(Big) Language Survey Going On

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Re: (Big) Language Survey Going On

Postby golyplot » Wed Jun 23, 2021 7:22 pm

Lemus wrote:I have suspected that there are two kinds of major polyglots in the world. Some who are more extroverted then normal who love talking to people and pick up their languages primarily through tutors, conversations, and other person-to-person methods. Others are more introverted than normal and prefer grammar books, programs, etc.



I suspect that there's a large gender bias here as well, with the former disproportionately female, and the later disproportionately male.

At one point, I was taking ASL classes, and I was struck by how female-heavy they were. I suspect that that is because ASL is usually a language you learn if you want to work with people. I suspect that a class like Latin or Ancient Greek would have substantially different demographics, though admittedly I don't have personal experience there..
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Re: (Big) Language Survey Going On

Postby lysi » Wed Jun 23, 2021 8:21 pm

golyplot wrote:
Lemus wrote:I have suspected that there are two kinds of major polyglots in the world. Some who are more extroverted then normal who love talking to people and pick up their languages primarily through tutors, conversations, and other person-to-person methods. Others are more introverted than normal and prefer grammar books, programs, etc.



I suspect that there's a large gender bias here as well, with the former disproportionately female, and the later disproportionately male.

At one point, I was taking ASL classes, and I was struck by how female-heavy they were. I suspect that that is because ASL is usually a language you learn if you want to work with people. I suspect that a class like Latin or Ancient Greek would have substantially different demographics, though admittedly I don't have personal experience there..


Was there a language specific portion on the survey? I don't remember, but it would be interesting to see if there's a gender divide between individual languages, like Latin and ASL in this case, statistically. As well as every other aspect of orientation. A priori you can make assumptions but having real data is better.
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Re: (Big) Language Survey Going On

Postby Le Baron » Wed Jun 23, 2021 8:49 pm

Yes, I read the initial results email earlier on. One thing it does seem to show is that there aren't really all that many 'polyglots' as compared to people who have actual mastery of a couple of languages, and that respondents were fairly honest. Or that not that many polyglots took part in this survey. Take your pick.

As for the majority female component, she seems to be saving that reveal for further results. Perhaps women learning languages are, so to speak, just less vocal about it (and do more actual language learning than academic analysis/discussion?) and so the assumptions from looking at general online participation have been misleading.
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Re: (Big) Language Survey Going On

Postby chove » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:32 pm

For the genders thing, I'd say in general women are less likely to advertise their skills and hobbies even online, for whatever reason (harrassment springs to mind but there could be less upsetting reasons). And there's the more subtle element of "assumed to be [gender] until proved otherwise" where people in a given hobby are assumed to be one gender or another -- like I'd expect on Ravelry (a knitting forum) posters mostly assume that other posters are women, or on gaming forums we might wrongly assume someone is male. I know I've tended to assume this forum leans heavily male, and I'm not even sure why I'd think that!
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Re: (Big) Language Survey Going On

Postby Cainntear » Thu Jun 24, 2021 10:20 pm

Regarding all the stuff about gender identity and sexuality, I'm going to restate something I've said before on various occasions:
A lot of people seem to get into languages because of identity issues. I don't think it really matters whether those identity issues arise from the person feeling intrinsically different themselves or as a result of rejection or disapproval of peers -- if you're not fully integrated into your society/community, you're going to look beyond it.

I think that these identity issues are also helpful to learners -- we were talking here recently about accents and identity, and the more you're willing to let go of cultural markers of your home language speaker community, the more open you'll be to not only acquiring a good accent, but idioms and phraseology too.
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Re: (Big) Language Survey Going On

Postby lysi » Thu Jun 24, 2021 10:47 pm

Cainntear wrote:Regarding all the stuff about gender identity and sexuality, I'm going to restate something I've said before on various occasions:
A lot of people seem to get into languages because of identity issues. I don't think it really matters whether those identity issues arise from the person feeling intrinsically different themselves or as a result of rejection or disapproval of peers -- if you're not fully integrated into your society/community, you're going to look beyond it.

I think that these identity issues are also helpful to learners -- we were talking here recently about accents and identity, and the more you're willing to let go of cultural markers of your home language speaker community, the more open you'll be to not only acquiring a good accent, but idioms and phraseology too.


Accent, with regard to identity, represents geographic or social belonging. A German living in Germany speaking English with a German accent has no less of a valid accent than a native English speaker.
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Re: (Big) Language Survey Going On

Postby rdearman » Fri Jun 25, 2021 8:47 am

lysi wrote:
Cainntear wrote:Regarding all the stuff about gender identity and sexuality, I'm going to restate something I've said before on various occasions:
A lot of people seem to get into languages because of identity issues. I don't think it really matters whether those identity issues arise from the person feeling intrinsically different themselves or as a result of rejection or disapproval of peers -- if you're not fully integrated into your society/community, you're going to look beyond it.

