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What is a non-mainstream language for you | ||
Tags: Rare Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5860 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes  Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 33 of 71 13 August 2012 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Let me talk about the situation in Singapore.
In Singapore, there are 4 official languages: Malay, English, Mandarin and Tamil. 77% of the population in Singapore is Chinese and English is compulsory from kindergarten. The government introduces the bilingual policy in schools and most people are required to learn two languages: English and mother tongue. Therefore the dominating languages in Singapore is English and Mandarin. Given this background, most people choose their foreign languages that are either close to English or Chinese. Therefore the mainstream foreign languages here are: Japanese, Korean, French and German with Thai, Spanish and Italian not far behind. Despite the status of being official languages, Malay and Tamil are not popular and there are few resources available. Every other language not mentioned in the above paragraphs are considered non- mainstream. These languages include Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Portuguese, main stream languages at the international stage. What is even surprising is that, none of the universities in Singapore offer Russian and Portuguese as foreign languages! This ignorance is further filled by the fact that there are no Eastern European studies or Latin American departments in any university here. Hence, people(or rather students in this case) has so much misunderstanding about Eastern Europe and Latin America, and they are shocked at anyone learning Russian or Portuguese. Whenever I told people that I am learning Russian, strange stares and question will be thrown to you, as if I were doing something wrong or incredible. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| orion Senior Member United States Joined 7026 days ago 622 posts - 678 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 34 of 71 13 August 2012 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In this small Kansas town with a regional university, Spanish is far and away the most mainstream foreign language. German and French are a distant third. Anything else is considered bizarre for a native to study. The local university has dropped French as a major, and is in the process of doing so for German, which I find odd for an area which prides itself on its German heritage. They do offer a Mandarin course, but not many students enroll.
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| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5212 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 35 of 71 14 August 2012 at 1:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The more Italian I learn, the more I realise that it's really not as "mainstream" as I
first thought, especially compared to the other "big three" of Spanish, French and German. I've come across very few other people who learn/speak it as a second language other than those who've previously lived in Italy, and almost every time I meet an Italian person it takes them a good while to get over the fact that an English speaker is actually learning their "obscure, difficult and useless" language when they could be learning "something useful like Spanish". I also think that particularly with Italian, the difference between the number of people who'd like to learn it and the number of people who actually do learn it is very pronounced. Everyone talks about how it's such a beautiful language and they'd love to learn it, which is why it gets so much representation in terms of resources and evening classes, but very few ever actually get up and make the effort, especially beyond the beginner stage; Italians seem to know this and are quite surprised when someone actually does make the effort. These days I often just joke about the situation - "I'm the only Scot you're going to meet who speaks Italian, so enjoy it while you can!" 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| AlephBey Tetraglot Groupie India Joined 4793 days ago 41 posts - 137 votes Speaks: English, Hindi*, Urdu, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 36 of 71 15 August 2012 at 5:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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English is pretty much a given among the educated classes in India, but
exceptional proficiency still tends to impress most people. Since I'm not sure whether English can even be considered a foreign language here anymore, I'll leave it aside for the time being. French is very common as a foreign language in schools- almost every third person in my university claims to have studied it for some period of time. The general level of proficiency, though, is very low. People rarely get beyond a CEFR level A1, and gradually begin to forget even that. There are people who claim to know 'a little French', but wouldn't be able to answer such questions as 'Y-a-t-il un bon restaurant près d'ici ?' Nonetheless, claiming to speak or to be studying French will not elicit anything more than a mildly bored hum of acknowledgment. French is plain vanilla- as 'exciting' or 'adventurous' as warm milky tea on the porch. Anything other than French though, is utterly exotic. I get all kinds of amused reactions for Japanese. Ranging from something to the tune of 'Why oh why? Couldn't you spend all that time on math instead? You could have gotten into the IITs!' to wonder-struck gazes of admiration. Spanish is surprisingly under-studied over here. I know of only one school in my hometown of a million-odd people that offers it as a third