Re: Quadrilingual

From: Miguel Carrasquer (mcv_at_wxs.nl)
Date: 09/20/04 

Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:58:38 +0200

On 19 Sep 2004 17:28:34 -0700, tor826@yahoo.com (Tor) wrote:

>"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:<414CCA49.178@worldnet.att.net>...
>> Schurich wrote:
>> >
>> > I'm an Egyptian living in England and my husband is French/German. We
>> > have a six-month old son. So far, I've been speaking Arabic to him,
>> > and my husband French; following the ?one-parent one-language
>> > approach'. However, my husband and I speak English together and to
>> > the community around us. We would really be interested in hearing
>> > from other parents in a similar situation to learn from their
>> > experience.
>> >
>> > Also, do you think it would be too much to try and keep the German
>> > side of things (I mean the language) alive for him, as well? I have
>> > heard of cases where children grow up speaking 4 languages from a very
>> > early age. Does anyone have some experience of this?
>>
>> Speak away! He'll have FOUR native languages, and that will be a VERY
>> useful attribute in the future.
>>
>> Don't worry, he won't confuse them. There's some indication that kids
>> with multiple native languages take a little longer to start talking,
>> but thereafter progress faster than monolingual children.
>
>I grew up in a trilingual environment in Finland (my mother is an
>American and my father is an ethnically Swedish Finn). I spoke
>English with my parents and siblings at home, with my American
>relatives whenever we met, with many expatriate American and British
>children that became my friends through my mother, and with my
>classmates and teachers at a school for English-speaking children. I
>spoke Swedish with many relatives, with some neighbors, and with my
>classmates and teachers at a school for Swedish-speaking children. I
>spoke Finnish with some relatives, with many neighbors, and with
>strangers when shopping, etc.
>
>I remember always searching for words and struggling to form sentences
>as a child. I didn't speak any language fluently. There were large
>gaps everywhere in my vocabulary: I knew "spatula" only in English,
>"starboard" only in Swedish, "cash register" only in Finnish, and so
>on. There was also a lot of interference among the languages. I'd
>say, for example, "He is long" (instead of "He is tall") based on
>Swedish and Finnish, and "Ei, se on Pekka, joka voittaa" (instead of
>"Pekkapa voittaa" 'No, it's Pekka that's winning') based on English
>and Swedish.

I had similar problems as a child (the same problem, in
fact, with the expression "He is tall" in Spanish and
Dutch), although I didn't experience any feelings that I
wasn't being fluent at the time. In retrospect, I think
most of the mistakes in my Spanish were due to the fact that
I learned most of my Spanish from my mother, whose native
language it wasn't (she's a native Catalan speaker), rather
than being caused by interference from the dominant
language, Dutch.
  
I must also have been 14 (maybe a little older), when I
started paying attention to my father's efforts to correct
my Spanish. I studied grammar books, pronunciation guides
and dictionaries, and managed to bring my Spanish closer to
the standard.

I have never been able to correct the two Hispanicisms in my
Dutch pronunciation (apical /r/ and /s/). They're not so
bad, because they fall within the parameters of normal Dutch
pronunciation, but they're not used by anyone I know. The
more usual variants are uvular /r/ and laminal /s/. I have
no problem with uvular /r/ and laminal /s/ when speaking
French, or even when simulating a Leiden (retroflex /r/ and
laminal /s/) or Amsterdam (apical /r/ and laminal/palatal
/s/) Futch accent, but I can't do it in my standard Dutch.
It feels artificial to me.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@wxs.nl

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