TEFL and encouraging indigenous languages?

[lolwhites]

I think Welsh and Irish are doing well because people there are interested in keeping it alive. On th eother hand, I remember a documentary of Scots Gaelic which said that it was still in trouble because young people weren't interested in learning it because they saw it as something for old people. Basically, it was suffering from an image problem.

[woodcutter]

Yes, but there is space for the quaint hobby, if you like, because there is basically no need for Welsh and Irish people to learn a different second language. If the Scots were independent they might get more interested too, but of course Scots Gaelic is much closer to death than Welsh ever was.

[Lotus]

The problem in France, for example, would be if people were under a lot of pressure to learn English in the Basque region, or Britanny. In that case there would be an effect on the amount of time devoted to the minority languages there. Of course, you can be trilingual, but is it really going to happen?

It depends on what part of the world you are in, but yes, many people take the time and trouble to become trilingual.

[woodcutter]

So you mean to say, Lotus, that because in some parts of the world trilingualism is fairly common, that if we (for example) begin a nationwide policy of Mandarin instruction in the UK, to meet the demands of the new world order, that programme isn't going to reduce the time spent on other languages like Welsh or French ? I beg to differ.

I don't think there are many trilingual communities who are familiar with three scripts and three different language families by the way. They tend to have languages with huge numbers of similarities, such as in the Swiss situation. English takes a lot of learning if your script and culture is different. Furthermore there is a big difference between chatting in a language and becoming highly literate. I wonder how many people acheive essay writing level trilingualism.

[Lotus]

Dear me, Woody, you do read a lot into one simple statement. The answer to your question is no. I never meant for anyone to think that becoming trilingual is easy. It requires a great investment in time and determination. There are people who do this. However, my original thinking was more on the order of those who grow up speaking several different languages. Script is usually not a major concern for many of them, I believe, so my original answer would apply primarily to oral language. I myself am currently bilingual, and am working on the third language. English and Chinese are as different in both speech and script as it is possible for two languages to be. I speak English and Cantonese, and my third language, on which I am working, is Mandarin. So, in a sense, the third language will be an extension of the second. The script is basically the same, if you consider traditional and simplified characters to be the same. I do not. It's more like the difference between Shakespearean and modern English. Sometimes you can figure it out, and sometimes you need a dictionary. But it is possible.

[woodcutter]

Mandarin/Cantonese is a fairly similar pair (so similar that I think perhaps the main learning problem for a Westerner is muddling them up, especially tonally).

Imagine the greater difficulties that Arabic would pose, compared to learning one Chinese language on top of another. A whole new culture and set of references in a whole new form.

Of course, some people manage such things. But not many. And it bothers me if, for example, a French/Portuguese/Spanish trinlingual glories in the title and dares to compare themselves to a German/Arabic/Mandarin speaker, for example.

[Stephen Jones]

Often you find that the languages in a bilingual community (particularly that of the weaker language) shows considerable influence of the other language and differs significantly from that shown in other monolingual zones.

One example is where I have my house, in Negombo in Sri Lanka. There a fair proportion of the population is bilingual since it's a Christian community and there is no religious difference between Sinhalese and Tamils. The Tamil spoken is a particular variety, strongly influenced by Sinhalese, called Negombo Fisherman's Tamil (there is even a thesis on it which I can email if anybody is interested). Just to add to the fun it is not uncommon for schoolchildren who migrate from Jaffna, the capital of Sri Lankan Tamils, to be told they speak a strange form of Tamil!

Canadian French is somewhat different, as in fact I believe large chunks of Quebec province have monolingual French speakers (in Canada English speakers are almost totally monolingual I also believe; my Aunt's husband spent 25 years teaching in Montreal and complained he didn't get promoted because he couldn't speak French; even before I ever set foot in French I could speak it much, much better than he could).

[woodcutter]

Yes, and I suspect some people would call that area of Sri-Lanka a "trilingual" community because some people presumably know a bit of English too.

I'll refrain from a quip about Stephen's final sentence!

Linguistically naive people often ask "Can you speak X?" as if it is a pure yes/no question, and you have to live with that. It bugs me though when people who should know better fail to consider levels of ability and are very loose in using terms like "trilingual". Many "linguists" seem to routinely do this.