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You are not a real polyglot if... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6587 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 97 of 299 18 October 2013 at 7:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Obligatory YouTube link to Lisa LeBlanc, one of my favorite singers in any language, be it French or Acadien. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Belardur Octoglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5616 days ago 148 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2, Spanish, Dutch, Latin, Ancient Greek, French, Lowland Scots Studies: Biblical Hebrew, Italian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Korean | Message 98 of 299 18 October 2013 at 8:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've hesitated to chime in, but I'm going to have to come down on the side that mutual intelligibility, even to an extremely high degree, does not constitute language identity. I can't say much about similarity in the Scandinavian languages, or about those of the former Yugoslavia, but I would make this claim based on German languages.
When spoken without too much influence from Standard (German) German, as I think Iversen has pointed out, Platt is definitely a different language (funny story, I have a friend who grew up speaking it, and if I overhear him, I understand it as Dutch for the first 30 seconds or so). Where I can really make my point is going to be regarding the languages spoken at the south end of the continuum of "German", specifically Bairisch (Austro-Bavarian) and Schwäbisch. I can understand and get by in both middle and upper Bavarian, though when I speak it, it gets a lot of influence, I don't know the unique words for everything. Swabian, though...there has been an interesting movement to get a standard orthography, and at this point I think it would be hard for an objective observer to doubt the independence of the language. There's even a Bible translation into Schwäbisch from the original texts, without relying on "standard German" assistance. The language, a dialect of Alemannian, is quite alive, spoken to a high level by quite a few diglots who still need "standard German" for education and professional life. The orthography is also different. Both of these have active initiatives to protect and encourage the development of the langages. Links for the interested, in German: Förderverein Bayerische Sprache und Dialekte Schwäbisch schwätza Schwäbische Kirch The respective Wikipedia articles are also helpful: Schwäbisch, which points out that it could be an independant language and this is only doubted when "standard German" is used as a Dachsprache, something which standardized spelling as in the bible takes care of Bairisch, which notes that Bavarian as a language has been considered endangered by UNESCO since 2009 There are very few monolingual speakers of either of these, and neither is the language of a political entity. Granted, some variants may be as little as 70-80% mutually intelligible with "standard German", but I would opine it better to err on the side of caution. Do I put these on my CV? Well, no, but because it's not really relevant. In conversation, I do mention it if those languages come up, and in some professional situations I have been known to switch when around native speakers. If someone pushes me to directly list languages, I certainly include them (if necessary, accompanied by the plea that they are, indeed, languages and not regional dialects). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6914 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 99 of 299 18 October 2013 at 10:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree that it's a strange decision to actually let the actors speak different languages, but it's not that far a cry from an entire cast speaking English while playing French, Romans, Vikings... and then include the standard scene where someone is surprised: "Oh, you speak our language!". 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4149 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 100 of 299 18 October 2013 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
As a French Canadian (neither Quebecoise nor Acadian - my family tree has roots in Northern Ontario, another very French part of Canada) - I have to disagree. They're no more different languages than British English and American English are different languages, or Castillano and Argentinian Spanish. Accents are different, vocabulary is a bit different, idiomatic expressions aren't quite the same - but that doesn't make them different languages. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5339 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 101 of 299 18 October 2013 at 11:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Then I'll take your word for it. You are the expert :-) I am not in a position to judge whether these variants are different enough, as I have never heard them spoken - just read about them - but I could not rule it out. My main point was that what I have heard of Belgian French certainly would not qualify as a different language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4712 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 102 of 299 18 October 2013 at 11:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It doesn't qualify as one. Maybe in the rural areas the dialect can be stronger, but then
you'd need to talk to someone who goes there for pleasure. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 103 of 299 18 October 2013 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Let me weigh in on this. Our discussion about what constitutes a distinct language has centered on two criteria: linguistic features and political status. Why are Québécois and Acadian not considered distinct languages from French French? It's not the lack of distinctive linguistic features. It's their political status. I won't go into a boring historical treatise on the question, but I'd like to look at how use the word French- Canadian or Canadien-français has evolved considerably in the last 50 years. Prior to the late 60s the French- speaking population of Canada was called French-Canadian. People spoke about French-Canadian literature, culture, etc. The word Québécois referred only to the habitants of Québec City. The rise of a strong Quebec independence movement in the 60s led to a radical change in vocabulary. The inhabitants of the province of Quebec are now known as les Québécois and this is the word used to refer to anything related to Quebec, i.e. literature, music, cinema, etc. The word canadien-français has basically disappeared from daily usage in Quebec. In fact it is often used in a derogatory manner. It is sometimes used to refer to French-speakers outside of Quebec and Acadia although a very common term is franco-canadien. The word francophone that was unheard of 60 years ago has become very prominant and will often replace canadien-français. No one in their right mind would speak today of la litérature canadienne-française or French-Canadian literature when speaking of all literature in French from Canada. What they would probably say is la litérature francophone. To come back to our debate here, this evolution of terms like canadien-français, québécois and francophone is the product of a process that we see all over the world: words change meaning and usage to reflect political and social changes. On a separate note, our debate reminded me that there will be a referendum on the independence of Scotland in 2014. If the Yes side wins and Scotland becomes an independent country, a decision will have to made about the official language be? Will it be Scots, English or Scottiish Gaelic? Edited by s_allard on 19 October 2013 at 5:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7161 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 104 of 299 18 October 2013 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
In comparison to standard German, I wouldn't automatically dispute that Plattdeutsch, Bayerisch (Boarisch), Schwaebisch (and especially Schwyzerduetsch) are languages. However this realization is founded on how divergent they are; not on non-linguistic criteria. Even if Lower Saxony, Bavaria, Swabia and Switzerland had never existed or if the respective speech communities came to imagine themselves to be always the same ethnic group, that wouldn't say much why the morphology, lexis and phonology are that divergent. There's nothing "unnatural" or "improper" about a seemingly unifed ethnic group showing language variation to the point where they can't understand each other natively without resorting to a common standard language any more than different ethnic groups use nothing more than variants of one language to the point where these different ethnic groups can't reliably or honestly conclude that the others speak a different "language" just because of their ethnic affiliation or place of residence within some borders. On a CV I wouldn't reject a candidate who put down one or more of the divergent items beside "German" (implied to be the standard form) because I know how different they are but like you I would wonder a little bit about the motivation. In business, using non-standard or regional forms with clients isn't that useful outside perhaps the occasional informal chat on the phone or if it's known that the clients will have little problem with or even welcome the use of such regionalisms or non-standard items in business communications. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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