Re: Learning a language

From: Eugene Holman (holman_at_elo.helsinki.fi)
Date: 06/12/04 

Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 15:11:06 +0300

In article <K_yyc.6808$sj4.1473@news-server.bigpond.net.au>, "John
Atkinson" <johnacko@bigpond.com> wrote:

> "Eugene Holman" <holman@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote...
>
> > "John Atkinson" <johnacko@bigpond.com> wrote:
> >
> > > "Eugene Holman" <holman@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote...
> > ><deletions>
> > > >
> > > > Is this abolute? I think we would all agree that Tok Pisin is a creole
> > > > that arose from a pidgin. Depending on the type of Tok Pisin you use,
> it
> > > > is closer to or further than English. Although it is a language that
> > > > evolved largely from a jargonized form of English, it had speakers
> from
> > > > the day it could be used as a medium of communication. Whether they
> were
> > > > native speakers or not is beside the point.
> > >
> > > Whether it had native speakers (speakers who learnt it in in early
> > > childhood) is *exactly* the point.
> >
> > I question this. Is there really any significant difference between:
> > 1. a native speaker, that is to say, one who learns language X as his/her
> > first language, and
> > 2. a public speaker, that is to say, one who uses language X, learned
> > rather than acquired natively, as his/her default language for all
> > communication outside of the family circle.
> >
> > Living in Helsinki, I am quite familiar with this phenomenon. Our city is
> > officially bilingual, and abut ten percent of the population has Swedish
> > as their native language. Nevertheless, the default language here is, with
> > few exceptions, Finnish, and many Swedish speakers use Finnish in a wider
> > range of situations and thus have a better command of it than they do of
> > their native Swedish.
>
> Did these Finns speak and hear nothing but Swedish until they reached
> adulthood, and then travel away from their Swedish-speaking communities to
> live in all-male communities of non-Swedish-speakers for periods lasting
> typically 5 years (where they learn and use TP), and on their return home
> resume their previous life and never use TP again?

Nothing quite that extreme, but there are many cases of families with one
Swedish-speaking and one Finnish-speaking parent whose oldest child
attended Swedish-medium school and thus has Swedish as his/her native
language, but the younger children attended Finnish-medium school, and
have Finnish as their native language. In practice, they are absolutely
fluent in both languages, but when it comes to the more sophisticated,
nuanced, or technical areas of vocabulary and communication, those who
attended Swedish school *might* be better in Swedish than they are in
Finnish. A native speaker of English with a fluent and quasi-native
speaker command of Finnish myself, I would be hard pressed to explain the
binomial theorum or theory of universal gravity, which I have only
studied in English and are not things that I frequently talk or think
about, in Finnish, even though, having studied the subjects in Finnish in
Finland, I have no difficulty teaching historical linguistics or acoustic
phonetics in that language.

There are certainly Finland-Swedes who grew up in monolingually Swedish
areas of Finland such as Åland or Munsala or Närpäs in Ostrobothnia, and
then moved to Helsinki as young adults, where they live their lives mostly
or solely in Finnish. They only use Swedish when they return to their home
districts for holidays and family events.

Finland-Swedish, at least as spoken in greater Helsinki and greater Vaasa,
both nominally bilingual conurbations, differs from the Swedish of Sweden
primarily consequent to obviously Finnish influence in phonology,
phraseology, pragmatics, and lexicon.

I remain unconvinced that first-generation native speaker influence on
the development of a creole or semi-creolized variety of a language
necessarily has a greater impact on its evolution than sociolinguistically
prestigious public-speaker second-language-speaker influence.

Regards,
Eugene Holman

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