Poll How many languages do you speak?

[asbjos]

As I've learned Scandinavia is Norway, Denmark and Sweden, while Iceland, Finland, the Faeroe Islands, Greenland and Åland + the Scandinavic countries comes under the Nordic countries.

I can easy understand Swedish. Danish is a little bit harder, but that goes well too. But in one of my school-books, it stood that people from Norway understood Danish and Swedish better than Danish and Swedish people understood the two other languages, so it may be a little bit there

 

[Gumok]

Can we include our own artifical languages? If yes, it would be 4 for me - czech, slovak, english, schshan [sɣʃaːn] and a bit of other languages that i learn but still only for fun (japanese, spanisch)...

 

[C3PO]

As I've learned Scandinavia is Norway, Denmark and Sweden, while Iceland, Finland, the Faeroe Islands, Greenland and Åland + the Scandinavic countries comes under the Nordic countries.

I can easy understand Swedish. Danish is a little bit harder, but that goes well too. But in one of my school-books, it stood that people from Norway understood Danish and Swedish better than Danish and Swedish people understood the two other languages, so it may be a little bit there

I was refering to scandinavian in linguistic terms. Finnish is an Uralic language, and not related to scandinavian.

Norwegians are still quite good at understanding other scandinavians, just pipped to the post by the faroese. :lol:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Germanic_languages#Mutual_intelligibility

PS: It looks like we are very good at emigrating, because the wikipedia article states the number of speakers is 70,000. That's quite a lot for a nation with less than 50,00 inhabitants. :rofl:

 

[Spacethingy]

I ticked three, but I only really do Francais and Deutsch to school level. (e.g. mainly using German to relate how I once blew up a bakery during my work experience (fictionally, of course...))...

1) If you speak more than 1 language, do you find yourself having any advantages over the average monoglot?

I think so. Not really in the sense of everyday being able to do something blindingly brilliant, but it's just nice being able to vaguely understand other languages.

2) Do you think western languages will remain the 'international' languages, even with Asian countries (such as China) rising in prominence?

Hmmmm... Hard to say. China is becoming bigger and stronger than everyone else, but... While their government is still, y'know, a bit scary (I don't really do politics :lol, I can't really see this happening soon.

3) What is your opinion of conlangs, such as Esperanto and lojban? Could they ever be useful on an international scale, or do you think they will remain an interest only for enthusiasts or learners?

La kuko estas mensogo!

 

[Urwumpe]

1) If you speak more than 1 language, do you find yourself having any advantages over the average monoglot?

I am posting here. Nuff said. :lol:

I have far more information sources available and can even see my own country and language sphere from outside by reading what outsiders write and say about us. If I would only know German, I would not only be limited in my horizon, but likely also have much different opinions about being German and the world outside.

2) Do you think western languages will remain the 'international' languages, even with Asian countries (such as China) rising in prominence? Keep in mind that their foreign scripts and tonal languages often make it extremely difficult for westerners to attain fluency, while vice versa the skill required for fluency is not quite as much.

All Lingua Francas have one thing in common: They come, and they go. Important is the application of the language, not the prominence of countries. France was a popular language in Europe when France was weak, but trendsetting in politics, architecture and philosophy.

As long as China won't set trends, Chinese will not become a language to talk about such trends.

3) What is your opinion of conlangs, such as Esperanto and lojban? Could they ever be useful on an international scale, or do you think they will remain an interest only for enthusiasts or learners?

I like Quenya, but tried out lojban... while lojban is great for a computer in its logic, it is extremely annoying for a human, it lacks syntactic sugars.

 

[Cosmic Penguin]

I can speak Chinese and English fluently (both are mandatory in school education since grade 1).... although one might make the case that there are so many different Chinese dialects that it's like different languages in themselves (unless, of course, if you write down what you want to say)! I can speak Cantonese (my mother tongue) and Mandarin, but can't understand a word of other dialects. Not sure how to count this case though....

I took French classes for a year a looong time ago, and recently I've taken up Japanese, although I don't think either qualifies for the time being.

 

[Mattyv]

One.:embarrassed: I'm hopelessly monolingual.
Although I do know some Latin but there is an obvious lack of people speaking that.:lol:

 

[Arthur Dent]

1. German as my mother tongue - I speak mostly "high german" with some northern colouring. Since I moved to the east, I'm able to speak the regional "sächsisch" dialect.

