Robyn Berghoff and Emanuel Bylund at The Conversation discuss a problem of mismatch; after pointing out that multilingualism is important and has consequences, they say:
The problem is that much of the published research about multilingualism is not conducted in the world’s most multilingual societies. For example, the African continent is home to some of the most multilingual countries in the world. Cameroon has a population of around 27 million people; over 250 different languages are spoken as first languages, often alongside English and French or both.
Studies of African multilingual contexts are almost non-existent in high-impact scientific journals, however. This matters because it is research published in these journals that receives the most attention globally and is therefore most likely to shape people’s understanding of multilingualism.
Our recent study provides new empirical evidence of the geographic bias in multilingualism research published in high-impact scientific journals. We show that the regions most commonly studied are not particularly multilingual. The reverse is also true: the most multilingual regions are massively understudied in research on multilingualism.
A pair of maps provide a very clear illustration of the problem; they continue:
This geographic bias is not unique to multilingualism research. It echoes concerns raised in many other scientific fields about the lack of representation of scholars and research locations in the so-called “global south” (Africa, Latin America, and most countries in Asia and Oceania).
In this case, however, the underrepresentation is particularly detrimental. It is precisely in the global south that multilingualism is most common. The predominance of global north research locations, then, means that much of the knowledge of multilingualism stems from regions that are comparatively monolingual. […]
The reduced visibility of research conducted in the global south has a complex web of causes. These include the unequal distribution of resources (like research infrastructure and research funding), as well as bias in the academic publishing system, which is dominated by global north institutions and publishing houses.
As a consequence of this imbalance, the global north is often seen as the “default” site for research, while global south settings are perceived as specific and a source of knowledge that is not generalisable to other contexts. This is simply untrue.
They recommend increasing the visibility of the research being conducted in the global south, “big team” science, and collaboration between north and south. As Bathrobe, who sent me the link, says, “This is sure to warm the cockles of David Eddyshaw’s heart.”
Cockles duly warmed …
I am aware of a fair bit of stuff published on multilingualism in Africa: I think the trouble is maybe that it tends to be hived off into specifically Africanist publications that researchers into things like multilingualism in North American educational contexts are never going to look at.
My very amateur feeling based on seeing how things work where I used to live is that multilingualism in Africa is often (not always) comparatively stable, with individuals happily using different languages for different purposes and in different contexts: the “competition” aspect need not be there at all. A lot of American/European ideas about multilingualism seem to be skewed by the legacy of nation-state homogenising of language, leading to the idea that multilingualism is inherently unstable and basically “unnatural.”
One of the things that struck me very much in West Africa was how languages could be phonologically, morphologically and syntactically quite different, but tended to be much more alike in semantics. Hausa, for example, fits right in among its completely unrelated Niger-Congo neighbours as far as semantics is concerned.
It impinges on comparative work in Africa, too: one of the reasons that subclassification within Bantu is so wobbly is that “horizontal” transmission of features between Bantu languages is common, rather than exceptional.
In my own pet area: it’s hardly surprising (for example) that the Western Oti-Volta language Boulba shares all kinds of sound changes with its not-really-closely-related Atakora neighbours, given that all Boulba speakers can also speak Byali and 90% of them can speak Waama too.
I think the diversity of sound systems in the entire Balkan Sprachbund is about the same as that within just Standard German… similarly, the sound systems of Basque and its Romance neighbors on all sides have on the whole been converging for 2000 years, and it shows; and what Basque seems to have had before that is actually quite close to what Proto-Celtic could have had.
Cameroon has a population of around 27 million people; over 250 different languages are spoken as first languages
Unfortunately, this statement is compatible with any of these possibilities:
(a) Everyone in Cameroon speaks one of 250 languages as L1 and no L2 languages at all;
(b) Everyone in Cameroon speaks one of 250 languages as L1 and the other 249 languages as L2s;
(c) any intermediate possibility.
Furthermore, it is unclear whether whoever says this believes that everyone has exactly one L1 language or not.
It’s not that African linguistics has not had a significant impact on linguistics in general in some areas: things that spring to mind where Africanist work has been central are serial verb constructions and autosegmental theories of tone.
Maybe researchers into multilingualism are more parochial in their outlook than some others.
My first refereed publication after my fieldwork in PNG (another of the world’s multilingual hotspots) was not a sketch of the phonology or grammar of the tiny language unique to my village, but “Multilingualism and Language Mixture Among the Numbami”! I cannot keep comparative notes out of any of my descriptive work. My dissertation advisor, George W. Grace, essentially agreed with DE’s observation above, arguing that multilinguals tend to keep their “content-form” (semantic constituents) aligned to facilitate translation, while restricting their emblematic usage to “lexification” (word choice and phonology). In the most extreme case I know of in one Oceanic subgroup (South Huon Gulf) in Morobe Province, PNG, the coastal member of the subgroup in regular contact with other relatively conservative coastal languages retained features more common to its Oceanic coastal neighbors, with 5 vowel phonemes and 3 positions of articulation (labial, dental, velar), while its most innovative South Huon Gulf relative far up in the mountains distinguished 7 vowel positions with length distinctions for each, plus 6 places of articulation for its consonants (bilabial, dental, alveopalatal, velar, labiovelar, uvular), quite an orthographic challenge!
In an article titled “The Population Kaleidoscope: Another Factor in the Melanesian Diversity v. Polynesian Homogeneity Debate” I compared several syntactic constructions across coastal representatives of each of the 4 local subgroups (North HG, South HG, Markham, and the isolate Numbami) to show that the sequences of morphemes were almost exactly intertranslatable, despite their different shapes and sounds (although of course many pieces were cognate).
Of the three members of the small North HG subgroup, the most conservative showed tonogenesis linked to obstruent voicing (voiced > L, voiceless > H, otherwise neutral), while the most widespread language around the coast lost the correlation between obstruent voicing and tone due to other obstruent sound changes, while the third member of the subgroup appears to have lost tonal distinctions and instead resorted to phonemic nasalization to preserve distinctions among highly eroded morphemes.
“high-impact scientific journals”
What exact field do they have in mind?
No matter what is written in high-impact journals, if you study Oti-Volta, you read about Oti-Volta.
I suspect they mean some applied discipline (that could be but is not informed by such studies)?
@DE, language shift is an event that happened many times in various settings before modern “nation state”.
Romance replaced many languages of Roman empire, Arabic replaced Romance and other languages.
Ireland: should we really say that Irish nationalists are responsible for shrinking Gaeltacht? Perhaps: the situation of Irish as L1 in Northern Ireland is not exactly “worse”. But then the exact mechanisms of this adverse effect of nationalism are by no means (as) trivial (as in certain nation states that take an effort to erase languages).
And USSR (not exactly a “nation” state).
Nationalists (other than Russian) tell stories how Moscow oppressed their languages. Russians in turn sincerely believe that the Soviet gorernment supported and promoted them.
