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How many languages do Europeans speak | ||
Tags: Europe | Number of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5831 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 25 of 66 02 October 2014 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd be surprised if there were a large percentage of Slovaks who actively spoke Czech.
There is little need for them to speak it, unless they live in the Czech Republic. Effective communication is possible between a Slovak and a Czech speaking in their respective languages to each other. Are Czech and Slovak separate languages? Most definitely yes. See Chung's language log for a detailed analysis of the similarities and differences between the two. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 26 of 66 03 October 2014 at 7:59am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, I didn't claim it by a personal impression, in fact I've never been to Slovakia and actually have no idea. However, the data come from an official European Commission poll. Is it possible the poll overestimates the percentage of Slovaks who speak Czech? Sure, but it can't be a general effect of language similarity, as it doesn't overestimate the percentage of Czechs who speak Slovak, Portuguese who speak Spanish, Swedish who speak Norwegian, etc. Could there be something very particular about the relationship between Slovak and Czech that leads Slovaks to claim that they can speak Czech "well enough to have a conversation," when really they're mostly relying on the mutual intelligibility that exists between those languages? Are Czech and Slovak separate languages? That's an old question with no real well-defined answer. It's an agreed-upon convention that Czech and Slovak are two separate languages, and indeed there are many differences between them. Nevertheless they are more similar to each other than some of the varieties within other languages. This may seem a pedantic and tired point, but it does influence the results of polls that ask people how many languages they speak. There must be lots of people in many countries who speak a local vernacular "dialect" as well as the national language (e.g. in Italy and Germany I know this is common) but do not report them as two separate languages, even if the differences between the two varieties may be comparable to or even greater than those between Czech and Slovak. Unfortunately this is one of those things where it's hard to do any better than the poll. Even someone who lives in Slovakia is unlikely to have a very accurate intuition about how many Slovaks can speak Czech. I know I couldn't accurately guess how many Americans can speak Spanish. That is why they have polls. Edited by robarb on 03 October 2014 at 8:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 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 27 of 66 03 October 2014 at 11:43am | IP Logged | |||||
Those who don't learn the language tend to live in an expat bubble and tend not to have that much contact with Dutch people. Those who do tend to learn after a few years. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4098 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 28 of 66 03 October 2014 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
I was always 3-5 years ahead of the school system, and most people I know who speak English very very well have also never relied on the school system to do much except formalising information already picked up intuitively. Those who learned English mostly through school are also often fairly reluctant to speak it if they perceive themselves to have a choice in the matter.
In Sweden it's incredibly easy to never learn a word of Swedish. Expats live in expat bubbles. They work in expat companies. They spend time with other expats. They play their native sports on expat teams. When they go out into the world everyone are willing to speak English to them. If they have children, their children are often, but not always, enrolled in expat schools where the teachers speak English. The teachers are often expats themselves, moving in the expat bubble. I went to a school like that, albeit not an expat myself, and worked for another school like that. It's really quite amazing, the little worlds apart that exist everywhere. As for the locals' attitudes cooling. Well, not in Sweden. Not unless you've got a moderate to dark complexion and don't speak English. Though I guess the attitude does cool in a way, in the sense that after some exposure to expats it's no longer exotic. I noticed that while hosting dinner parties attended by friends' expat spouses, the originally "all English" parties soon started being "all English for the first five minutes". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 29 of 66 03 October 2014 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Based on many visits to Czech Republic and Slovakia and befriending several Czechs and Slovaks over the years, the general trend is that Czechs and Slovaks do not have an active command of the others' language. Exceptions come up in mixed Czech-Slovak families, translators/interpreters and in those who study at the other's universities. (e.g. Slovaks who get tertiary education in Czech Republic and what few Czechs do the same in Slovakia).
On my latest foray to Czech Republic, I used Slovak and was answered in Czech. My Slovak isn't so bad that I need to switch to Czech and my Czech interlocutors can tell by my answers in Slovak that I understand their Czech and so continue using their native language. I suspect that many Slovak respondents to that poll conflated their strong passive ability in Czech to an equally strong active ability in Czech even though this flies in the face of my and others' observations on how Czechs and Slovaks typically communicate with each other. The language-dialect debate is a bit out of place here in my view, because after conducting comparative analyses in my logs first about BCMS/Serbo-Croatian and now with Czech and Slovak, the extra linguistic dimension for me is that very high mutual intelligibility doesn't mean that what is actually used is grammatical to the other speakers. In other words, I could still fully understand a Czech even though what he/she would use would/could be ungrammatical, non-existent or misspelled in Slovak. My mind fills in the blanks using context and the already high degree of similarity between the two as exhibited in the rest of the sentence/output when I can't quite figure out an isolated element in that sentence/output. On the other hand, BCMS/Serbo-Croatian has such high internal similarity/convergence that what passes off as proper Croatian is typically grammatical to a Serb (or Bosniak or Montenegrin) and could be expressed identically by that Serb (or Bosniak or Montenegrin). So many times I've been praised for speaking good "Serbian" or asked where I learned "Serbian" when what I actually used came from the pages of "Teach Yourself Croatian" and the Croatian section of "Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language". No Czech has ever praised me for speaking Czech or asked where I learned Czech after I put out a small stream of Slovak output. It's clear to everyone from the start that I used Slovak even though I was fully understood. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 30 of 66 04 October 2014 at 5:54am | IP Logged | |||||
That makes sense. However, I'm still baffled as to why so many Slovaks said this, while almost no speakers of any of the other mutually intelligible sister language pairs of the EU did.
It's not out of place. One needs to understand relationships like the one you've just stated to make sense of what it means when a European claims or doesn't claim to speak a closely related European language. Edited by robarb on 04 October 2014 at 5:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6060 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 31 of 66 04 October 2014 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Generally speaking, I'm going to go with the "usefulness" theory.
Along the border with Spain, most people speak both languages. And that's for real, not just Portunhol. I guess people are more suspicious of their own distant central governments than they are of each other. There's also a not-so-distant historical reason for that: during the Spanish civil war, the Portuguese government was sympathetic to the nationalists, but the common people supported the republicans. The Portuguese guards had orders to pick up republican fugitives and turn them over to the nationalists (and the worst possible fate). The people, at the risk of their own lives, harboured and fed those fugitives. Later on, for many years, the situation in Spain was very dire: after the end of WWII, they became very isolated. The Portuguese had helped the British with food and minerals, so the country was well seen internationally. Yet the people was poor. Not as much as in Spain, but still... "Informal" across the border trade followed. Escape routes were turned into smuggling ones. Coffee, cigarettes and other goods were sold. Relationships were established and strengthened. Still today, there are a few villages where you can't really tell in which country you are and mixed marriages are common (mostly along the Galician border). 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5099 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 32 of 66 04 October 2014 at 11:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
This part of your post is interesting. So I take it that after the first five minutes, everyone switches to Swedish or are there other languages involved? Also, I'm wondering about the appearance aspect. If I understand correctly, you're saying that Swedes are accepting of people with different complexions as long as they speak English (and/or I'm guess Swedish), right? But it would seem that they (the moderate or dark complexioned individuals) would have a very different reception if they spoke say French or Portuguese etc. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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