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More than trilingual? | ||
Tags: Children | Multilingual | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 25 of 80 17 October 2010 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I come close to being bilingual in Spanish and Norwegian, since I have lived on my own in Spanish families for three years. When I gave birth to my first daughter I decided to speak only Spanish to her, but my resolve lasted for exactly three weeks, before the fatigue of being a mother with a small child was too much for me, and I reverted to Norwegian.
I tried again when she was one year old, when we got her a Spanish au pair, and she actually learned to say "gracias" before she learned to say "takk". Unfortunately the au pair married a Norwegian and moved out, and we gave up again. For the last three summers my daughter has stayed a few weeks in a Spanish family, and although she speaks English only with them, she has a really, really good accent whenever she says something in Spanish. She takes Spanish at school, and the first day of shool her class mates thought she was Spanish, and she still get questions occasionally, whether she is half Spanish. This may sound like the story of a total failure, but I chose to look at it as a partial success. No, she is definitely not bilingual, but when you learn a new language it is difficult to get the accent right, and having that, she is still better off than she would have been had I made no effort. And for most of us, that is perhaps a more useful lesson to keep in mind than the real bilinguals. As for the discussion regarding Spanish/Italian -languages/dialects, I would be more willing to accept that some of the Italian dialects are languages in their own right, than I would accept that Spanish and Italian is the same language. My biggest dictionary is between Italian and "Napolitano", and I would dare any Italian speaker to go to the small villages south of Naples and try to understand what is being spoken among some of the locals. One lady I met, begged my Italian friend from the area, to appologize to me because she only spoke the local language, and could not speak Italian with me. Catalan and Gallego were also considered "dialects" under Franco. That does not mean that they were, linguistically. Even the Scandinavian languages, mutually understandable as they mostly are, are languages and not dialects. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 26 of 80 17 October 2010 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My "kung fu brother" (apprentice of the same teacher) is trilingualectal in the three mutually unintelligibleish lingualects of Mandarin, Cantonese and his home lingualect in Guangxi (not sure which one that is).
EDIT: Also I'd like to suggest that everyone stops using the words "language" and "dialect" forever. It'll be a hassle and ridiculous and make us look like morons, but wouldn't it be worth the trouble in order to stop these annoying discussions from cropping up? Edited by Ari on 17 October 2010 at 6:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 27 of 80 17 October 2010 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think anyone reasonably tries to deny that some Italian 'dialects' are languages in their own right. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 28 of 80 17 October 2010 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
Personally I think that the differences between the Scandinavian and the Iberoromance languages are more or less at the same level, - i.e. it is fairly easy to learn to understand other languages in the same group if you are a native speaker or advanced learner of just one of them. But as Ikarias observes you cannot just assume that it is possible without investing some time and effort in the project. A Dane who hasn't listened to Swedish or Norwegian will probably not be capable of understanding those languages, but due to geographical reasons and modern media it will be more and more difficult to find Danes who haven't ever heard Swedish and Norwegian. It is meaningless to discuss 'intercomprehensibility' as if those contacts between neighbours didn't exist. I have not made comparative studies of shared vocabulary etc, but I speak most of the languages we are discussing here and have some knowledge about the rest (including many of the dialects). As I said my hunch is that the differences between the Iberoromance languages and between the 'Continental' Scandinavian languages is at about the same level. Italian is slightly farther away from Spanish than Catalan and Portuguese, but not as much as Icelandic is from Danish-Norwegian-Swedish. This claim doesn't correspond with the tree structure of historical linguistics, but historical linguistics has very little to do with current intercomprehensibility. I'm aware that there are Italian dialects that are very far away from standard Italian, - and at least Sardic is generally recognized as an independent language.But the point is that those dialects are being absorbed by standard Italian in the same way that Low German has been reduced to a dialect of High German, and Occitan to something that mostly has become a special pronunciation of French. Under other historical circumstances North Italy could have been cut off from Southern and Middle Italy, and then the dialects up there (including Romansh) could have formed a language continuum with Occitan rather than with the dialects spoken from (for instancer) Tuscany and Southwards. The limit between 'languages' and 'dialects' are as much historical and political as linguistical. Apart from that I do believe that children under the right circumstances can become trilingual. If we accept that a monolingual child knows 5000 words then this include a stock of maybe 1000 very common words. Those words will certainly be learned in all three languages, so if there is a detrimental effect on the total vocabulary in each language then it will only hit the rarer words. And here the important thing is that all three 'language spheres' must be equally rich - if a child only hears simple and repetitive remarks in one of the languages then he/she may become a native speaker of that language, but with a severely restricted vocabulary. Edited by Iversen on 17 October 2010 at 11:50pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 29 of 80 17 October 2010 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is what's wrong with the world today: "kids need time to be kids". "Don't make them learn, let them play." ... that sort of thing. The whole point of play is to learn about the world. Kids were born to learn. If you leave it till they're late enough to chose to learn, it's too late. There's a generation out there right now being lost to "let them be kids". They're eating junk food... because they're kids. They're playing computer games... because they're kids. They're zoning out in front of TVs... because they're kids. Kids actually love a lot of different things if they're encouraged. Reading, eating well and exercise in the outdoors are good fun. Childhood is the only chance at preparing for a happy, healthy, long life. Edit: Plus, "wrong, wrong, wrong" you say. So are you claiming genuinely that bilingual kids have literally half the vocabulary of monolinguals? You seem pretty sure of this, so it would be nice to see the evidence of why all the literature I've ever read on childhood bilingualism is "wrong".... Edited by Cainntear on 18 October 2010 at 12:04am 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| BiaHuda Triglot Groupie Vietnam Joined 5364 days ago 97 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Vietnamese Studies: Cantonese | Message 30 of 80 18 October 2010 at 1:42am | IP Logged | |||||
I think I am being taken out of context here. I don't have a problem with bilingualism at all and I don;t beleive in not educating children. My neice who is 15 months old lives with me. She has started speaking and Vietnamese will always be her native language. She is also learning some English words. This is ok what I have a problem with is the idea of four different family members speaking different languages around the child as some kind of experiment. Nothing wrong with introducing the child to languages but some of the ideas that were proposed here seem a little over the top. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 31 of 80 18 October 2010 at 10:27am | IP Logged | |||||
What do you mean by "some English words"? Is she learning English as a second native language or not? "some English words" is more likely to confuse her than a whole other language.
There's nothing experimental about it. It's a known, done thing. The modern Western nuclear family can only support 3 languages maximum, though. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 32 of 80 18 October 2010 at 1:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Mother, father and TV ... nannies have apparently died out, otherwise it would have been 4 languages.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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