You can see it even in Putin speeches, when he says that USSR was so good at supporting local national cultures, and much of its experience in doing that has been forgotten.
Meanwhile the fact is that many of langauges disappeared while some others (e.g. Uzbek) did not.
Stability is exactly the feature important to Ferguson in his “diglossia” (I understand that diglossia is not about bilingualism).
@drasvi:
Sure: not all language death has been driven by the modern state ideology by any means, though a great deal has (and in this context, the USSR certainly counts as a modern “nation” state too, whatever the official propaganda line was. “Nation” need not imply biological relatedness: the French idea of nationhood, at its best, anyhow, is cultural, not biological, for example. You can’t maintain that the old USSR was not interested in cultural hegemony.)
Examples abound in Africa, too: Hausa has evidently gobbled up many languages since well before the European invasions (though part of that did involve state-building, at that.)
What I meant was that the ideology of modern (19th-century-onward) cultural flattening as part of state-mongering (currently vigorously expressed in China) has affected the thinking of Europeans/Americans when they think about multilingualism: even without intending to, they have imbibed the idea that it’s multilingualism that needs explaining and investigating, because it’s a deviation from the “norm.”
I suspect that you’re right about the “high-impact” stuff; it may reflect not so much an ignoring of the Global South (ugh) as a sort of intellectual ghettoisation where people interested in things like bilingual education or language loss in immigrants to rich countries don’t have as much awareness as they might of relevant work elsewhere in linguistics in general.
(After all, you can get papers published in the high-impactiest juournal of them all, Nature, on historical linguistics, even if you are woefully ignorant of the past two hundred years of steady progress in, er, historical linguistics. Never visited that shelf in the university library ,,,)
The somewhat fatuous rhetoric about “Global South” treats it as all much of a muchness, but e.g. Latin America is very different from sub-Saharan Africa when it comes to multilingualism – there are certainly plenty of pockets of it, but there are also large chunks (probably making up a clear majority of the population) where almost everyone is functionally a monolingual Hispanophone or monolingual Lusophone.
FWIW, Nicholas Ostler makes an interesting claim that the Spanish colonial authorities did not put much effort into discouraging indigenous languages — the attempt to create universally Hispanophone societies in the former Spanish colonies was, he says, mostly a post-independence project driven at least in part by “state-building” concerns. Except of course in Paraguay where state-building apparently could be done bilingually. No wonder everyone else thought they were a weird primitive backwater.
@DE, I simply dont’know how I should apply the concept of a nation state to USSR.
Soviet citizens were “Soviet”, then everyone also possessed “nationality” (“Tatar”, “Russian”, “Uzbek” etc.). So what is the nation in question? “Soviet people” or specifically Russians or?
even without intending to, they have imbibed the idea that it’s multilingualism that needs explaining and investigating, because it’s a deviation from the “norm.” – here I agree.
and in this context, the USSR certainly counts as a modern “nation” state too
Like drasvi, I don’t understand your thinking here. If “nation state” is exactly the same as “state,” there’s no point to the phrase. As it’s generally used, “nation state” means a state centered on a single “nation,” which can of course be a fuzzy concept, but in general we understand that France is the state of the French, Germany of the Germans, etc. The United States is not such a state, and still less was the Soviet Union. There was no such thing as a “Soviet nation,” and this caused many problems for the Soviet leaders, which have been frequently analyzed (Geoffrey Hoskins is particularly good on this).
Yeah, I’ve confused the issue by talking about “nation” states, particularly given the etymology of the word (which is of course, not relevant to its actual current meaning.)
Though in mitigation, I plead that the state-synthesisers have quite often pushed the same confusion as part of their propaganda retroactively: for example, in the PRC’s determination that everyone within their borders is “Chinese”, which is achieved by delberate manipulation of the meaning of “Han”, the Mandarin word for – “Chinese”, to refer to only one kind of “Chinese” person. The PRC lays claim to monitoring the behaviour of people all over the world on the basis of this manufactured concept of “Chinese” ethnicity: they certainly conceptualise it in (pseudo)biological terms.
Still: what do you call “nationalism” of the French kind, which is expressly not biology-based (and where a far-right “nationalist” pusher of “great replacement” shit can be of Algerian Jewish origin)?
I don’t think Éric Zemmour is a French nationalist. He isn’t for anything, he’s against a long list of things.
I think that phenomenon goes back to Jörg Haider.
@DE, in my view THE problem with China and everything is that we simply don’t know how this or that environment will affect a language.
Yes, there are policies which are demonstrably bad: in China, in France, in Algeria. But there also many more policies whose result we can’t predict.
There was what the government of USSR wanted from langauges, there was how the government explained its policies. But these wishes and words did not determine how their decisions affected the situation.
I have been under the impression that multilingualism is considered common and normal in continental Europe, east and west. Of course, there has been suppression of minority languages everywhere, lest their speakers unify and think of political independence. But trilingual speakers are common enough that they are considered unremarkable, whether highly educated or not. No?
I don’t know how it is in the U.K. I imagine that other than immigrants and their first generation descendants, second-language fluency is mostly limited to people with university education. Are multilinguals still considered unremarkable?
There was what the government of USSR wanted from langauges
There wasn’t one thing that the government of USSR wanted from languages or anything else; even individual people have contradictory wants, let alone governments. To take an excellent example, as I explained here, under Stalin the government both did and did not want to support local languages:
That was how good Soviet citizens knew what the government “really” wanted: if you didn’t do it, you got sent to the Gulag or shot. Otherwise, it was meaningless propaganda.
RE USSR: While there was an official policy of linguistic and cultural autonomy (which I have seen half- jokingly described as “every nationality has the right to read Lenin in their own language “), there was also unofficial pressure to learn Russian if one wanted a good education or a career. And while the non-Russian nationalities felt this pressure to learn Russian and use it for inter-ethnic communication, Russian native speakers generally didn’t feel the need to learn the languages of other nationalities. So multilingualism was a one-way street similar to the situation of immigration nations like the U.S. or European-style nation states.
@Y: No, in those European about which I know something, trilingual individuals are not unremarkable. Simplified, among the speakers of the national language in bigger countries like Germany or France, knowledge of a prestige foreign language (nowadays mostly English) is indeed not something remarkable, but knowledge of a third language is. Among immigrants and minorities being trilingual (their own language, the national language, and English) would be unremarkable. Trilingualism is also quite usual in smaller countries – e.g., in my experience, many Dutch speak good English and German.
EDIT: I began writing my comment before LH posted his, and saw his comment only afterwards. I agree with his points.
Having recently returned from a linguistics conference (yes, yes, a real in-person one!) where matters relating to multilingualism were abundantly discussed, it seems to me that Robyn Berghoff and Emanuel Bylund are missing the point: the reason why the bulk of the published research on multilingualism today has North America and Western Europe as its focus, I think, is because, with the sharp increase in the number of migrants in North America and Western Europe from the “Global South”, issues relating to North American + Western European multilingualism are much more immediately relevant (in matters such as bilingual education for children, language teaching to adults…) than multilingualism abroad (including Africa), and therefore scholars having such matters as the nucleus of their research are much LESS likely to face cutbacks.
