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Native bilingual people mix up languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| cacue23 Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 4300 days ago 89 posts - 122 votes  Speaks: Shanghainese, Mandarin*, English Studies: Cantonese | Message 1 of 11 25 February 2013 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm kinda frustrated with the length of the title - it doesn't let me express what I really want to express... but forget it for now and here's the story.
I had a psychology professor who was born to English and French parents who at first lived in Quebec and then moved to Alberta (mostly English-speaking), and the professor herself moved to Ontario several years after she finished formal education. She told us that when she was very young she used to speak sort of a blend between French and English (runner, driving mon char, etc). She was picked on by her classmates in Alberta and it took her a lot of effort correcting her speech. I wonder how this phenomenon can be explained. I guess not all native bilingual speakers are good at both languages and never mix them up. Also, moving around a lot during childhood may not be advantageous for a person's mental health - not being able to retain stable friends and lacking peer interaction and what not. Any thoughts? inputs? comments? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 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 2 of 11 25 February 2013 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's just what effective communication in that environment consists of. The point is to
speak something that the other people in the family understand and if this is how it's done in that household, that is how it is. I once spent time in a Romanian-language household which would occasionally be peppered with English, French, German or Hebrew words based on context. It's just how these people communicate. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4950 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 11 25 February 2013 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Actually from what I have read it is normal that bilingual children when they are first
learning to speak use a creole of both languages. This happens at ages 2-4 I believe, after the babbling and single words stage. Supposedly it self-corrects in the vast majority of children by age 5-6. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 11 25 February 2013 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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I love "people watching" in Montreal, because I'm fascinated by fast, bilingual conversations. There's a local bakery I often visit (for their excellent pain au chocolat), and the employees are largely bilingual. The cashier might greet me in French, then ask about the French book I'm carrying, before turning around to speak to one coworker in English and then another in French. I've seen the same thing in restaurants, where a group of friends may bounce between two languages at high speed.
The really impressive thing is that every bilingual Montrealer I've ever met has been amazingly courteous about language issues. On one level, this is probably a basic necessity of life: If you need to change languages 20 times in an hour, it would be unspeakably tedious to make a big issue out of it each time. But at the same time, it's easy to find monolingual English or French speakers who are profoundly unhappy about bilingualism in Montreal. And it's easy to see why: They spend much of their life relying on other people's linguistic charity. It's nice that all your coworkers will instantly switch to English when you join the conversation, but I can't imagine what it must be to spend your entire life like that. Or to be turned down for a job because you can only function in one language. It's easy to imagine how child growing up in certain parts of Montreal might assume that everybody speaks French and English, at least to some extent. And that might lead them to take code-switching and language mixing for granted. If you then drop that child into a monolingual environment, it may take them a while to sort things out. Even though I learned French late in life, it can subtly influence my English. If I've been thinking in French for a day or two, and I start speaking English, I actually spend the first 10 minutes translating from French into English, with occasionally weird results. And when I write in English, I'll often think of a particularly nice connector phrase in French, and then spend a few seconds trying to find an elegant English equivalent. Languages interfere in subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ways. This isn't really a problem, as such. But it suggests that we shouldn't think of a bilingual speaker as having exactly the same skills as two native speakers. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6086 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 5 of 11 25 February 2013 at 7:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, there's really nothing to explain since it's quite normal.
Most children who are bilingual go through the first 4-5 years where they mix the two languages. They want to talk immediately (without thinking first) and use the words that come to them the fastest -- they just happen to know two languages. The experts call it "switching" and if you google that you'll get a lot of information. My daughter (now 6), still uses German syntax and English words, which is really funny. She also uses "you still know?" for "Do you remember" because the Germans say "Weißt du noch?". She doesn't mix vocabularies much anymore, I think we're finally past that stage ;) It's imperative that the kids get help from a parent, teacher, whomever to encourage them to learn vocabulary. The reason for this is their vocabularies will be smaller than monolingual children in each of their respective languages. One language will typically be stronger than the other one, normally the language spoken at home. The "weaker" language will most likely be the "school" language. It's really important they have somebody read and talk to them. The "switching" goes away after they enter school and after that it's just a fun, pleasant memory! Edited by Sunja on 25 February 2013 at 8:01pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| cacue23 Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 4300 days ago 89 posts - 122 votes Speaks: Shanghainese, Mandarin*, English Studies: Cantonese | Message 6 of 11 25 February 2013 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I really hope one day those psych experts would work out the stages for native bilingual speech development or something like that... or is it already in existence? When I was small I spoke Mandarin in formal school settings and the dialect Shanghainese when I wa at home or after class when I talked to my friends. I might switch between languages, yes, but I never blended them. Perhaps that's because these two languages are not normally miscible?
Oh, and I experienced exactly the same thing that emk said. It's kinda frustrating if I was talking to people who understood only Mandarin or only Enlgish, but since I usually talk to people who understand both reasonably well, that isn't really a problem. I do try to stick to one language at a time, according to what language my conversation partner speaks of course. Edited by cacue23 on 25 February 2013 at 11:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| wber Groupie United States Joined 4302 days ago 45 posts - 77 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Vietnamese, French | Message 7 of 11 26 February 2013 at 12:51am | IP Logged | ||
1.I think that when you were a kid, the concept of separate languages doesn't really come to mind. You just speak what you need to speak to communicate with your friends and family. You don't consciously realize that the language that you speak to your friends and the one that you speak to your family members are "separate" and "different" until around elementary school. 2. If by mix-u,p you mean confusing one for the other, it may not necessarily be true. It is true that one language will be dominant over the other, sometimes it will be very subtle or there's a huge gap of knowledge. It's just that some words are untranslatable so for the full effect of what you want to convey, you might need to mix the two intentionally, sometimes it's easier than finding a different word that in that same language that may be less poignant. One word in language A might need to be translated into 3 sentences in language B. It happens. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5101 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 8 of 11 26 February 2013 at 12:55am | IP Logged | ||
Really? I have no problem admitting my ignorance about the linguistic tendencies of francophones in Canada, but although I knew there were plenty of monolingual Anglophones (we're everywhere), I kind of had this vague notion that monlingual french speakers were a dying breed. Like monolingual Scandanavians or something. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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