I Can Understand Spanish but Not Speak It
The Small-scale Isle Where 500 People Speak Ix Different Languages
Its inhabitants tin can understand each other thank you to a peculiar linguistic miracle.
On South Goulburn Island, a small, forested isle off Australia's northern coast, a settlement called Warruwi Community consists of some 500 people who speak among themselves around nine different languages. This is 1 of the last places in Commonwealth of australia—and probably the world—where and then many indigenous languages exist together. In that location's the Mawng linguistic communication, but also i called Bininj Kunwok and another called Yolngu-Matha, and Burarra, Ndjébbana and Na-kara, Kunbarlang, Iwaidja, Torres Strait Creole, and English.
None of these languages, except English language, is spoken by more a few k people. Several, such as Ndjébbana and Mawng, are spoken by groups numbering in the hundreds. For all these individuals to sympathize ane another, i might expect South Goulburn to be an isle of polyglots, or a place where residents accept hashed out a pidgin to share, similar a sort of linguistic stone soup. Rather, they only talk to one another in their own language or languages, which they can practise because everyone else understands some or all of the languages but doesn't speak them.
This arrangement, which linguists call "receptive multilingualism," shows upwardly all around the world. In some places, it'south accidental. Many English language-speaking Anglos who live in U.S. edge states, for instance, can read and comprehend quite a bit of Castilian from being exposed to it. And countless immigrant children learn to speak the linguistic communication of their host land while retaining the ability to understand their parents' languages. In other places, receptive multilingualism is a piece of work-around for temporary situations. But at Warruwi Customs, it plays a special role.
Ruth Vocaliser, a linguist at the Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity Project of the Australian National University, realized this past chance, and wrote nearly receptive multilingualism at Warruwi Community recently in the journal Language and Advice. In 2006, for one of her trips for fieldwork on Due south Goulburn, Vocaliser and her husband had a Toyota truck shipped from Darwin past boat. Though the island'south non very large, there aren't many cars, so having i is a social lubricant. Singer and her husband became friends with a local married couple, Nancy Ngalmindjalmag and Richard Dhangalangal, who had a boat and trailer but no car, and the two couples concluded up going fishing and hunting, and digging up turtle eggs on the beach. That's when Vocalist noticed that Nancy always spoke to Richard in Mawng, just Richard always replied in Yolngu-Matha, even though Nancy besides spoke fluent Yolngu-Matha.
"Once I started to work on multilingualism and tuned my ear into how people were using different languages," Singer wrote in an email, "I began to hear receptive-multilingualism conversations all over Warruwi, like betwixt 2 men working on fixing a contend, or between two people at the shop."
There are a diversity of explanations for this, Singer says. In the example of her married friends, Richard didn't speak Mawng, because he wasn't originally from Warruwi Community. If he did so, it might be perceived as a claiming to rules that exclude outsiders from claiming sure rights. As well, Yolngu-Matha has more than speakers, and those speakers tend to exist less multilingual than speakers of smaller languages.
More broadly, people at Warruwi Community avoid only switching to a shared linguistic communication because in that location are social and personal costs of doing so. Some families insist that their children speak only their language, usually their begetter'due south. Languages are associated with item pieces of land or territory on the island, and clans claim ownership of that land, and so languages are also considered to be owned by clans. Ane tin merely speak the languages ane has a right to speak—and breaking this restriction tin can exist seen as a sign of hostility.
Withal, neither restriction applies to agreement a language—or as Nancy put it in an interview with Vocaliser, to "hearing" it. Vocalist suspects that receptive multilingualism in Commonwealth of australia has been around for a long time. The phenomenon was noted by some of the earliest European settlers on tardily 18th-century expeditions into the Australian interior. "Although our natives and the strangers conversed on a par, and understood each other perfectly, yet they spoke unlike dialects of the same language," one settler wrote in a journal.
While Australia isn't the only place in the world where receptive multilingualism happens, one matter that makes it different in Warruwi is that those receptive skills have a status as real proficiencies. Where the academic strange-language field tends to run across such skills as language half-learned, as an incomplete—or even worse, failed—acquisition, at Warruwi a person tin can claim receptive skills in a language as part of their repertoire. The Anglos in Texas aren't likely to put "understands Spanish" on a job résumé, while the immigrant children might be embarrassed that they can't speak their parents' languages. Another difference is that people at Warruwi Customs don't run into receptive skills equally a path to spoken abilities. Vocaliser's friend Richard Dhangalangal, for case, has lived most of his life with speakers of Mawng, which he understands very well, merely no one expects him to first speaking information technology.
Receptive multilingualism has been institutionalized in some places. In Switzerland, a country with iv official languages (from two different linguistic communication families), receptive multilingualism has been congenital into the educational system, such that children larn a local language, a second national language, and English from an early on age. In principle, this should let everyone to sympathize everyone else. Merely a 2009 study showed considerable monolingualism amongst Swiss citizens; Italian speakers tended to be the most multilingual and French speakers the least. Moreover, each group of speakers possessed stiff negative attitudes about the others. Just as in Warruwi Customs, social factors and ideas well-nigh language shape the life of many languages in places similar Switzerland.
But fifty-fifty someone in Switzerland might consider the condition of agreement-without-speaking in Australia to be no big deal, given that many people in Europe tend to have related languages in their repertoire (think Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages). This allows them to draw on cognate vocabulary and grammatical structures for passive agreement. The languages from Warruwi Community, by dissimilarity, come up from half-dozen different language families and aren't mutually intelligible, so those clusters of receptive skills amount to something quite sophisticated. Not enough is known near receptive multilingualism to know how many languages someone could sympathize merely not speak.
Whether in Switzerland or at Warruwi Community, one advantage of receptive multilingualism is that people can limited who they are and where they're from without forcing other people to be that matter, too. Co-ordinate to Singer, this creates social stability at Warruwi Community, because all the groups feel comfortable and confident with their identities. "The social and linguistic diversity at Warruwi is seen as essential to social harmony rather than every bit a barrier, underscoring the need for people to affirm diverse identities instead of everyone identifying as the same," she writes. "When there's no larger hierarchical social structure such as chiefdom, kingdom, or nation, maintaining the peace is no easy matter."
1 option for keeping the linguistic peace in other parts of the earth is for everyone to opt into speaking a language they all share, perhaps even a lingua franca. This is called "accommodation," which at its cadre is about reducing differences amidst people. But in some places in the world, accommodation is dis-preferred, even unthinkable. In the instance of Warruwi Community, Vocalist notes that people who stake a claim to the community (and by extension its language) would exist unwilling to speak another language.
And that'southward one lesson to be learned from receptive multilingualism at Warruwi Community: Modest ethnic groups are surprisingly circuitous, socially and linguistically, and receptive multilingualism is both engine and issue of that complexity. Information technology may also be a fundamental to ensuring the hereafter of pocket-sized languages as the population of speakers dwindles if more than was understood nearly how to turn receptive abilities in a language into being able to speak it. "If nosotros understood receptive abilities better, nosotros could blueprint language teaching for these people," Singer says, "which would make it easier for people who only understand their heritage language to start to speak information technology subsequently in life."
rouleauupellift67.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/11/receptive-multilingualism-small-languages/576649/
0 Response to "I Can Understand Spanish but Not Speak It"
Post a Comment