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Do you know if multilingualism is more common in England, Australia, or New Zealand? I've got the (maybe mistaken) impression that it's just not valued as highl
by ericd 9y ago
Do you know if multilingualism is more common in England, Australia, or New Zealand? I've got the (maybe mistaken) impression that it's just not valued as highly in the English Commonwealth as in other countries.
- hnzix 9y agoAustralian middle schools almost always teach a foreign language, the problem is that it's more or less random - Japanese, French, Italian and Indonesian are pretty common. Depending on the school you can elect to keep studying a language in high school, and the subject weighting is quite favourable towards your final College entry rank. But most people graduate with minimal retention.
- ericd 9y agoUS schools are the same way, albeit usually with a focus on French or Spanish. I'm wondering more about the culture - there doesn't seem to be the same culture of language learning that I hear about from Europeans.
- hnzix 9y agoI would say language learning is treated as a hobby, like painting or salsa dancing. It's certainly not part of the cultural DNA.
- kwhitefoot 9y agoEnglish schools all teach at least one foreign language. But very few students master it because to a good approximation there is no need. Because English is so widely spoken it is more costly (however you measure it) for an English speaker to learn enough languages to converse than it is for a non-English speaker to learn English; after all, they only have to learn one language while the English speaker will have to learn several to be able to converse with the same number of people. In my job I talk and correspond with people who speak Castilian Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, various South American Spanish dialects, Hindi, Gujarati, Arabic, Turkish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German (including Swiss German and Austrian), French, Chinese (Mandarin and several major dialects), Vietnamese, Italian. I speak passable Norwegian because I live in Norway but there is no chance that I could learn all the other languages, life is too short and all those colleagues speak English. They Spanish speakers (etc.) don't learn Hindi (etc.) either for just the same reason. If English weren't so widespread we would have to choose some other auxiliary language. For a thousand years it was Latin, then it was French, now it is English, sometime in the future it might be Mandarin Chinese. So I don't think multilingualism is necessarily highly valued anywhere, the ability to communicate is valued and speaking the most commonly used auxiliary language gets you a lot of that.
- HarryHirsch 9y agoThere's always been a love-hate relationship between England and France. Some Englishmen are Gallophiles, others avovedly not. Note: this is about French culture, its literature and way of life, of which French language is a part, not French language itself.
- logfromblammo 9y agoI see it more as an intense sibling rivalry between Britannia and Marianne. Sometimes they have scratching, hissing, spitting cat-fights. Sometimes they sneak into the other's bedroom and surreptitiously fart on all the pillows. And sometimes they just have each other's back, with no questions asked.