language, and I still remember how surprised I was to see the low turnout at the Delhi branch of the Instituto Cervantes for DELE A1. Apparently more people attempt the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. From my experience, if you're Indian, speaking any Indian language other than Hindi as a non-native can also be considered somewhat 'non-mainstream'. Especially if you're a north Indian who speaks a Dravidian language. Bengalis tend to be greatly impressed on discovering my interest in their language- despite my pathetic grammar and even more pathetic pronunciation. People from Tamil Nadu break into friendly, amused chuckles if I use any one of the ten-odd phrases I know in their language. Native Hindi speakers, though, used as we are to people from all over the sub-continent having at least some knowledge of our language, tend to be much more difficult to impress. A foreigner who speaks Hindi, however, will get similarly surprised reactions to what I described earlier. Edited by AlephBey on 15 August 2012 at 5:45am 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4852 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 37 of 71 15 August 2012 at 6:10am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm surprised Hindi is not mainstream in Singapore. I know there are a lot of Tamil speakers there, but I thought there might be some interest in another big language from India. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5929 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 38 of 71 15 August 2012 at 10:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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I live in Washington state and I would say that the mainstream languages here are Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean. Italian, Russian and Arabic could be second tier languages; that is they are not mainstream languages but still useful to know. The first three languages are the most common but few people would think it really weird to learn Mandarin, Japanese, or Korean even though these languages are thought to be much harder to learn to a usable level. I should also add that few people actually learn much of the aforementioned languages from classes in school and it is fairly common for people to say that no one can really learn a language well without being immersed in it while living a country where it is spoken.
Learning any other language is considered very unusual unless you have lived abroad and/or have relatives who speak the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5860 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 39 of 71 15 August 2012 at 6:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
No, most Tamil speakers prefer to learn English than to learn Hindi. In fact, there are more Indian families speaking English than speaking Tamil (39% to 38.8%) In fact, there is even a sizable portion of Indian families speaking Malay (10.3%), according to this wikipedia entry : Indian_languages_in_Sin gapore There is however, slight growth in the Hindi speakers due to migration from India to Singapore. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4552 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 40 of 71 17 August 2012 at 6:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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Spanish is actually a native language for many people in my corner of the U.S. Non-
Spanish speakers frequently take Spanish classes but I have yet to know of one who has managed to emerge with good speaking skills and a less-than-terrible accent. Then again, they do tend to hold some resentment towards the Spanish speakers here, so I doubt their heart was into learning the language in the first place. I'd be more interested in discussing non-mainstream languages among language learners. When I used to frequent linguaphiles, I remember a humorous quote saying "It seems everybody here is learning a major language like French, a small language like Albanian, and an obscure Tibetan dialect for which the only resource is a handwritten book given to them by an old man in the Himalayas." I cannot attest to the geographical accuracy of the quote, but the quip about learning obscure languages certainly resonated with me. Within every group, there are of course subgroups and mainstream and non-mainstream things within these subgroups. To the average Joe on the streets of Kansas City, Zulu will be an exotic language nobody would be expected to know. To somebody studying Niger-Congo languages, it would be expected that everyone in this field knew what Zulu was. Outside of this forum, most people wouldn't know Albania is a country, let alone that it has its own language. On this forum, it's still considered slightly exotic but normal enough that it won't raise any eyebrows. In other words, if there's a "Colloquial" series for it, it's not non-mainstream. So, how deep into the languages of the world do we have to get to be a language hipster, in the parlance of young people (I say as a young person myself)? I'd say when the only resource for your language is a $200 non-pedagogical grammar available only through mysterious sources, you are studying a non-mainstream language, even in language learning groups. When dictionaries do not exist (outside of Hippocrene, of course) for your chosen language, you are definitely studying a non-mainstream language. Of course, as I said, this only applies to communities where learning languages is an important hobby. To most people in my community, Swedish is considered a "weird" language that only five people in the mountains speak. It all depends on which group you're talking about. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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