In almost all situations, you can make an educated guess abut where an individual comes from, so you will know very soon if you are dealing with somebody from South America, from West Africa, the Middle East or South East Asia. An interpreter from China might not be able to speak and translate all minority languages that are spoken in China, but he can point you in the right direction.
The skill of being able to identify exotic languages alone wouldn’t be enough to build a career. However, there is the field of forensic linguistics. Linguists might be able to tell you in which part of the country somebody grew up, if he is native speaker, if his parents were native speakers etc.
There’s also the method used by the American lawyers of the Amistad slaves to find an interpreter: learn how to count from one to ten in the mystery language, then walk down to the docks and count loudly from one to ten in the language until someone approaches you.
I’m not sure what the modern equivalent of this would be, though. Maybe wander around the international terminal at an airport?
Another issue is whether or not the individual is willing (and able) to cooperate.
I saw a documentary about the recruiting bureau of the French Foreign legion, an organization which is obviously well prepared to deal with applicants from all corners of the earth. Among other things, they have a folder with text samples from a vast number of languages. They also had maps from all continents and countries so they simply make the potential recruit to point out where he is from (which implies that the Foreign Legion probably wouldn’t accept illiterates or young men who have never seen a map before).
If such a person is able to protest you he can understand you and gives away his origin too. Testing him covertly just becomes as simple as cursing at him (or something else similarly inflammatory) in various languages until he reacts back. A little help is needed, but it can still be done.
When I was working in China, we had a training session on how to manage police interrogations. In China, police can legally hold you for a certain period (I think it’s 24 hours) without formally charging you. They are also legally required to provide an interpreter for your language.
Sometimes police will hold foreigners to harass them or to try to get a bribe. In this case, we were advised to try to waste as much of that 24 hours as possible, and that a good way to do that was to speak in the most obscure language we happened to know, as it would be a challenge for them to identify it and transport the relevant interpreter to where we were being held.
Because our group was largely returned Peace Corps volunteers from around the globe, we spoke a variety of fairly random languages. I was always mildly disappointed I didn’t get to try to dodge a detainment by practicing my Fulfulde.
I saw a book once that dealt to a degree on the topic of identifying written languages. For a lot of languages – about a hundred or so, if I remember – it included a written sample with a translation, and then some tips for how to recognize it. I think this book was intended for librarians.
A few weeks ago, I had occasion to go to the local office of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Enforcement and Removal Operations. They had a poster along those lines next to the reception window. It included samples for (among many others) Welsh and Yiddish. How many monolingual Welsh or Yiddish speakers are there in Chicago, or in the world for that matter?
Ulysses, Circe, where a guilty-feeling Bloom is being questioned in Nighttown, the whorehouse district, and the policeman has been alerted by the voice of his pen-pal lover. NB: The “stage directions” and indicated spoken text are in-and-out-of dream consciousness.
BLOOM (Behind his hand.)She’s drunk. The woman is inebriated. (He murmurs vaguely the past of Ephraim.) Shitbroleeth.
SECOND WATCH (Tears in his eyes, to Bloom.) You ought to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself.
I do that professionally. If it’s a real language I can name it. If it’s meaningless gibberish I can rule out its being a real language (unless it’s encrypted text).
No you can’t. I’m sure you can ballpark it but unless you’ve put in some serious studying you’re pretty much just blindly guessing when it comes to telling related languages apart.
Possibly a historical holdover ? Back in the 30s I’d imagine quite a few Jewish immigrants (particularly from eastern Europe) mostly only spoke Yiddish ; or at least that keeping a Yiddish interpreter on hand was simpler than keeping some for any number of eastern European languages. English wasn’t quite as universal a language back then.
Welsh… I got no clue admittedly.
But even sven’s story reminded me of my Mom’s strategy to avoid getting speeding tickets whenever she travels abroad: “if a cop stops you, only speak French and pretend like you don’t understand a word they’re saying”. So the “no sé señor, no comprende” method, basically. She says a surprising many cops will just get frustrated and eventually let her go.
Maybe US customs are simply prepared to deal with Welshmen who think they’re being clever ?
Eh, maybe, maybe not. I’m passable in Czech (or used to be, anyways) and there are a heck of a lot of the Slavic languages I can’t tell apart. Slovak and Polish I can generally recognize, but I couldn’t tell the differences between Macedonian, Bulgarian, Croatian, etc. if my life depended on it.
Actually, after posting I realized I knew people in the same situation. Even one who is fluent in German but couldn’t specifically identify similar Germanic languages. It’s worth a try, but yeah, you might not get the answer asking just one more person.
I don’t know about Welsh or Yiddish, but when I lived in Chicago I knew three people whose first language was Irish Gaelic which is even less common than Welsh. Those three also knew some English, but it was definitely their second language and I could see where if they were hurt, under a great deal of stress, or traumatized their English skills could pretty much go down the toilet. One of the two Gaelic teachers I had was a professional translator whose languages included not only the relatively common Spanish, Italian, and Arabic but also Gaelic and Basque.
The local Public Aid office has a massive wallchart with a sample sentence in a 100+ different languages, and it’s not unusual to see such a thing in a hospital ERs, either. When I was doing census work we were given a similar thing, a folded, laminated cardboard thing with language samples. We were told that many people who were functionally illiterate even in their native language would at least recognize the writing of that language and thus indicate what sort of translator was required. Some pretty obscure stuff appears on these language cards/posters, including Hmong and a couple of Sudanese dialects, which seems pretty puzzling until you know that many Hmong were resettled in the Chicago area after moving to the US, and there were a bunch of Sudanese Lost Boys who wound up in Northwest Indiana (two of them are regular customers of mine, very interesting folks they are).
How the heck does someone who is monolingual in Irish end up in Chicago? Actually, how the heck does someone who is monolingual in Irish end up in Ireland? Yes, there are people whose first language is Irish. But monolingual in Irish? That would be as difficult as finding a Netherlander who didn’t speak English.
The list was obviously created on a computer, and Homeland Security (the agency, anyway) didn’t exist until a few years ago. And there are plenty of reasons to keep Polish/Ukrainian/Russian/Lithuanian, etc. interpreters around here, anyway.
Trivia note: a few months ago, I finally got the immigration file for my great-grandmother, who was born in what is now Belarus. Much to my surprise, it included a transcript of her deportation hearing from 1923, complete with Yiddish interpreter.
I’m skeptical that there are a large number of monolingual Irish or Welsh speakers, but I’m more willing to believe that there are more bilingual Irish/something else speakers where that “other” language happens to be something other than English. I know that there is a community of Welsh speakers in South America that speaks Spanish as its second language, but I’m not sure about Irish. Did this person speak any other languages fluently? It’s possible that he was of Irish ancestry and grew up in France or something and speaks fluent Irish (thanks to his parents) and French (thanks to French public schools) but isn’t that good at English because he didn’t really get to use it.
A language can be lost in a family in a short amount of time - I met a girl on a train in the US who was a US citizen by descent (mom was American), but she had grown up in France and spoke French natively. She was struggling with English, but decided to come to the US to study (which was easy because she was a citizen).
I would not be surprised if there were Amish people in Quebec nowadays that are bilingual in Pennsylvania Dutch and French rather than Pennsylvania Dutch and English, but even in the US there are no or very few adult monolingual speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch, because you need another language to speak to the broader community.
