Re: Quadrilingual
From: Tor (tor826_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/22/04
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Date: 22 Sep 2004 04:01:59 -0700
azythos2@hotmail.com (mb) wrote in message
> Those with problems at school with German were often the same who were
> deficient in the language of their parent(s). Almost always the
> parents' answer to "What language do you speak with the child?" was
> either "mostly German" (with no native-German parent) or another
> common, non-native language used for communication with the spouse. To
> the question "Do you mix languages when speaking with the child?" the
> answer in the "successful" group was regularly "never", and in the
> "problem" group, generally "yes". In the "problem" group, it seemed
> that those who went to the additional schools where available
> (Italian, French, Spanish, etc.) were doing better than those who
> didn't, hardly a big surprise. The "successful" had some difference in
> this regard too, but not at all in vernacular speech, only in better
> use of the standard language.
>
> I guess all this is banal and expected.
No, no, it's very interesting.
> I remember that there were a
> few families where problems like yours were seen even though they were
> expected to be in the "successful" group, but the teachers went to
> town on that and proposed some plausible explanation for all.
Well, my father normally spoke English to us children, even though his
native language was Swedish. He was usually too busy to communicate
with us much, but it's nevertheless likely that he did contribute
somewhat to our problems. His English was very good, but not without
errors. (One bizarre, persistant error of his was to pronounce
"author" and "thousand" with [t], even though he otherwise had no
difficulty with the [T] sound.)
A growing number of Finns are natively bilingual, with a
Finnish-speaking parent and a Swedish-speaking parent. A couple of
years ago I read an article about a study on these bilingual children.
The study found that quite a few of the children had difficulties
with both of their languages, but I don't recall what the numbers
were. The difficulties were more or less similar to the ones I had as
a child. The children with the worst problems, who sounded worse than
I ever was, were labeled "semilingual". Unfortunately I don't
remember whether the article said anything about why some children
have problems and others don't.
The article reported that a bilingual child may have gaps in his
vocabularies (knowing a word in one language but not in the other) or
have trouble retrieving a word (knowing the word in both languages,
but remembering it only in the language that he is not speaking at the
moment). When the child is talking to a monolingual person and
encounters a gap or has trouble retrieving a word, he will hem and
haw, but when he is with a bilingual child like himself, he will
simply inject the word from the other language, knowing that he will
probably be understood. The article expressed concern about this
mixing of languages (not quite the same, of course, as the mixing you
mention above), but I don't remember exactly what was bad about it. I
think the concern was that the speaker was less likely to improve his
speech if he allowed himself to mix languages.
Fortunately for my siblings and me, I guess, there was a kind of taboo
among us against mixing languages. But we did hem and haw -- a lot!
Tor Aschan
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