Are language learners more sensitive to minoritised languages?

[nooj]

It's been some time since I watched anything there but I think they do offer Welsh subtitles.

Goddamn I love being wrong. The list of reasons/excuses not to learn Welsh are running shorter by the day. Welsh subtitles on their programmes are an invaluable tool to the learner. Kudos.

[kleene*star]

Usually there are a bunch of practical issues that make learning minoritized languages kind of a pain in the neck:

1) Lack of learning material and teachers
2) Lack of (or very few) media
3) Lack of a publishing industry (or a very small publishing industry at best)
4) Difficulty in finding natives to talk with (and the natives themselves might have a negative attitude toward their minoritized language)
5) Minoritized languages are usually divided into different dialects and sub-dialects and lack a unified standard, and oftentimes, the different dialects aren't particularly mutually intelligible.
6) Very limited geographical extension

Of course there are exceptions to this, for instance I don't think Catalan has these issues, but as far as minoritized languages go, Catalan is quite in an exceptional place.

Also, I should admit that my view of minoritized languages is very euro-centric (especially point (6)), not sure how things are in the rest of the world.

As for your question, I'd definitely learn Catalan if I lived in Barcelona, I wouldn't learn it if I wanted to visit it as a tourist (in fact I already visited Barcelona and didn't even speak Spanish except for a few sentences lol). Whereas learning Alsatian to visit or even live in Strasbourg would be like learning Latin to visit or live in Rome at this point, and learning Irish to visit Dublin would be like learning Navajo to visit New York.

[Axon]

I've always thought of myself as the type of person who would learn a minority language if I lived somewhere with one widely spoken, but so far it's basically not been the case.

I lived in Central Java, Indonesia for a year from 2017-18, spoke Indonesian almost 100 percent of the time with locals, and never once needed to speak Javanese with anyone. That's probably the biggest motivating factor for me, whether there are people in the area who clearly prefer to speak the minority language. In fact, I studied Javanese as part of my language program as well as before I even arrived. I wanted to be able to speak it! It was just that, for me and my situation, there seemed to be no added value. I ended up retaining a handful of individual words and phrases at the end.

The situation is somewhat different with Sichuanese/Southwestern Mandarin. Not only did I live in Kunming, Southwestern China for a year from 2018-19, I've spent far more time in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces than any other provinces combined. My wife is a native speaker of two Sichuanese dialects and can passably imitate Yunnanese. I actually started learning/learning about Sichuanese before I met her or even went to China (remember, I always wanted to be the person who was in tune with local languages). Perhaps it's my study methods, or perhaps other learners are just better, but it took me a very long time to be able to speak even short sentences correctly.

Especially when I started, there were basically no resources online for learning it and understanding the tone changes, of which there are many. I've read dozens of papers giving slightly different descriptions of the tone system. I've also had tons of input from very different varieties of the larger Southwestern Mandarin dialect area. Phonology and vocabulary both have huge changes from generation to generation, so there are subtle details to everyone's speech that I start paying attention to and then get tongue-tied.

Now, at the eighthish year of trying to learn and the fifthish year of applying serious linguistic thought and understanding to it, I'm confident enough to switch to Sichuanese whenever addressed in a heavy Sichuanese accent by a stranger when I'm eating or buying things. With my in-laws, they make a good effort to speak Mandarin to me and often switch back to Sichuanese, and the most recent time I visited I was able to keep up short conversations in Sichuanese before I had to switch back to Mandarin.

I've realized, though, that I'm never going to be able to have native-sounding Sichuanese the way I've achieved a native-like accent in Mandarin (native-like production and fluency is a different and much further away goal). There are too many possible standards. I could study the Chengdu accent really well, but none of my relatives are from Chengdu. I could study the accent of the region nearest my relatives, but that's still not quite right because of their age and the actual location they're from. I'm not from there, and I don't live there, and it would appear to them as if I was trying to mimic them ... to what end? I'm already perfectly accepted in the family just with Mandarin alone, and from their point of view my interest in Sichuanese is a quirk or curiosity. I like the way it sounds and I like the things it preserves from Chinese language history that Standard Mandarin doesn't.

I certainly don't plan to stop studying. If I keep getting better, maybe one day I'll look back and realize that I was wrong, that learning fluent Sichuanese really did open up something new with my family that just more advanced Mandarin wouldn't have.

[nooj]

I lived in Central Java, Indonesia for a year from 2017-18, spoke Indonesian almost 100 percent of the time with locals, and never once needed to speak Javanese with anyone. That's probably the biggest motivating factor for me, whether there are people in the area who clearly prefer to speak the minority language. In fact, I studied Javanese as part of my language program as well as before I even arrived. I wanted to be able to speak it! It was just that, for me and my situation, there seemed to be no added value. I ended up retaining a handful of individual words and phrases at the end.

What attitudes and discourses did you notice from Javanese people themselves, and I suppose, from other Indonesian people who were living there, concerning their language?

Did you use any of the resources from the ANU (the university in Canberra)? I recall they had created some useful resources for their courses of Javanese.