I think that these identity issues are also helpful to learners -- we were talking here recently about accents and identity, and the more you're willing to let go of cultural markers of your home language speaker community, the more open you'll be to not only acquiring a good accent, but idioms and phraseology too.


Accent, with regard to identity, represents geographic or social belonging. A German living in Germany speaking English with a German accent has no less of a valid accent than a native English speaker.

What does that even mean? Someone has a valid accent?

Valid:
1. having a sound basis in logic or fact; reasonable or cogent.
2. legally binding due to having been executed in compliance with the law.
3. legally or officially acceptable.



Accents are on a scale running from unintelligible to native. Cainntear is saying the more you're willing to assume the cultural markers and align your identity to the language, then the further along the scale your accent will move towards native when compared to another person who refuses to align closely with the language.

Schumann's Acculturation Theory as presented in "The Pidginization Process: A Model for Second Language Acquisition" (1978) predicts that the degree of a learner's success in second language (L2) acquisition depends upon the learner's degree of acculturation. Attempts to test this theory have not been particularly fruitful due to the lack of an adequate measure of acculturation and the particular linguistic markers selected to measure success in L2 acquisition. This study proposes to measure sojourners' acculturation in terms of their social exchange networks (Milroy & Wei, 1995). It measures L2 success in terms of pronunciation, which in the view of many scholars (Guiora, Beit-Hallahmi, Brannon, Dull, & Scovel, 1972; Labov, 1972; Scovel, 1988) is the strongest linguistic marker of a speaker's cultural identification. Using this framework, the current study provides strong evidence in support of Schumann's Acculturation Theory. The acculturation experiences and L2 pronunciation of 9 American women residing in Norway are described and the relationship examined. It is concluded that learners who developed positive network connections with native speakers of Norwegian evidenced more native-like pronunciation than those who had greater difficulty establishing such relationships.


Another study:
the qualitative data revealed that the majority of participants did not believe that their pronunciation was related to their cultural identity. However, the data did reveal a significant relationship between cultural identity and how important native-like pronunciation of English was perceived to be.


Learning a language is therefore learning the behaviour of a given society and its cultural customs. Language is a product of the thought and behaviour of a society. An individual language speaker’s effectiveness in a foreign language is directly related to his/her understanding of the culture of that language (Taylor, 1979)


There have been some more recent studies which show it may not be as important to identify with the culture, but rather it is more important to the learner not to be rejected by the natives of that culture. (One study in Turkey and another in Pakistan regarding English learner motivations) So the learners are driven towards better pronunciation to avoid feelings of humiliation or inadequacy.
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Re: (Big) Language Survey Going On

Postby Cainntear » Fri Jun 25, 2021 9:05 am

lysi wrote:
Cainntear wrote:Regarding all the stuff about gender identity and sexuality, I'm going to restate something I've said before on various occasions:
A lot of people seem to get into languages because of identity issues. I don't think it really matters whether those identity issues arise from the person feeling intrinsically different themselves or as a result of rejection or disapproval of peers -- if you're not fully integrated into your society/community, you're going to look beyond it.

I think that these identity issues are also helpful to learners -- we were talking here recently about accents and identity, and the more you're willing to let go of cultural markers of your home language speaker community, the more open you'll be to not only acquiring a good accent, but idioms and phraseology too.


Accent, with regard to identity, represents geographic or social belonging. A German living in Germany speaking English with a German accent has no less of a valid accent than a native English speaker.

I didn't say otherwise. Saying something's not a good accent doesn't mean it's not valid.

Maybe you feel my choice of word ("good") was wrong, and in the specific case of English I wouldn't have used that word: English is now in very common use as a lingua franca between non-natives so is a special case, but if that same German is learning a language used primarily for communication between and with native speakers, a heavy accent is going to be an impediment to understanding. And when you get down to unusual language pairs (eg a Hungarian learner of Basque) the non-natives' accent is not going to be placeable to the people they're talking to, so won't communicate any group membership, but rather non-membership of the main speaker group.

And if we go the extremes of accent, we have languages in the Far East with limited syllable structure -- to the point where some have no consonant clusters in syllable onset and no syllable codas at all. Is an accent that can't pronounce /tr/ a "valid" accent for speaking European languages? Is it useful?
The fact that we don't need to eliminate our accent entirely doesn't mean we don't need to adapt to some degree.
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Re: (Big) Language Survey Going On

Postby lysi » Fri Jun 25, 2021 2:34 pm

rdearman wrote:
lysi wrote:
Cainntear wrote:Regarding all the stuff about gender identity and sexuality, I'm going to restate something I've said before on various occasions:
A lot of people seem to get into languages because of identity issues. I don't think it really matters whether those identity issues arise from the person feeling intrinsically different themselves or as a result of rejection or disapproval of peers -- if you're not fully integrated into your society/community, you're going to look beyond it.

