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How native is native? | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5338 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 17 of 32 21 November 2011 at 12:46pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree. I have thankfully never participated in a quizz show, but I love playing "Trivial Pursuit", and have done so with natives with both the American and the French version. I argued that I should not have to answer national cultural questions, as that were questions where I did not stand a chance. It would not be a level playing field. The American (who was a university professor in both law and history), refused me that right, and of course he could answer 30 questions for every one I could answer. What do I know about American base ball teams or commercials? It was just dumb luck that I managed to win after all. When I played the French version with some French friends, they granted me the right, but we argued over what a cultural question was. One of the questions I got,was what the name of a certain dessert was in French, and I was told the ingredients. The answer was "Dame Blanche", and my friend argued that I could just have said "White Lady" in English. I retorted that if I had ever heard of the dessert I could have said it in French, but how was I supposed to say the name in any language, of a dessert which was totally unknown to me. This actually goes straight back to my opening post. The young man in question spoke fluent Norwegian, but since he lacked all the cultural knowledge, he was perceived as an idiot. It was like an American who asks what McDonald's is. He would hardly be perceived as an American, no matter how flawless his accent was. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 21 November 2011 at 12:49pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| On_the_road Diglot Newbie Sweden Joined 4760 days ago 23 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish | Message 18 of 32 22 November 2011 at 11:43am | IP Logged | ||
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I think that being native has more to do with using the language pragmatically than anything else. You can have perfect knowledge of the language gramatically, you might know how to spell every word in the dictionary and perhaps even achieve a perfect pronounciation without ever visiting the country in which the language is spoken. What is much harder to learn is how to behave in different situations and contexts, what words to use, how to say them and so on. Of course, this is also hard for a native in a way since there are many different cultures even within each country (which makes this somwewhat problematic as well) Edited by On_the_road on 22 November 2011 at 11:45am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5230 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 19 of 32 22 November 2011 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I really like the way OlafP and others have gone about it.
For monolingual speakers, it is obvious what their native language is, regardless of 'objective' proficiency (compared to others, or advanced non-natives). The only productive way to address the question, therefore, seems to be having someone who speaks several languages compare among them. So, borrowing what another poster said about quantum mechanics, the only way to know if you are a native in language X is to self-assess if you would 'do better' in another language than you do in X. Accent affects perception by others, but nothing else. Now, to be fair and avoid the specificity traps (the vocabulary for XYZ etc.) this reasoning directly leads to, such assessment would have to cover many common areas, go around or skip others, etc. Or, we can go straight for the meat of it: Aren't you sure what language you would swear / mumble to yourself in, if you were woken up in the middle of the night? If you're not, congratulations, you are a native of more than one language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ikinaridango Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6129 days ago 61 posts - 80 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, Italian Studies: German, Polish | Message 20 of 32 24 November 2011 at 12:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it might be fruitful to propose a distinction between being a native speaker of
a language and being a native of a country. The young man Solfrid Cristin mentioned in her original post was, I would suggest, a native speaker of Norwegian. What he wasn't, perhaps, was culturally Norwegian in the same way that a person of his age who had spent most or all of his life in Norway would have been. Take for example an Australian who moves to Scotland, where she has some trouble assimilating culturally. No one in Scotland is going to claim that she isn't a native speaker, but there are those who may suggest that she is unfamiliar with some of the local ways. This sort of cultural dissonance is not uncommon in the English-speaking world, and I imagine the same to be true wherever languages have achieved a broad geographical spread. However, because the Norwegian language is so closely identified with the state of Norway, it may be natural to assume that the cultural bank of knowledge held to be shared by all those who grow up within its borders are also requisite components of fluency. The young man in question, although, I presume, he did not grow up in a Norwegian-speaking community, still seems to have had Norwegian as a home language. Perhaps in his case the question is not so much that he is not a native speaker, but that the contexts in which he was exposed to and used the language were very restricted, and so his cultural frame of reference became almost lopsidedly that of anglophone America, that is to say that unlike the Australian of my example he didn't have his own broader community of fellow native speakers and their own cultural capital to rely on and to inure him against what seem to me like narrow-minded and inappropriate assessments of his intelligence. May I inquire as to what happened to the young man mentioned in the original post, during his time in Norway? It sounds as though he may not have enjoyed his experience there if some were regarding him as a sort of halfwit. I hope that he found people who took the time to understand both him and the situation in which he found himself. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5338 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 21 of 32 24 November 2011 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | ||
I only knew him from the school environment, but I do not think he had a good time here. I tried to convince the other teachers that he was not stupid, but simply in unknown waters. They did not believe me, and the pupils all laughed at him. The thing is that his flawless accent and obvious Norwegian background actually worked against him. There were several pupils at the school, where you could hear or see that they did not have a Norwegian background, so people expected less of them, and did not laugh if they made a mistake, or did not know certain facts. This guy was 17 years old, looked, talked and acted like he was 12, and knew none of the cultural codes. In the years I was teaching, he is the only 17 year old boy that ever came to hold my hand. Not in a flirty way, but as a child would hold the hand of his mother. And he was heavily dyslexic to boot. The thing he had going for him was that his mother is famous, and a very rich and resourceful woman. She pushed him on, and as I said he has now a brilliant carreer as a photographer in the United States. He grew up in an American environment, and he is obviously more at ease there. I am really happy for him, and feel certain that he made the right choice in going back to the US. which for him was his true native country, in spite of the fact that both his parents were Norwegian. I have never come across a similar case. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 24 November 2011 at 1:14pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ikinaridango Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6129 days ago 61 posts - 80 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, Italian Studies: German, Polish | Message 22 of 32 24 November 2011 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for your reply, Solfrid Cristin. Perhaps it's not altogether surprising that
teenagers can be cruel to their peers, but it seems not unreasonable to expect a greater degree of tolerance and empathy from teachers. Still, it seems that the young man has gone on to enjoy a successful career. In answer to your initial question, I don't think that this case sheds much light on the nature of fluency, but rather upon cultural and national identity. It seems that the pupil, as he then was, passed the first test of inclusion, namely an ability to speak the language like a native; it was the disjuncture between this fluency and perhaps a degree of cultural awkwardness that saw him being rejected. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6129 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 23 of 32 24 November 2011 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | ||
What an interesting story. Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen anything like this here in the USA. I can't imagine what kind of cultural clues you could be unaware of that would make you this alienated over here. In high school here, I always thought that if you had money, then you were cool. If you did not, then you were not cool. That it was that simple. For boys, especially, the rich parent could alleviate some amount of teenage social alienation by buying the 'Porsche.' 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5338 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 24 of 32 24 November 2011 at 10:14pm | IP Logged | ||
- What's a hamburger? - What is KFC? - Who was JFK? - What's Disneyland? There are thousands of things you take for granted that people know, things that you simply cannot believe anyone above the age of 4 has not heard of. Money does not give you status in school here. Being good at sports will though. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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