One of the nice things about in-person conferences is that one can have frank and open talks with colleagues during coffee breaks and the like (since there is no real danger of being recorded or overheard, unlike the case with on-line conferences, where people do NOT feel free to discuss numerous sensitive matters with colleagues, even ones they know well and trust), and a recurring theme in informal discussions at this conference was the consequence(s) for various grad students and professors of having their research funds abruptly cut off/not renewed (there were some real horror stories on that topic), and an underlying theme (I am tempted to call it a substrate) throughout these discussions was: How can I protect myself (and my grad students, in the case of more senior professors -well, those who actually care for their grad students, that is-) from facing such a scenario in the near future?
The simplest answer (hinted at more than directly told, most often) seemed to be: To do research that is perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be relevant in a very concrete way to various funding agencies/national governments. And indeed several scholars of my acquaintance there who had done (often excellent) work on language contact/multilingualism somewhere in the Global South were now working on language contact in their home countries among first and second generation migrants + refugees: tellingly, I did not meet any scholar at this particular conference whose trajectory had been in the opposite direction (i.e. who had begun to work on multilingualism in their home country and later studied it in the Global South): such individuals may exist, but if so they are very much in the minority.
I don’t understand why you think Berghoff and Bylund are missing the point; I suspect they wouldn’t disagree with anything you say. They simply deplore it, as do I. Do you think the focus on North America and Western Europe is a good thing, setting aside funding issues?
Is it possible that works on multilingualism in different parts pf the world have been placed under different umbrellas, say “multilingualism”, “language contact”, “areal linguistics”, etc.? How are studies of linguistic exogamy in Vaupés or contact interference in Kupwar compare to the studies of language prestige among German Turks?
This is what I was wondering.
What Hans said. People actually fluent in two foreign languages are not common and certainly likely to be highly educated, people fluent in three are outright rare and may all have doctorates (or ABDs).
WTAF.
Zoom meetings can’t actually be recorded without at least telling everyone in the meeting. Or are there people with something like a YouTube downloader!?!
Zoom meetings can’t actually be recorded without at least telling everyone in the meeting. Or are there people with something like a YouTube downloader!?!
Practically every person in the average Zoom meeting also has a phone in their pocket, unless that’s what they’re dialing in from.
Hat: Berghoff and Bylund might not disagree with anything I say, but unless I badly misunderstood their article (which is certainly possible) they would not regard it as central: their article seems to place ideology at the center of the reasons for not paying attention to multilingualism in Africa, rather than cutbacks which are less likely to affect research perceived to be directly relevant to national social issues in the first world (such as multilingualism involving migrants and refugees…).
To be clear, I do NOT think this focus on North America and Western Europe is a good thing at all, but it is quite grossly disingenuous (to put it mildly) on Berghoff and Bylund’s part to place the blame solely or indeed even chiefly on first world scholars’ (ideological) shoulders.
For example, a number of years ago I met a well-known (first world) scholar whose specialty was a major language grouping of the Global South, who told me that he only accepted as grad students candidates who pledged NOT to do any fieldwork there.
(Just to be clear: this scholar was from a first world country, and worked in one, but both had NO colonial past connected to the language grouping said scholar specialized in).
Why? Because, as he told me bluntly, the area had grown so unsafe for outsiders that he could not in good conscience send grad students there. He bemoaned this state of affairs and thought he had been very lucky to be able (back in his own grad student days) to do fieldwork at a time when the area was comparatively safe for outsiders. He thought it was terrible that the younger generation of grad students would not experience the many joys and challenges of local fieldwork, but he also thought that such lack of field experience was better than the alternative (i.e. the very real risk of being taken hostage or killed while practicing fieldwork).
I certainly cannot condemn this scholar. Reading Berghoff and Bylund, I do not sense that they accept or even consider that the paucity of first world scholars working on multilingualism in Africa today might have perfectly reasonable causes (such as the one this scholar had). All I sense on their part is a kind of self-righteous exercise in finger pointing and virtue signaling which, to be blunt, I heartily dislike. All the more so since it is rampant in Academia.
I think Etienne has pretty certainly nailed it. It’s primarily about the economics (as, indeed, is language loss: a bigger factor than deliberate government-sponsored suppression.)
It also means that “must try harder to avoid Eurocentric bias” is not going to solve the disparity (not that it’s a bad idea in itself.)
[EDIT on seeing Etienne’s follow-up comment: what language group was that, Etienne?]
“their article seems to place ideology at the center of the reasons for not paying attention to multilingualism in Africa”
No:
“The reduced visibility of research conducted in the global south has a complex web of causes. These include the unequal distribution of resources (like research infrastructure and research funding), as well as bias in the academic publishing system, which is dominated by global north institutions and publishing houses.”
(Berghoff and Bylund)
Even if online meetings can’t easily be recorded, and even if live conference smalltalk can be recorded too, the latter is obviously more likely to yield off-cuff discussion. For one thing, at a conference you’re stuck as long as your stay lasts, and you talk to those around you on whatever common ground you can find. In online conferences, even if they try to simulate the informal venues in off-schedule breakout rooms or whatever, your life will come in the way… There are kids to pick up, a dishwasher to empty, or a garden to mowe, maybe even a grant application to write.
David Eddyshaw: I will answer your question (“what language group was that?”) when/if I ever meet you in person: confidentiality is something I take seriously, and knowing what the language group is, I am afraid it would prove very easy -well, too easy, actually -for any number of people to identify the scholar I wrote about upthread, who told me these things in confidence.
“must try harder to avoid Eurocentric bias” is not going to solve the disparity
@DE, I think discussing the disparity is a good idea. And such a discussion can result in better funding.
(I’m not sure if you’re objecting, because on the one hand you write it in the context of a highly critical Etienne’s comment and “must try harder” sounds sarcastic and on the other hand you say it is not a bad idea in itself)
@Etienne:
Fair enough.
(I think I can guess: in fact I can think of a very plausible candidate, but we shouldn’t speculate here, from what you say.)
For one thing, at a conference you’re stuck as long as your stay lasts, and you talk to those around you on whatever common ground you can find.
For another thing, at a conference you’re drunk…
“No”
I wrote so just because I did not have much to add to this quote from Berghoff and Bylund. But I simply don’t see ideology in their artcile.
Yes, it is addresses its readers (not necessarily scholars) as agents rather than victims of funding, but still the cause it names is “funding”
I agree with drasvi, and I think Etienne is reading their piece tendentiously because of his own preconceptions. (Which of course is something we all do.)
Trust me, that’s not possible during an online conference unless you only drop in for a talk or two and then log out.