2. Fluent in English (14 years of education. Most of my friends and colleagues are native speakers from the USA and the UK and I worked in Ireland for a while)

3. French. I had four years of french in school and an exchange visit to the Le Mans area. My oral french was good (seriously) my written french was terrible.

4. Spanish. I learned it in my final three years of school. I'm good enough to order a beer or to follow telenovelas (without understanding every word).

My french and spanish skills have deteriorated over the past years.


My wife wanted to teach me Latin and ancient Greek, too. And Russian. Well, she taught me how to read the Cyrillic alphabet. She is very multilingual.

1) I think I have an advantage over monoglots who don't speak English.

2) I think English will be dominant for some years. But in the distant future we will speak a mixture of Chinese and English.

3) I'm not a fan of artificial languages. I understand the original purpose, but modern use of English made those languages more or less obsolete. The current purpose of Esperanto is to bring Esperanto speakers from all around the world together.
And as it was already said in this thread: learning a language also helps to understand the culture.

 

[HarvesteR]

I think English became the universal language by default not just because of the cultural prominence of english-speaking countries... It's also a very straightforward language to learn.

Being a non-native anglophone I can say that, compared to latin-based languages, English is a very easy language to learn...

All nouns are a single gender (the), as opposed to two in portuguese and spanish (male and female nouns), and three in german (der, die, das), and most verbs require almost no conjugation... And there are no accents on any letters.

This is think is also a reason why Chinese is not likely to ever catch on as a universal language... They say you can study Chinese your entire life and never be able to speak like a native.

Cheers

 

[Marg]

1) Latvian - native;
2) Russian - as native;
3) English - fluently (even switching between more "rhotic" american and non "rhotic" british accent);

Being in Germany I had to speak german, though i know it only just a little bit,
as well as weak french.
Also I speak quite weak mandarin chinese. Learned a couple of years.
Latvian language also has tones (just two, not four as in chinese), and there is also "uo" sound as in mandarin. So it helps. Also some soft chinese sounds are close to russian soft consonants.
Tried japanese, but sentence structure is much more specific than in chinese and european languages (SOV, not SVO!).

P.S. Latvian has very advanced spelling system - pronounciation and spelling are almost the same, usage of macrons, etc...
so David is "Deivids", John is "Džons", etc.

 

[Eccentrus]

only speak three fluently

1. Indonesian (mainly the common Creole used in Jakarta, a.k.a Bahasa Gaoel (literally, the "Social Language")

2. English I don't speak that well, but as you have seen quite many times here, I can write it very eloquently, and in fact my writings makes more sense when written in English rather than in Indonesian (due to learning English as a written language and Indonesian is learnt as a more spoken language for me)

3. Javanese, because my family line landed in the Javanese linguistic area.

I've tried several attempts to add to my arsenal of languages, notably is German, when I was in HS, learnt it for several months when the 2008 crisis strikes and my dad stopped my auxiliary courses. Mandarin learnt for a month last year, but discontinued due to the busyness of being a Medical Student (there's no Mandarin courses anywhere near my campus, but as an attempt to increase their students' capability to research and read journals, the Dean said that he will add several extra-curricular courses for some languages, notably English, since many students are still bad in it, and then several popular scientific languages such as German, Chinese, and Japanese). And then of course, being a medical student, Latin is a must, even though is not mandatory in my Med School, just by having a rudimentary understanding of it improves my understanding of anatomy very much.

I'm not in the opinion that Mandarin Chinese can replace English as an international language, it is much easier for a Chinese speaker to learn English rather than the other way around, if anything, a very simplistic modification of English perhaps will arise to become the new international dialect. Although one can say that the Scientific English used in journals might as well be classified as another language altogether (the same syntax and grammar, with a whole new set of words except for the most basic parts) and is already as international as a language can hope to be, almost every journals I have read, whether it was written by a Chinese, a Japanese, a German, or an American use pretty much the same syntax and wordset.

 

[4throck]

The alphabet is more important than the language itself, I'd say.
It certainly helped to popularize English. Letters that are easy and fast to draw and can be seen from the distance are very useful.

Don't forget that the romans started using "times new roman" in monuments :thumbup: Of course, they only used CAPITALS. Why complicate things?
And Latin was very successful at the time. Even with no format school system people learned how to read an write. It needs to be simple (around ~20 characters).

Just to prove my point, I guess that most of you will know recognize S.P.Q.R even after 2000 years.

Chinese will start to spread when it becomes marketable/usable. Those funny characters just don't work that well. Too many, too complicated.