[Ug_Caveman]

If you went to Barcelona, Dublin or Strasbourg, would you learn first and foremost (or only) Spanish, English or French, or would you also learn Catalan, Irish and Alsatian?

I do admit, my interest has been perked by West Frisian as a complement to Dutch. I have some of the (very limited group of) materials for it on my bookshelf. A couple of grammars and readers alongside my Afrikaans materials.

And this thread has inspired me to invest in beefing up that collection a bit... That and some rather lovely music in Frisian I've heard in the last few days.

[Axon]

What attitudes and discourses did you notice from Javanese people themselves, and I suppose, from other Indonesian people who were living there, concerning their language?

Did you use any of the resources from the ANU (the university in Canberra)? I recall they had created some useful resources for their courses of Javanese.

Great questions! As for resources, I didn't know about them at the time. I had an Indonesian textbook with a few phrases in Javanese (very limited in use) and also briefly used Mango Languages before I arrived (so formal and bookish as to be useless). In Indonesia, the teachers of Javanese classes for non-natives used material they wrote themselves.

As for language attitudes, I think I'm much more sensitive to this kind of thing now, for starters. Back then I knew a lot, but I have a much more complex understanding now about how minority languages work. So all of these memories are filtered through my knowledge and interpretations at the time.

I got the sense that basically all Yogyakarta locals used Javanese and Indonesian with equal facility, and that Javanese was a language a local person my age would use in the following settings: with family, with a group of friends consisting only of Javanese-speakers, and with a Javanese small business owner whose customers were also Javanese. So in a mixed setting, the default for everyone I knew was to switch to Indonesian. This was not the case for a friend I knew, a white woman from America who lived in the next city over and also spoke good Indonesian. There, she was in fact fully expected to learn Javanese in order to keep up with friends' conversations. This shows me that my own perspective was shaped a great deal by the international and fairly academic environment I was in. Three large, famous universities were all next to each other and I remember that most people my age were students in that part of town.

My Javanese professor taught the class fully in Indonesian to a mix of students from the upper-level Indonesian for Foreigners courses. We met just once a week and the material was, from what I remember, based on analyzing dialogues between friends and in markets. The TA was a student who had a hobby of calligraphy in the Javanese alphabet and wanted to promote Javanese to everyone. Still, there was no pressure to speak Javanese from anyone. Perhaps I'm remembering wrong, but the professor and TA would first speak in Indonesian to us rather than push us to converse in Javanese. One clear memory from that professor was her lamenting that a lot of Javanese writing around Yogyakarta on signs and storefronts was misspelled in basic ways, showing that people wanted to use the alphabet as an identity marker but without putting the effort into correctly learning the script.

I stayed in Surabaya for one or two nights and happened to meet literally the only Indonesian YouTube celebrity I was even aware of, Londokampung. I greeted him in Javanese in a mall, much like his "White guy speaks Javanese" videos, and he was very surprised and pleased by this. Even in that short stay, I could feel that Surabayans used Javanese in places I never heard it in Yogyakarta, like upscale restaurants in malls. I strongly recommend Londokampung's video series from last year where he interviewed other advanced non-ethnically-Indonesian speakers of Javanese about their attitudes toward the language.

[rdearman]

I wouldn't bother, and the reason is in the name: minority. I don't want to speak to a minority of people, I want to speak to the majority of people. So learning the larger language gives me more bang-for-the-buck. Same amount of effort with a bigger payoff by learning the larger language.

[mick33]

When I first got serious about learning languages in 2008 I found many opinion pieces and blog posts about the importance of saving minority languages. I then thought that I would like to learn some minority languages, such as Lushootseed, Älvdalska, Neapolitan, and Irish. I even started to believe (for only a little while) that perhaps I could do this myself.

But once I began reading more about specific endangered minority languages I realized that the only people who can revive these languages are the natives, if they wish to do so. Some speakers of various minority languages may appreciate outsiders learning their languages, or they may not, but I probably won't actually change anything by learning any of these languages.

I have no connection to any of these groups of people or their cultures and no training in the relevant aspects of linguistics that would enable me to assist in transcribing or recording these languages, thus I'll leave these projects to the locals and get on with my own life.

[Iversen]

To Mick33: But you did get fairly far with your Afrikaans, didn't you?

For me it's one of the languages that are spoken in secret by a minority, but never to tourists. The total number of speakers is supposed to be counted in millions, but I never found anybody to speak to down there during my latest visit. However there were a few books in the bookstores, and I brought home - among other things - a fine field guide to the local voëls, and I have also downloaded some podcasts later on so that I can keep it alive. But it would be nice also to get a chance to use it during possible future visits.

On the other hand I have never even considered learning any of the innumerable other official languages of Suid-Africa.

[mick33]

To Mick33: But you did get fairly far with your Afrikaans, didn't you?

Yes, I did, and despite what I wrote above I do not regret learning it.

Unfortunately, I know nobody near me who speaks it and still haven't been to South Africa or Namibia. 10 years ago, I did find a Meetup group based in Seattle for South African expats and people interested in South Africa. They used to have a website (I can't find it now) and someone else on there had asked about speaking Afrikaans with them, but either they don't speak it or didn't really want to.