I think that these identity issues are also helpful to learners -- we were talking here recently about accents and identity, and the more you're willing to let go of cultural markers of your home language speaker community, the more open you'll be to not only acquiring a good accent, but idioms and phraseology too.


Accent, with regard to identity, represents geographic or social belonging. A German living in Germany speaking English with a German accent has no less of a valid accent than a native English speaker.

What does that even mean? Someone has a valid accent?

Valid:
1. having a sound basis in logic or fact; reasonable or cogent.
2. legally binding due to having been executed in compliance with the law.
3. legally or officially acceptable.



Accents are on a scale running from unintelligible to native. Cainntear is saying the more you're willing to assume the cultural markers and align your identity to the language, then the further along the scale your accent will move towards native when compared to another person who refuses to align closely with the language.


Aligning your accent to native speakers is not a priori a good thing.
rdearman wrote:
Schumann's Acculturation Theory as presented in "The Pidginization Process: A Model for Second Language Acquisition" (1978) predicts that the degree of a learner's success in second language (L2) acquisition depends upon the learner's degree of acculturation. Attempts to test this theory have not been particularly fruitful due to the lack of an adequate measure of acculturation and the particular linguistic markers selected to measure success in L2 acquisition. This study proposes to measure sojourners' acculturation in terms of their social exchange networks (Milroy & Wei, 1995). It measures L2 success in terms of pronunciation, which in the view of many scholars (Guiora, Beit-Hallahmi, Brannon, Dull, & Scovel, 1972; Labov, 1972; Scovel, 1988) is the strongest linguistic marker of a speaker's cultural identification. Using this framework, the current study provides strong evidence in support of Schumann's Acculturation Theory. The acculturation experiences and L2 pronunciation of 9 American women residing in Norway are described and the relationship examined. It is concluded that learners who developed positive network connections with native speakers of Norwegian evidenced more native-like pronunciation than those who had greater difficulty establishing such relationships.


The situation is far from clear when it comes to English, however. What culture is there to be learned from English? Is a non native English any less valuable than a native English? What measures are there for value of an accent? There are objectively none, subjectively many, but they represent far more the biases and prejudices of the one making the judgments than any particular reality.

rdearman wrote:
Another study:
the qualitative data revealed that the majority of participants did not believe that their pronunciation was related to their cultural identity. However, the data did reveal a significant relationship between cultural identity and how important native-like pronunciation of English was perceived to be.


Learning a language is therefore learning the behaviour of a given society and its cultural customs. Language is a product of the thought and behaviour of a society. An individual language speaker’s effectiveness in a foreign language is directly related to his/her understanding of the culture of that language (Taylor, 1979)


What 'beliefs and customs' are there to be learned from a Lingua Franca? It's a means of communication. It's much more complicated than "learning the thoughts and behaviour of a society". What "beliefs and customs" are there to be learned for a German learning English to communicate with other Europeans in some domain of technology? Certainly there are some beliefs and customs to be learned from the countries he's working with, and yet none related at all to English.

There have been some more recent studies which show it may not be as important to identify with the culture, but rather it is more important to the learner not to be rejected by the natives of that culture. (One study in Turkey and another in Pakistan regarding English learner motivations) So the learners are driven towards better pronunciation to avoid feelings of humiliation or inadequacy.

Plenty of native English accents are stigmatized too. Obviously this is important but identity and perception are not exclusive. A French speaker of English with a French accent isn't going to be stigmatized, far from it, and it represents their identity far more closely than picking a Standard American accent.

Cainntear wrote:
lysi wrote:
Cainntear wrote:Regarding all the stuff about gender identity and sexuality, I'm going to restate something I've said before on various occasions:
A lot of people seem to get into languages because of identity issues. I don't think it really matters whether those identity issues arise from the person feeling intrinsically different themselves or as a result of rejection or disapproval of peers -- if you're not fully integrated into your society/community, you're going to look beyond it.

I think that these identity issues are also helpful to learners -- we were talking here recently about accents and identity, and the more you're willing to let go of cultural markers of your home language speaker community, the more open you'll be to not only acquiring a good accent, but idioms and phraseology too.


Accent, with regard to identity, represents geographic or social belonging. A German living in Germany speaking English with a German accent has no less of a valid accent than a native English speaker.

I didn't say otherwise. Saying something's not a good accent doesn't mean it's not valid.