Well, again, the implication is “you, the reader, can change something”.
So if for someone the source of the problem is external, she can read it as “scholars are responsible for the problem” or “it is scholars who set the fashion”
But I don’t think that readers can change nothing… “You can make a difference” is not exactly the same as “you are responsible for the situation”.
(and if scholars never discuss their problems or only discuss them in private when no one is recording, they maybe should not expect any improvements)
David M.: Trust me, that’s not possible during an online conference unless you only drop in for a talk or two and then log out.
So you log out and write your application (after picking up the kids etc.) instead of staying for the informal talk. If there even is informal talk.
(Sez I, who’ve never even been to a scientific conference, on or off any line.)
A few hasty comments:
1. My dissertation advisor, George W. Grace, essentially agreed with DE’s observation above, arguing that multilinguals tend to keep their “content-form” (semantic constituents) aligned to facilitate translation, while restricting their emblematic usage to “lexification” (word choice and phonology).
Yes, this is certainly an interesting phenomenon. I remember reading of a similar situation in Southeast Asia, where certain ethnic groups (villages?) had entirely switched from one language to another*. This would certainly be facilitated by semantic convergence. Switching from one language to another would simply be a matter of switching from one vocabulary set to another.
*Damn! I wish I’d kept the source instead of resorting to vague memories!
2. With regard to the USSR, I find this an interesting topic. In the case of Mongolian, the quasi-independent state of Mongolia managed to largely maintain the Mongolness of its vocabulary. On the other hand, Buryat has become completely inundated with Russian loanwords; Mongolian and Buryat have effectively been split from each other. For example, Mongolian uses yoronhiilegch for ‘president’ where Buryat uses prezident (off the top of my head). Why did Buryat become so filled with Russian loanwords, and not loanwords from other constituent nationalities of the Soviet empire? Because the Buryats wanted it in order to become ‘progressive’? Or because Russian was the de facto standard of the empire? (Sorry for the naive formulation.)
3. As I might have mentioned some time in the past, the Mongolian word for “China” is Hyatad, which is supposedly derived from ‘Khitan’ but is now the word for Han Chinese. The Inner Mongolian word for “China” is Dundad Uls (Central country), and Hyatad is used only for the Han ethnicity.** The term Hyatad pretty much sums up the reality. Dundad Uls propagates the official position that China does not belong to the Han ethnicity; it is a land of many ethnicities.
** In an interview for an Inner Mongolian radio station I once used the word Hyatad for “China” and was hastily corrected by the interviewer.
4. As I have discussed at various places, China actually enforces a policy whereby terminology in minority ethnic languages must be a calque of Chinese terminology. Whole dictionaries have been produced in pursuit of this project — the officially promulgated vocabulary is quite explicitly meant to ensure that Chinese terminology is rendered correctly in minority languages. I don’t think there is any doubt that this project is a reflection of Han hegemony. (With reference to the role of minority nationalities in the Soviet empire, I’m wondering what kinds of policy were adopted with regard to the adoption of Russian terminology. It would be interesting to know more about this.)
The Inner Mongolian word for “China” is Dundad Uls (Central country)
That’s a calque of 中国 Zhōngguó, right? Is it recent?
for example, in the PRC’s determination that everyone within their borders is “Chinese”, which is achieved by delberate manipulation of the meaning of “Han”, the Mandarin word for – “Chinese”, to refer to only one kind of “Chinese” person.
Per contra, as I understand it. The 汉人 or 漢人 or Hànrén are the ethnic group constituting about 92% of the PRC and about 18% of the world population. The first character is applicable to Chinese characters, hànzì, and to the Hàn Dynasty, the first long-lived Chinese dynasty (202 BCE – 9 CE and 25 CE – 220 CE). Per contra, the citizens of the state called “China” in English are the 中国人 or 中國人 or Zhōngguó rén, the people of the Central Country (or “Middle Kingdom”, traditionally).
Regarding abandoning fieldwork because of security concerns: If I remember correctly, that was one reason Don Kulick (in his book A Death in the Rainforest, covered on a few other posts on this blog), said he stopped doing fieldwork in Papua New Guinea because he felt no longer safe after a couple of violent incidents in the village he was working in.
Also, thinking about it, I suspect that China, Russia, Iran and their allies will become increasing difficult for a Western scholar to do any sort of fieldwork in, as relations between those countries and the West have deteriorated. I believe this will probably continue indefinitely.
On the main topic of Western scholars ignoring multilingualism in the Global South, there was a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter about something that the linguist Carol Meyer-Scotton wrote many years ago (here’s a link, but you will need a Twitter account to see the whole conversation; thanks Elon). Here’s the whole quote:
People were upset by this comment, believing she is ignoring the linguistic realities of places within India or Africa and that she was exemplifying a typical Anglo-Saxon monolingual mindset. Yet she has done a lot scholarly work on bilingualism and code-switching, including writing textbooks on the subject. The idea that most people’s multilingual competencies is segmented into domains of usage seem to me to be widely accepted among multilingualism scholars. It might also be the case that I am also less of a trusting soul, so when I hear people say the know N languages, I assume that overall they are overestimating their competency in those languages. The tone might also be a problem here, it could come off as somewhat condescending.
people fluent in three are outright rare and may all have doctorates (or ABDs).
I consider myself fluent in 4, at a minimum, and I don’t have a doctorate. I find that tri-linguals are increasingly common, at least in Austria and I suspect in Germany. They fall into a few groups:
1. The kind of people who learn languages for fun and have doctorates – very rare
2. People who immigrated to Austria at a young age, achieve fluency in German in school, retain their native language and develop a Euro-standard command of English. Very common. This actually describes probably a majority of my son’s classmates (Bosnian, Serbian, Armenian, Syrian, Ukrainian, etc.) and possibly a majority of people under 25 in Vienna.
3. Products of “mixed marriages” whose European parents have different native languages, and raise them bilingually, then English gets added. In modern Europe this is also quite common. We are hosting 4 Belgian teenagers this weekend. One 14 year old boy is fluent in Spanish (mother and grand parents), English (father/media), and French (father’s family/peers/school). Interesting that he cannot speak Dutch however.
With reference to the role of minority nationalities in the Soviet empire, I’m wondering what kinds of policy were adopted with regard to the adoption of Russian terminology
I don’t know about the policies, but I can talk about results. I have textbooks for Kazakh and Russian published in the late Soviet period (1970s/80s), and the pattern that emerges is that words for which there presumably was no pre-existing terminology*) that are international loans in Russian are loaned on without big changes to both languages, (e.g. respublika “republic”) while concepts that are expressed with native Russian terms often are calqued or newly coined from native roots (e.g. “industry”, Russian promyshlennost’, Kazakh önerkäsip from öner “art” and käsip “profession” (käsip also translates Russian promysel “business, trade, profession”, so you see the influence.)