 

[indonesianorbinaut]

i was raised with Indonesian (with it's slang ) and Sundanese (fluent), i've studied English (maybe just writing language) for 10 years and still learn it (since i was in kindergarten) , little bit Arabic for 6 years and still in progress (since elementary school), and starting to learn Japanese now

 

[Urwumpe]

Chinese will start to spread when it becomes marketable/usable. Those funny characters just don't work that well. Too many, too complicated.

Well, Korean could fit the bill. Their characters are less funny. :lol:

Tengwar on the other hand is also not that bad... the number of characters is limited as well, but the characters are not really distinct enough to permit easy reading...

 

[T.Neo]

Just to prove my point, I guess that most of you will know recognize S.P.Q.R even after 2000 years.

Without darting to Dr. Google I understand it fine... but what does it stand for? And whatever that fancy latin-sounding acronym is, what does it mean? Languages are seperated by more than their writing systems, of course.

That said, I think it can be argued objectively that syllabaries are easier to learn and use than logographic writing systems, but there are also ways to transcribe languages such as Han Chinese into Latin script.

 

[Urwumpe]

"Set propellant quantity to reserve"

The romans had been pretty advanced.

(Actually, it means "The Senate and the People of Rome": SENATUS POPULUS QUE ROMANUS)

 

[Linguofreak]

I speak English natively and German fluently enough that I've been mistaken for a native on the street in Germany, though I'm sure it's much easier to pass for native in Germany where you're getting daily exposure to German and people generally expect the people they meet to be Germans, than it would be here in America where you don't have daily exposure to German, and any Germans you meet will expect you to be a non-native speaker. My vocabulary is also smaller than that of a native speaker, even in the best of conditions.

That's two.

I can read Spanish fairly well, but I can't speak it, and probably about the same for French (though I get much less exposure).

That's two and a half or so.

I've had classroom exposure to Japanese and Russian, and book-exposure to maybe half a dozen or a dozen other languages.

Together, they probably bring me up to two and three quarters.

1) If you speak more than 1 language, do you find yourself having any advantages over the average monoglot?

Yes, even the languages that I have had exposure to but don't really speak have been helpful at times.

2) Do you think western languages will remain the 'international' languages, even with Asian countries (such as China) rising in prominence?

Over the next 50 to 100 years I'd say it's likely. After that, all bets are off.

Keep in mind that their foreign scripts and tonal languages often make it extremely difficult for westerners to attain fluency, while vice versa the skill required for fluency is not quite as much.

Meh... The only foreign script that's going to be any more difficult for Westerners than learning Roman would be for a non-Westerner is the Chinese script, and a writing system is a separate thing from a language (it's possible, for instance, to write Russian in the Roman alphabet, ор инглиш ин сррилик, фор дхат мадр).

Two langauges (Korean and Vietnamese) have already abandoned the Chinese script, Korean for Hangul and Vietnamese for Roman. Of the two major languages that still use the Chinese script, both Chinese and Japanese can be romanized, and Japanese is already partly written in Hiragana. If Japanese dropped the Chinese script and went fully to using Hiragana, learning written Japanese wouldn't be any harder for Westerners than learning written English would be for the Japanese.

As for tones and stuff, it's just a matter of what your brain got used to hearing as you were growing up. I guarantee you that it's as hard for the Chinese to deal with the word "squirrels" (which, depending on what sounds you count as vowels, can be interpreted as a six-consonant cluster with no vowels, though generally the "rrr" sound there will be counted as a vowel) as it is for westerners to deal with Chinese tones. Also, westerners are more sensitive to tone than you realize: we're just used to using it to make distinctions at the sentence level (such as between statements and questions) rather than at the syllable level.

3) What is your opinion of conlangs, such as Esperanto and lojban? Could they ever be useful on an international scale, or do you think they will remain an interest only for enthusiasts or learners?

As far as conlangs, I like conlangs that are meant to be fictional natural languages (like Tolkien's languages), but I've always found stuff like Esperanto and lojban silly.

 

[Izack]

English, and a small amount of French, due to living in a bilingual area. Also having a go at Esperanto, 100% for fun as I've never met a speaker of it and likely never will, and it's simple. I'm very interested in the Slavic languages, as well.

You won't find me attempting more than a phrase or two of my second language, as it was learned more than ten years ago and has since faded.

 

[APDAF]

Would Klingon count as a language?

 

[Loru]

Would Klingon count as a language?

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