Maybe you feel my choice of word ("good") was wrong, and in the specific case of English I wouldn't have used that word: English is now in very common use as a lingua franca between non-natives so is a special case, but if that same German is learning a language used primarily for communication between and with native speakers, a heavy accent is going to be an impediment to understanding. And when you get down to unusual language pairs (eg a Hungarian learner of Basque) the non-natives' accent is not going to be placeable to the people they're talking to, so won't communicate any group membership, but rather non-membership of the main speaker group.

And if we go the extremes of accent, we have languages in the Far East with limited syllable structure -- to the point where some have no consonant clusters in syllable onset and no syllable codas at all. Is an accent that can't pronounce /tr/ a "valid" accent for speaking European languages? Is it useful?
The fact that we don't need to eliminate our accent entirely doesn't mean we don't need to adapt to some degree.


I'm using English as an example of a global language (because it is the archetypical global language) but what I say wouldn't be any less valid with, for example, French.

Whether an accent is 'useful' is irrelevant. Is an English accent with the cot-caught merger any less 'useful' than one without? But about accents being an impediment to understanding, a Scottish accent are almost incomprehensible to anybody not familiar with it, and yet it's a native accent. Why would an incomprehensible (to outsiders) non-native accent be any different than this?

The adaptation is the crucial part in this discussion, there needs to be some ability to converge accents with an interlocuter, to speak a more standard English for communication, but asking a German to lose their German accent in English is the same as asking a native English speaker to change their accent: Both are asking them fundamentally to change the representation of their identity.
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Re: (Big) Language Survey Going On

Postby Cainntear » Fri Jun 25, 2021 11:25 pm

lysi wrote:
rdearman wrote:Accents are on a scale running from unintelligible to native. Cainntear is saying the more you're willing to assume the cultural markers and align your identity to the language, then the further along the scale your accent will move towards native when compared to another person who refuses to align closely with the language.


Aligning your accent to native speakers is not a priori a good thing.

Yes, and it's not a priori a bad thing. That's why we're discussing variables here.
The situation is far from clear when it comes to English, however.

But as I already said, English is in a unique position.
What measures are there for value of an accent? There are objectively none, subjectively many, but they represent far more the biases and prejudices of the one making the judgments than any particular reality.

The reality is that some people are harder to understand, and some people are easier to understand. The fact that there is no precise measure of this doesn't stop that being reality.

And the people who have a stronger non-native accent are harder to understand than the ones with a more native-like accent. This is objective reality that we know to be true, even if we can't measure it quantitatively.


What 'beliefs and customs' are there to be learned from a Lingua Franca?

Most languages are not learned to be used as a lingua franca between non-natives. Increasingly only English is.

What "beliefs and customs" are there to be learned for a German learning English to communicate with other Europeans in some domain of technology?

There are ways of looking at the world encoded in any language. Even if you eliminate idiomatic cliches and proverbs, there are still levels of idiom you cannot eliminate from a language.

As an English speaker, I needed to be acculturated to the levels of politeness used in Spanish, and I would need further acculturation to deal with the system of honorifics in a language like Japan.

A French speaker of English with a French accent isn't going to be stigmatized, far from it, and it represents their identity far more closely than picking a Standard American accent.

But you've skipped over a point I made in my last message. I said:
myself wrote: when you get down to unusual language pairs (eg a Hungarian learner of Basque) the non-natives' accent is not going to be placeable to the people they're talking to, so won't communicate any group membership, but rather non-membership of the main speaker group.

A French accent in English is far from unknown -- it's something a fair percentage of native speakers will have encountered many times during their life. Would you recognise an Uyghur speaker's accent if you were to encounter one speaking English? I know I wouldn't. So how does speaking English with an Uyghur accent express a group identity, and who does it express it to?

Whether an accent is 'useful' is irrelevant.

"Irrelevant" is a strong word, and needs supported.
Is an English accent with the cot-caught merger any less 'useful' than one without? But about accents being an impediment to understanding, a Scottish accent are almost incomprehensible to anybody not familiar with it, and yet it's a native accent. Why would an incomprehensible (to outsiders) non-native accent be any different than this?

Because the non-native speaker of English does not learn English to speak to other speakers of his or her own native language -- that would be a waste of everybody's time.

The non-native speaker of English -- or indeed any language -- learns it expressly to communicate with people who are not part of his language community, so needs to learn a comprehensible accent.

The adaptation is the crucial part in this discussion, there needs to be some ability to converge accents with an interlocuter, to speak a more standard English for communication, but asking a German to lose their German accent in English is the same as asking a native English speaker to change their accent: Both are asking them fundamentally to change the representation of their identity.

You know what's a more fundamental marker of identity than accent? Language.

Why is it OK to ask the German to stop using their grammar and their lexis, but not their phonology? I do not see how that makes sense.

And again, how do you speak English in an accent that does not permit the sounds of English?
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