*) For many modern concepts, such terms often did exist and frequently are of Arabic or Persian origin, e.g. “industry” Uzbek sanoat.
In general, when I lived and worked in Central Asia in the 90s, Russian was still mostly used in the area of science and technology. Even the Uzbeks, who, different from the Kazakhs, mostly used their own national language (Uzbek) or Tajik in everyday life, switched to Russian when discussing technical topics in telecommunications (my field of work) among themselves – not just using Russian terms, but switching to Russian totally, until the discussion turned to non-technical topics again. (I know that they didn’t just do it for my sake, because they frequently spoke Uzbek, which I speak only rudimentary, among themselves even in my presence, switching to Russian only when I was supposed to participate in their conversation.)
So, for the most part, you didn’t need Kazakh or Uzbek terminology for scientific or technological topics, because you would anyway discuss them in Russian. Some terminology existed, to be used in contexts where policies dictated that texts had to be provided in the national languages, and these contexts became more frequent after independence, which is the period when I first lived there, but by most that was seen as busywork done to tick nationalist boxes, not as a necessity (I remember a case where we got a form to fill in in Kazakh; none of the Kazakh employees in our JV knew the language well enough to do that, so we hired a translator; when we handed in the filled form, the people at that agency phoned us and asked sheepishly whether we could provide them with a Russian version, because they didn’t understand Kazakh either.)
That’s why I tried to specify “foreign languages”, though. If you grow up in a bilingual situation – which has become quite common in the cities, exactly as you say –, neither of those two languages is “foreign”. In obsolescent terminology, they’ve “acquired” rather than “learned” them.
So, I would say most younger Europeans these days are fluent in their native languages plus, largely, Euro-standard English, and have something like tourist-level knowledge of one more, but that’s usually it.
Among my colleagues there are a Fleming and a Walloon who seem to talk a lot with each other – always in English. The Fleming is actually fluent in French, but I don’t know if he learned it in Belgium. (He’s also fluent in German, which he learned in Germany.)
The conferences I’ve been to, on- and offline, have packed schedules. There’s a short coffee break in the morning, a lunch break that is, offline, often a bit too short to find a restaurant and finish eating, a short coffee break in the afternoon, and often something in the evening as well. I rarely get enough sleep at conferences. Either you skip some talks or poster sessions, or you simply can’t do anything on the side.
I would say most younger Europeans these days are fluent in their native languages plus, largely, Euro-standard English, and have something like tourist-level knowledge of one more, but that’s usually it.
Yes, I agree with that. The number of Europeans who actually learn a new foreign language, other than English, to the point where they can communicate fluently is probably not much higher percentage wise than in the US. A lot of this has to do with the fact that everyone expects everyone else to learn English. I have heard numerous stories about huffy German and Russian tourists screaming at Italians or Greeks to “speak English”.
Maybe this, rather than ethnocentrism, explains the apparent lack of interest among young Belgians in learning the other camps’ language. Probably a bit of both.
I do have to say that I met more people in Poland with a strong grasp of a third language than I have in other European countries. I know several Poles with excellent Spanish, Poles who speak Mandarin, and a lot of Poles speak decent German. Supposedly Romanians learn French and Italian but the ones who do must go off to live in France or Italy because I never seem to run into them.
“… thinking about it, I suspect that China, Russia, Iran and their allies will become increasing difficult for a Western scholar to do any sort of fieldwork in, as relations between those countries and the West have deteriorated.”
If you mean organisational issues, you are right. Both ways: whether you are Iranian (hostile) or Zimbabwean (shithole), to conduct fieldwork in the West you need a visa at least;)
If you mean specifically safety, I don’t think so. Again both ways:)
This logic – identifying destinations which are safe to travel based on political climate – is quite common for exactly Westerners. But I think political climate is a poor indicator.
I visited Syria and had a great time, and I would have no hesitation about going to Iran. Zimbabwe I would worry about, based on what I know of the situation there (admittedly my knowledge is spotty).
I have heard numerous stories about huffy German and Russian tourists screaming at Italians or Greeks to “speak English”.
I love this. (The story, not the screaming.)
@Vanya: wheen I meet them working in Germany, Poles are frequently in service jobs where they have to interact with German natives (housekeeping, waiting tables, caregiving, etc.) while I encounter Romanians more frequently in jobs where communication is limited and can be channeled through a foreman (construction, farm work). Whether language knowledge is a reason or a consequence for that, I don’t know.
The history of language in Belgium was until recent generations asymmetric. Young Flemings needed to learn French if they wanted to get ahead (in certain sorts of occupational/cultural niches) whereas young Walloons faced no comparable pressure or incentives to learn Dutch. Colonial subjects in the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi might be taught French, but were rarely-if-ever taught Dutch. This asymmetry naturally fed Flemish resentment, so “if I have to talk to a Walloon I’ll just do it in English” is a natural result of that.
“Zimbabwe I would worry about” – Yes, Zimbabwe is here to illustrate the point that the “organisational difficulties” may arise without political complications.
They do have organised tourism (think about a South African tourist at Victoria falls) but I know too little about the country.
As for Iran, as you could guess (from my previous complaints), Iran was my main reason to object.
P.S. Russia: several years ago this was quite ridiculous. The main danger was that a Western tourist faced was that some Russians will try to convince her that the West is deeply wrong here and there and Russia/Putin is profoundly right there and here (in Iran too: “why do you impose all those sanctions on us?”). I think it is the same now, but I can’t speak confidently. Especially if it is “fieldwork” and thus we are discussing, say, Dagestan, which I don’t know much about, and especially Christopher spoke about future.
“while concepts that are expressed with native Russian terms”
@Hans, thank you for this observation. Abundance of Russified Greek/Latin alongside with Perso-Arabic in Uzbek always amused me (though respublika is not terribly Russified) but I did not realise that they distinguished beween Russian-Russian words and Russian-international words.
And to your earlier post, this is what I was going to write myself.
Though…There was a range of policies – and even when policies were similar, situations could be very different.
Uzbek (its Dachsprache at least) did relatively well. It was a language of an SSR.
Kazakh did much worse.
The policy with respect to Tajik in Uzbekistan was strange: “let’s pretend all people native to Uzbekistan speak Uzbek!”.
Now, I am not sure about comparison to specifically European nation states.
There is, for example, English in India.
France was simply hostile to Breton (and USSR was not hostile to Uzbek) – on the other hand, it was likely nicer to Arabic in colonies in that it did not try to destroy all “religious superstitions” and local institutions.
But then this attempt to destroy this all… Should we compare it to nationalism and not to Islam and Christianity?
Speaking of modern Europe one parallel arises in our recent conversation about schooling. What a German professor of multiculturalism will think about a Syrian who does not want to send his daughter to a German school, how supportive or hostile she will be to him? I expect hostile. It is not as much Germanising aliens as it is civilising barbarians.
That’s a calque of 中国 Zhōngguó, right? Is it recent?
