I wonder how these people that speak a dozen or more languages keep them apart. In elementary school they got us started with German, French and English but I never paid much attention so the French never took. I got reasonable grades for German (which is quite close to Dutch so not too hard) but never really used it afterward. These days, when I try to speak German only English words come out…
Also, people can make smalltalk fluently but not much else, or be able to do deep science with a thick accent. Which counts as better mastery of a language?
With your handle you ought to know better than me, but I have read that the spoken Chinese dialects are as different from each other as English is from French, in which case knowledge of two should be worth partial credit, if the written language is the same for all.
I know three exceptional linguists, my (Ukranian) former father in law, my (English) brother and a (Polish) friend. None were raised bilingual all have fluency in six languages + including those learned in adulthood.
What I conclude from this is that, in all likelihood, the ability to learn multiple languages is quite common, just under utilised in the West.
Well icoriander I for one welcome you to the Dope, and hope you post more (I’m not aware if the rule about age is true…)
Also note that this thread was started 14 years ago, to comment in such an old thread normally needs a very good reason, as the original posters may not be able to respond to comments. That’s just FYI for next time.
What do you mean by “the West”? In my experience, many Europeans can speak at least two languages. I think the curve is skewed by the UK (only 38% multilingual) and Ireland (less than half of the Irish speak Irish :eek:) which is ironic, given that one other second language for a lot of Europeans (51%) is English.
America, Oz and NZ are majority monoglot, it’s true. But “The Anglosphere” and “The West” are not synonyms.
> . . . the spoken Chinese dialects are as different from each other as English is from
> French . . .
It’s not accurate to speak of the variants of Chinese as dialects. There are at least fourteen different languages that are referred to as Chinese. (Some sources say that it’s more like twenty-five languages.) They are not mutually intelligible, although they are closely related. A better analogy would be to say that they are as different as English and German (or Dutch or Frisian, to be even more exact). That is, you can find basic words in the Chinese languages which are the same if you memorize a few rules about changes in pronunciation. You can’t really understand another of the Chinese languages if you only know one of them, but you can see the resemblances. The Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family broke up about two thousand or so years ago, and the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan family broke up about the same number of years age. French is part of the Romance branch of the Indo-European family, and so you have to go back at least four thousand years to find where it broke with English and the other Germanic languages. Yeah, a lot of French words were borrowed into English after the Norman Conquest, but if you look at the basic words of English and of French, they are quite different.
Boy, I’m really angry to discover that Ethnologue has just gone to paid subscription status. This means I can’t link to the relationship tree for Chinese from it. Up to now that’s what I always do when I’m talking about the relationships of languages. I could like to Glottolog instead, but I don’t like their trees.
Sources I’ve checked estimate that somewhat more than half of everyone in the world speaks at least two languages fluently.
Chinese (as I understand it) is doubly weird in that two spoken languages may be mutually unintelligible but use the same written language for both. Boggles my mind, it does.
While it’s true that most (all?) of the Chinese languages use the same characters, it’s not quite true that the written languages for all of them are the same. I believe that each of the Chinese languages has some words with no equivalents in the other Chinese languages and hence has some characters with no equivalents in the others. Furthermore, the grammars of the languages are slightly different. Thus if you looked at a written passage done by the speakers of various Chinese languages, you might be able to tell which language they spoke. Many Chinese speakers of Chinese other than Mandarin thus try to make their writing closer to Mandarin so they don’t cause this problem.
But aren’t the characters used in Chinese writing and the writing of several other Asian languages basically a language of their own? I would think the only thing that carries over from the spoken to the written language is the word order.
Similar to how sign language is a different beast from the spoken language used in the same region.
That’s the same situation as with, say, English and American Sign Language, and then we get to add British Sign Language to the mix, and we have three mutually-incomprehensible languages (BSL and ASL are very different from what I understand) with the same written form. And I expect other English-speaking countries have their own SLs, adding even more to that list.
Japanese too…I’m not sure if a chinese person could read a japanese newspaper, say, but I’ve only studied Hanzi, and simplified Hanzi at that, and could read simple Japanese adverts.
It was a really pleasant surprise…I didn’t know Hanzi and Kanji were (so) similar.
Again, replies keep deviating from the OP’s question, which is about languages one can speak. Urdu spealers and Hindi speakers are speaking and understanding the same language, regardless of the fact that they write their languages in different alphabets and cannot correspond in letters with each other. One who can write both is not bilingual. It’s the reverse in Chinese, everyone in China can read the sane newspaper, bout there are a dozen or more spoken languages that are not mutually intelligible. A person who can speak Mandarin and Cantonese is bilingual. If something is written in “Chinese”, there is no way to know if the writer speaks Mandarin or Cantonese.
Maybe this will unboggle your mind: If I say “524” in my language, only an English speaker can understand it, but if I write it, it is clearly intelligible to a Russian or an indonesian, because we all agree on the meaning of the symbols, however the words are pronounced. Chinese writing is analogous to numerals., not to phonetically spelled words.
I had just the opposite experience. We spent 2 weeks on a Mediterranean cruise (Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Italy, France, Spain). And probably because we were exclusively stopping in major tourist destinations, virtually everyone we dealt with had some English. I came to the conclusion that if you were in a tourist-facing job (bus driver, taxi driver, tourist site ticket taker, waiter) it was either a job requirement or highly desirable.
The desk clerks at our hotel in Barcelona immediately addressed us in fluent English, and I noticed them later talking to other guests in other European language. As we were checking out I asked the manager how many languages he spoke – 6, :eek: and he was working on Japanese. His assistant only spoke 5. I felt like a caveman.
