accent and sub-accent; there are a lot of hints in dialect though, like what you call a bread roll ...
- lomnakkus 9y ago> It's interesting that the article starts with the line "True bilingualism is a relatively rare thing". That's probably the case in the US or English-speaking world, but definitely not the case in many other areas. "True bilingualism is a relatively rare thing" is a truly bizarre statement for most of the world, I should think. FTR, I was raised "truly bilingual" -- I would go to kindergarten with kinds who spoke X, speak Y with my parents and immediate family, try to speak Y with the butcher until he told me he didn't understand X, then speak X, and be understood. (I think I was 5-7ish, so this is obviously from recollection by my parents.) I'm still fluent in X and Y, although one has suffered in pronunciation terms, but that's mostly through general atrophy from disuse, not because I can't do it, somehow. I think the exception may be exactly those countries who have some-sort-of-English as their native language (UK/Canada/America/etc.) They can usually afford to not bother with the others. ... though I do think it's a massive shame in terms of general cultural deveolpment. Again, English-speakers don't have this, but the whole "grammtical gender" thing is a massive eye-opener[1], especially is you manage to learn several different languages that not only have different geners for specific things, but also have different numbers of genders. (E.g. Danish, outside of specific persons, has two genders. German and French have three genders -- which, tellingly, don't actually agree across various nouns.) [1] Not to anything fundamental, just to how absurd language is as a construct.
- KayEss 9y ago> Danish, outside of specific persons, has two genders. German and French have three genders Given that Norwegian and German have three I would expect Danish to also have three. French has two (le + la).
- MattConfluence 9y agoDanish (and Swedish) used to have three grammatical genders, but the feminine and masculine merged at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish
- 9y ago
- Manishearth 9y agoI was really taken aback by the first line. For context, I'm trilingual (used to be bilingual). I grew up near Boston. A quarter of the kids in my class were bilingual. I don't know how many had native proficiency in their non-English language, but I'm guessing most. So I thought maybe "true" bilingualism was some hard to attain thing that none of us had. Nope, it just means "native proficiency". AIUI that's a relatively common thing, even in the US, at least in urban areas. And definitely in other countries. There probably was some local skew in this sample set, but from what I can tell this is definitely not abnormal in cities. The article seems to be mostly written in the context of unilingual parents who want a bilingual child.
- GuiA 9y ago> The article seems to be mostly written in the context of unilingual parents who want a bilingual child. Yes. The core target audience of the article is likely unilingual families who will put their kid in French/Chinese/whatever classes to give them a leg up for Harvard admissions, 15 years later (or, in the NYTime's subtle language: "parents who want to give their kids a bilingual boost"). Obviously if the kid only speaks the language in the context of a classroom, true fluency will never be reached. In a realistic context, true multilingualism is very achievable, and not particularly exceptional throughout most of the world as many other commenters have pointed out.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago>In a realistic context, true multilingualism is very achievable, and not particularly exceptional throughout most of the world as many other commenters have pointed out. // Implicitly you appear to suggest multilingualism is easy to achieve in [almost] all contexts? Where parents are monolingual, and the pervading culture is monolingual then there's little opportunity for immersion and few people from whom to learn.
- macNchz 9y agoI think what the article meant by 'truly' bilingual was someone not only fluent in speech but with equivalent vocabulary, grammar etc in two languages. I'd guess that the kids you knew growing up were speaking english in school and another language at home, so they likely don't develop the vocabulary and grammar in their 'home' language that they might have if they were studying it every day in school. From the article regarding kids from bilingual homes who speak english in school: "... they didn’t go to school in Spanish, they don’t read books in Spanish, and when you actually measure the size of their vocabularies, or the grammar they understand, or the coherence of the narrative they produce, they are not as proficient as they are in English".
- anton69 9y agoYes. I’m Latvian, born in the Soviet Union. Many of my generation grew up speaking Russian and the language of their country (Ukraine, Polish, Georgian, etc). Sure, I moved to the US when 10 but true bilingualism seems pretty normal to me. In my case speaking Russian with one parent and Latvian with the other.
- rimliu 9y agohttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzrbmiFCIAEE5HT.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzrbmiFCIAEE5HT.jpg