I’m not sure when it arose. But I’m pretty sure the adoption of the term in China was driven by ideological motives, namely to propagate the idea that China is not just the Han Chinese. This would have made it more palatable to be a citizen of a country that is totally dominated by the Han Chinese. It sidesteps the problem we have in English, where “Chinese” simultaneously refers to stereotypical “Han” culture, and to Chinese in the wider sense, a citizen of the country called China, whether Han Chinese or not. By the broader definition, Tibetans are also “Chinese”, which sits oddly in English.
How long Dundad Uls dates back is an interesting question. How to integrate non-Han ethnicities (and their territories and cultures) into the conception of “China” has been a constant issue and has shown an interesting evolution since the late Qing period, through the period of the Republic of China, and into the period of Communist rule. The uncharitable interpretation, which is the one I adopt, is that the Han Chinese power-holders simply want to hold onto all the old Qing territories and need some way of keeping them while maintaining China’s identity as an ethnically and culturally Han state. A kind of snow job.
@Bathrobe, Uzbeks were also taught Russian (and not Latvian) in school.
Dominance of Russian was pretty much official, at least since 50s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification#Rapprochement
But again, I’m not sure if this should be analised in terms of imperialism. English is adopted as a language of international communication and the default foreign language in school, but I’m not ready to call this Anglophone world “English empire” – even though I do see the connection to politics, economy and what not.
The pattern of population movement is a different story. And of course, actual central government.
The policy with respect to Tajik in Uzbekistan was strange: “let’s pretend all people native to Uzbekistan speak Uzbek!”.
What’s strange? Once they decided it was Uzbekistan, obviously everyone was Uzbek and should speak Uzbek. That was the whole point of national republics!
@drasvi: I guess three factors contributed to Uzbek holding up better than Kazakh:
1) The bigger parts of Kazakhstan were part of the Russian empire for about a century longer than what is today Uzbekistan. Even today, the share of ethnic Kazakhs that speak Kazakh is highest in the South, which became part of the empire the latest.
2) Uzbekistan had an ancient urban culture (even if Samarkand and Bukhara mostly spoke Tajik,*) not Uzbek). Most Kazakh cities were founded by Russians and to a large degree inhabited by Russian- speakers, so urbanization meant Russification. Even today, urban and predominantly Russian-speaking Kazakhs look down on rural, Kazakh-speaking Kazakhs, calling them mambety.
3) A much greater share of internal migration (a lot of it involuntary under Stalin) into Kazakhstan than into Uzbekistan in Soviet times.
*) Those Tajik speakers see themselves as Uzbeks and also have that ethnicity in their passports, in contrast to the Tajiks that have immigrated into Uzbekistan in the late Soviet period and after independence.
@LH, maybe not strange but comical.
“Uzbekistan is populated by Uzbeks who speak Uzbek. Belgium is populated by Belgae… Algerians speak Algerian…”
Add here Uzbek dialects that belong to Kipchak, Karluk and Oghuz groups:)
It was strange to learn that they have Arabic speakers… when I began learning Arabic.
I imagine many Basques, Catalans, Lithuanians, Faroese, and Swiss Germans are trilingual (including English).
From what I read on WP, many Liechtensteiners speak their own Alemannic, plus standard Swiss, plus German, plus (presumably) English.
I’ve only met one Liechtensteiner and she was fluent in both Alemannic (as much as I can tell) and English.
In other words, we are lost in various modes of bi/tri-lingualsm. A bias associated with the first and second worlds is that to know two languages you need to go to school and learn there two languages.
Of course most Russians go to school and “English” is usually one of disciplines taught there.
Some also study Latin:)
Rampant multilingualism in Europe came up before.
I guess my point is, even if multilingualism is not that widespread in Europe, is it still thought of as normal (unlike the United States, for example)? Does that color what sociolinguists are drawn to working on?
I would say most younger Europeans these days are fluent in their native languages plus, largely, Euro-standard English, and have something like tourist-level knowledge of one more, but that’s usually it. [**]
Younger Americans not so much. Or is that strip being unfair?
Younger New Zealanders seem just as bad — even though many of them travel overseas in their formative years: there’s a stall selling French-inspired baked goods at our local artisanal Saturday market, staffed by a rotating crew of fresh-out-of-collegees. ‘Pain chocolat’ they understand. The pleasantries surrounding a typical visit to the boulangerie not so much. The ‘caffe latte’ stall similarly. [***]
[**] Then it’s a tad inconvenient the fons et origo of the pan-European language has opted out of Europe. Will English get dropped as an official language of EU?
[***] Not that I’m claiming to be multilingual (nor ‘younger’ of course). But I can still remember enough from my trips to Europe for those pleasantries, and to read a menu, organise a chambre for the night, etc.
Younger Americans not so much. Or is that strip being unfair?
Probably not, but it’s no secret that (non-immigrant) Americans are not much for languages, for obvious reasons (they don’t need them to get by). It’s sad, but it’s not a sign that they’re stupid or venal or whatever anti-American ideologues want to read into it. If people in Europe didn’t need any languages but their own, they wouldn’t learn them either.
One of the first things Russian tourists learned after the fall fo the Iron Curtain is that “Romance speakers proudly don’t know English”.
I think this only became past in 2010s…
I think it is not as much about people who “need” langauges, as about ideologies behind European education and also about the internet.
Oh, I forgot to mention, the same phenomenon exists in Switzerland nowadays. (Though one colleague fluent in three foreign languages – English, French, German – is from Ticino.)
I haven’t, but I’m not surprised.
is simply out of luck in Germany. Germany is unusual in that homeschooling is completely illegal.
…and ruled by the Roi des Belges to this day.
But the funniest part is that Esperanto took this up.
There is no separate “standard Swiss”, though.
Well, learning one foreign language in school and ending up reasonably fluent is thought of as normal. Learning one more and ending up less fluent in it is also thought of as normal (often leading to “I learned it in school but can’t speak it at all”). Having two native languages is also increasingly thought of as normal in the cities, but the same holds for Hispanics in the US. Anything beyond all that is… not exactly met with puzzled wonderment, but definitely unusual.
Unfortunately it’s pain au chocolat.
Nope.
1) Ireland and Malta.
2) Inertia.
3) The US is pretty much enough of a reason for everyone to learn English at school, so it remains (or rather continues to become) the language everyone has in common.
I spent most of 2005–2010 in Paris and soon learned to speak French fast. Because… as soon as the Parisians notice that French isn’t your native language, they speak to you in English – English in the French sound system. So, first, it takes you half a minute to grasp that that’s supposed to be English, and then you still don’t understand it.
In 2012 I did run into people in Spain who flat-out couldn’t speak English. Hablo un poquito de español…
Internet, yes.
(Also: the vast majority of people who have learned Japanese just to read manga live in the US.)
Ideologies, though… the dominant ideology in European education is a mixture of “the kids are going to need that knowledge to find a job” and “the employers need people who have that knowledge”. Its success is mixed as usual.
About the Syrian, yes, maybe this example can’t be generalised. The situation was discussed in press (the guy also was rich (which I suppose is bad) and I think financial support from German state was also discussed in this context), and irritated the pro-refugee party as a popularised and scandalous example which is not representative of refugees in general.
But what I mean, I don’t think such assimilatory pressures are rationalised in nationalist terms.
A German may say that “we Germans live like this, and if you come here from Syria, you must learn to live so as well”, but I suspect she will contrast him to people from France rather than compare (and perhaps actually will see a medieval barbarian in him).
Well, maybe there is certain dualiy here.
If you go to a Russian school together with Russians, you get assimilated to a very high degree. And presumably what you’re assimilated to is modern industrialised Russian nation (and not, say, Russain village) (In reality not that simple, because if you live in Tabasaran village, you presumably go to school with other Tabasaran kids…).
But the ideal “all children should go to school!” is understood as the ideal of “modern” or “civilised” society and these notions are clearly supranational. And it is these notions that I compare to Islam, Christianity and USSR.
(With Islam some things are unclear to me though, because: 1. much of the Arab world is Roman Empire 2. the conquerors were not just “Muslims” but also specifically Arabs. I mean, all right, the army of initial conquest of Maghreb was diverse. But then a few centuries later Banu Hilal came, and those were honest bedouins.)
Unfortunately it’s pain au chocolat.
Thanks for the correction (it is ~30 years since I was in French France), but not on their chalkboard it ai’n’t.
2005–2010 in Paris … as soon as the Parisians notice that French isn’t your native language, they speak to you in English …
My experience (more in the rural South in 1980’s) was as soon as the locals notice that you’re English, they speak to you in extra-fast, extra-slangy patois. My French lessons didn’t reveal vingt has two syllables/isn’t a homophone with vin.
I have heard numerous stories about huffy German … tourists screaming at Italians or Greeks to “speak English”.
The package tours to Canary Islands in the 1980’s seemed to have colonised them into English-visitors vs German-visitors. It was impossibly to fly from Britain to La Palma, so we flew to Tenerife and took a ferry. On La Palma, the huffy Germans expected everybody to speak German.
I assume that overall they are overestimating their competency in those languages.
I know plenty of monolinguals who overestimate their competency in that language.
Though one colleague fluent in three foreign languages – English, French, German – is from Ticino.
Only one of those languages was actually foreign, and that one only technically so — it’s useful in your own country, for whatever value of “country”.
I assume that overall they are overestimating their competency in those languages.
I know plenty of monolinguals who overestimate their competency in that language.
Though one colleague fluent in three foreign languages – English, French, German – is from Ticino.
Only one of those languages was actually foreign, and that one only technically so — it may actually be more useful than the other two in Ticino.
There is no separate “standard Swiss”, though.
They refer to Swiss Standard German, FWIW. I suppose the same could be said for speakers of any regional dialect of Swiss German.
I once met a young traveler in South America, German and Deaf. I asked him what sign languages he knew, and he said (wrote, rather), German, Spanish, American, and International Sign.
That’s not how Switzerland works. 🙂
Sure, but that means “plus standard Swiss, plus German” doesn’t make sense.
what
@Hans,
The main foreign language in Romania until the 1990’s was French. This changed now, and most people finish school with very rudimentary knowledge of French, as it’s rarely used outside of school. If they speak a foreign language they will be probably speak English, but mostly to the vast exposure in the modern life, not how much they learn in school.
German was usually an option only in former Austrian areas, like Transylvania. Many Romanians that know German left already 20-25 years to go to Germany and you probably don’t notice them. The ones that go now for work are from areas where German was not really a choice for foreign languages. Germany was not the main destination for emigration due to the language. It’s mostly for seasonal jobs. The main destinations where Italy, Spain and then UK. Romanians do the jobs with customer exposure, but in Romance speaking countries. Indeed, one stereotypical job for Romanian women in Italy was taking care of old people. Around 6 months in Italy are usually enough to get a good enough level in Italian to do this kind of jobs.
Thanks for the background!
it’s no secret that (non-immigrant) Americans are not much for languages, for obvious reasons (they don’t need them to get by)
that’s one often-cited reason, though it’s only partly and spottily true: a new yorker with absolutely no spanish is quite hard to find, in part because it’s concretely useful, and i’ve known more than one person from the twin cities who picked up some hmong because in their highschool social world it was somewhere between helpful and necessary.
but far, far more important, i think – and not at all obvious outside the u.s. (and pretty invisible to certain class strata within it) – is the deprioritization, undermining, and outright rejection of language-teaching in most u.s. public education. this is longstanding: iirc the assortment of state laws setting a legal age below which* students could not be taught anything but english are from the 1910s & 1920s. and it’s pervasive: i have friends whose kids are in “bilingual” programs in the NYC public school system, which have dedicated staff and resources, and i can tell you that every scrap of castellano those kids have (which isn’t much) they learned at home or from english-secondary classmates.
A bias associated with the first and second worlds is that to know two languages you need to go to school and learn there two languages.
and this, i think, gets to something that hasn’t been mentioned yet. the multilingualism that’s studied is classroom multilingualism: the multilingualism of kids of immigrants; the multilingualism of the products of european school systems; the multilingualism of folks being taught the colonial or neocolonial languages relevant to the the states they live in.
and that’s not the main multilingualism of the global south, or of the most meaningfully multilingual societies. which is the multilingualism of everyday interaction, where each person likely has quite different degrees of facility in the languages they speak, but where almost everyone actively uses multiple languages regularly. that’s been something that’s become rarer and rarer in europe (with 1492, 1794, and 1945 marking important inflection points) – and in the americas since colonization – though i’ve experienced it this century walking around ohrid with a local person.
but, importantly, the Travel Is Danger explanation for the research gap is a red herring. there are plenty of immigrant communities where fieldwork can easily be done on this kind of multilingualism – damn near anywhere in the world, though not on every language of the world. in my home neighborhood alone, you could choose from kreyol/french, yiddish/hebrew/aramaic, french/arabic/[an array of west african languages], english/arabic/[an array of west african languages], with or without addressing a community’s range of uses of and relationships to english. (and that’s not even opening the can of worms of the multiple english-lexifier creole continuums you could look at, separately or in their interactions)
i’m sure everyone here can fill in their own local research opportunities of this kind, so i won’t belabor the point.
choosing to ignore this kind of bilingualism and focus on the other kind, despite the ample convenient research possibilities is just as ideological a decision as the ones that maintain the funding differentials that folks have mentioned. which is to say: entirely.
(and just to fill in the gap: the multilingualism of immigrants learning the languages of the states they’ve arrived in is a kind of liminal case, since it’s adding a language to an already established repertoire, but often doesn’t involve formal language-teaching)
.
* generally set, conveniently, at roughly the age when a lot of kids tended to leave school or start attending spottily because of having to work, which also roughly corresponds to the conventional age past which language acquisition becomes more difficult.
International Sign is a hybrid between signed pidgins (ad hoc, not creole languages named “Pidgin”) and and a now-extinct signed Esperanto called Gestuno. This actually looks vaguely E-o (cf. gesto ‘gesture’, gestolingvo ‘sign language’) but AFAICT -un- is not an E-o affix.
a new yorker with absolutely no spanish is quite hard to find
~~waves his hand~~ Granted, I’ve only been here for 40+ years; I wasn’t born here. But my daughter and grandson were, and they have no more Spanish than I do, i.e. just occasional words. This is a bigger problem for Irene, as she looks much more Hispanic than he does, and when she was living here used to spend a lot of time telling people who addressed her in Spanish that she doesn’t know it.
I’d estimate that at most 50% of the population have any Spanish beyond that, and maybe 20-25% actually speak (“as who should say speak”) Spanish. Certainly it would be a gross exaggeration to say that almost everyone in New York is multilingual. FWIU, the fastest-growing immigrant groups are Asians and Pacific Islanders, who generally (Filipinos perhaps excepted) have no Spanish when they get here.
i have friends whose kids are in “bilingual” programs in the NYC public school system
Notoriously, bilingual education is a racket in NYC. Kids are taught by officially qualified as bilingual, but in fact non-bilingual, teachers; some of those kids become officially qualified but non-bilingual teachers; and so on forever. Depending on the language, non-bilingual may mean ‘no English’ or ‘English only’.
there are plenty of immigrant communities where fieldwork can easily be done on this kind of multilingualism
Very true. Van der Velde’s nice Eton grammar started out with work conducted with a fellow-student Eton speaker in Belgium, for example, and many grammars of Kordofanian languages and the like have been conducted primarily with refugees in Khartoum (before that got too dangerous too.)
I recall Tony Naden once suggesting that there should be some special sigil to mark references based on actual fieldwork in situ, and there certainly are important things that can only really be established by that kind of work. But the “let the speaker come to me” approach certainly has an honourable history (Tony Tillohash …Bloomfield on Tagalog …)
I remember a Kusaasi colleague who was doing an MSc degree in London talking about the London Kusaasi community …
Van der Velde’s nice Eton grammar
As I understand it, the Eton Grammar describes Latin.
I used to possess a nice Eton Latin grammar of Greek.
(Sold it when I went to Africa, unfortunately.)
a new yorker with absolutely no spanish is quite hard to find, in part because it’s concretely useful
In the first place, your “absolutely no” is doing a lot of work here — JC and his daughter and grandson, with their “occasional words,” would fit under its capacious umbrella. By that standard, anyone who can say “OK” is an English-speaker. And in the second place, NYC, as is well known, is culturally not a part of America. Apart from a few megacities with substantial Hispanic populations and the region bordering Mexico, Americans (I repeat) don’t need foreign languages to get by, and even in those places they can by and large do fine without them if they are willing to put up with occasional annoyances. It should be obvious that I don’t think this means Americans shouldn’t study foreign languages, but we need to deal with the world as it is, and America is not much like West Africa in this regard.
Well, as I noted before I am not sure I actually support improvement of English education here, and, similarly, Russian education among Lezgians. I love diversity, and see the first comment:
“One of the things that struck me very much in West Africa was how languages could be phonologically, morphologically and syntactically quite different, but tended to be much more alike in semantics.”
Diversity in semantics is cultural diversity, and I value it.
Russians fluent in English and Lezgians fluent in Russian means its collapse.
America is not much like West Africa in this regard
Dinzugɔ, Amɛrika teŋ anɛ teŋ kanɛ nwɛnɛ bimbɔk* nɛ la!
* Li gbin anɛ “bangida.” (Amɛrika dim pian’ad anwa …)
That’s impressive.
Or does “some” mean “just the swearwords”?
Unlikely. Spanish plays no role in the Philippines today. The languages there have a thick layer of easily recognizable Spanish words, of course, often or always including a complete set of numerals, so that certainly helps; but that’s it. The times of Spanish literature written in the Philippines are over.
Sure, but in Europe outside the Iberian peninsula it’s really not hard to find people whose Spanish consists of paella, gazpacho, and nothing else. It does seem to me that English monoglots in the US expect more than that* from each other.
* …that would be taco & tortilla…
English monoglots where in the US? It makes all the difference.
Even if one does know “uno, dos, tres” and “buenos días” and “piso mojado”, should that really be counted as bilingualism?
…on teh intarwebz, the perfect non-answer to your question. 🙁
Of course not. I just saw a nit being picked and had to jump in.
“That’s impressive.
Or does “some” mean “just the swearwords”?”
I’m impresed anyway. I did have classmates from a number of Soviet ethnicities, but they simply knew Russian and always spoke Russian:(
picking the nits a li’l:
i can’t remember exactly how much hmong these folks had, but if i remember right it was everyday-interaction stuff (i may well be wrong, but i think greetings & politenesses to friends’ families), and i’m sure curses as well.
yes, the “absolutely” was doing a lot of work – but so is the “partly and spottily”. and i’m not claiming widespread multilingualism of the west african variety, just noting that language facility is a spectrum, and many more people in this country are somewhere above its low point in a language other than english that they didn’t learn in school than is usually admitted – because it has a practical place in their lives (swearing counts). to name one instance, there’s a lot of “monolingual anglophones” who’ve got just barely enough german to talk a little with a arkansan oma or just barely enough french to understand a vermont-québecois pépère (or portuguese, tagalog, chamorro, russian…). and i’d bet that a lot of new yorkers who’d claim no spanish have a fair amount of passive knowledge that they use when needed (giving directions on the subway or streetcorner, telling a coworker not to touch something that’ll hurt them, etc).
@DE: just to clarify: i said “communities” because i think they open up possibilities that are radically different from single-informant study (or multiple-single-informant study). on bed-stuy’s fulton street, say, you can be “in situ” and look at people’s use of pulaar, wolof, french, and arabic as they talk to family & friends, go shopping, hang out at the mosque, and otherwise interact with folks who share one or more of those lects with them. the patterns won’t be exactly the same as they would be in senegal, but the kind of multilingualism will be.
“are somewhere above its low point in a language other than english that they didn’t learn in school than is usually admitted – because it has a practical place in their lives (swearing counts). ”
When I talked to a L1 Spanish speaker for the first time (I was 22 maybe) I tried to count words and phrases in Spanish that I know. I could remember dozens. (I did count words too, but not those borrowed in Russian).
For French it easily can be hundreds (I don’t know if I shoudl count foie gras if we don’t count borrowings – though borrowing of course contribute in your knowlege of another language!) for an edcuated speaker who never studied French. The idea is that such vocabulary can greatly exceed more practical “greetings and swearings” in size…
PS. Not an objection to anything, just a note.