Why is it so rare to be perfectly bilingual in English and a Slavic language?

[drp9341]

Hello everyone!

So I've been working in Warsaw, Poland for the past 2 of months, and lots of my students have cousins who grew up in Chicago, Germany, Canada etc. One comment I often get is that I speak better Polish than their cousins in the states. (I don't believe this to be true, since my level, according to a reputable Polish school's entrance exam, is "strong B1").

Regardless, I've heard soooo many stories of Polish people forgetting Polish. Let me give you some examples

#1) I know a girl my age, 24 years old, who moved from Poland to the US when she was 16. She has absolutely zero accent in English. (she was very self-conscious about her accent and went to speech therapy for years, and claims she only totally lost her accent ~2 years ago.) She talked to my girlfriend, who has never been outside of Poland for more than a month at time, and my girlfriend said her Polish was super American; Even I could hear her American accent. Supposedly it was not only her accent, but her grammar as well that was "messed up."

#2) A student of mine told the following story: Her cousin, who she's very close with, moved to Germany when she was in her 20's for 2 years and didn't talk with her family at all, she had supposedly got into trouble and had to leave Poland. When she came back 2 years later she had a very strong foreign accent, people in shops would even switch to talk with her in English. side note: lots of Poles in Warsaw are VERY enthusiastic about speaking English. If you give any hint of not being native they will try to speak English with you.

#3) My student's cousin moved to Canada when he was 7 years old, and he's now almost 40. His parents speak to him only in Polish. My student told me that this cousin cannot speak in Polish at all. He struggles to put together even the most basic sentences.

These are only 3 stories, but I think you guys got the idea. I've heard at least 5 more similar stories - Polish children moving abroad and loosing their ability to speak fluently, not to mention speak native-like.

I have heard similar stories with Russians also, except for those who grow up in an ethnic enclave, e.g. Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

Spanish speakers rarely have this problem. Not all of them are able to pass for a native, but I haven't met any who are unable to speak fluently. I also have Japanese and Chinese friends who are fluent, or (according to them,) perfectly bilingual in both languages, (the one's who are "equally fluent" in both languages attended Chinese/Japanese school on the weekends.)

Why is this? Is it a phonetic thing? Or is the grammar and structure so different, yet similar enough at the same time so as to cause interference. I know this is all anecdotal, but this really been piquing my curiosity.

What I'm curious about is whether or not this is "the norm" or if these stories are exceptions. Let me know what you guys think.

[Theodisce]

Perhaps some of those people lose interest in Polish input when they move aboard. That woud't explain your third case however, which seems to me extremely unlikely (I'm not implying the story is false, but we may be missing some important details). Older teenagers and people in their twenties would normally be able to speak their native language even after long periods of living abroad. Maybe they have no interest, or, worse, came to have a negative attitude towards their native language. It's funny since I've been living in Germany for 2 years and when my German friend asked me how people in Poland reacted to German accent he believed was now accompanying me when I was speaking Polish I found it hard to understand what had made him believe such a rapid change was possible (on a few occasions my native language was (mis)identified by native speakers of German as French. I was most flattered when a German lady developed the idea my native tongue was Swiss German after a 30 minutes long conversation).

Your examples would not puzzle me that much if they were taken from the pre-Internet era.

[LinguaPony]

One of my ex-bosses is a Russian guy who moved to the UK in his early youth - he must have been around 24 or so. When I worked for his company, he visited Russia about once in two years. He spoke Russian like he had never left his homeland, not a trace of any accent; he even managed to keep track of all the new slang. He had to speak a lot of English, of course, when he was in the UK, for business and just to communicate with people. No problem at all, except when he spoke on the phone with English people from Russia, they noticed some Russian accent, but as soon as he went back home, it would almost disappear.

Actually, these stories about people losing their native tongue sound very strange to me.

[DaveBee]

It's unusual in the UK for an anglophone to be bilingual in a slavic language, but there are lots of slavs here with good english language skills.

I think there is an effort to keep the languages alive into the next generation too. You see occasional news reports of saturday schools for children, and certainly in my town their are polish shops, polish restaurants and a polish church. The polish government seems keen to promote polish learning too, they petitioned the UK gov't to add polish to the curiculum.

I think spanish is still the most popular adult evening school course though, and there are lots of anglophone british expats in Spain, and to a lesser extent France.

[Cavesa]

A very simple reason: the slavic languages are not viewed as prestigious ones, therefore the language of the new home country is strongly preferred, with the "a child should have only one native language or they'll speak them both wrong" myth still being well alive. That is why not only heritage speakers but also children and teenagers having been moved abroad lose so much. They are getting educated in the new language and there is no pressure or even "logical" reason for them to pursue double education. Some parents choose this for their children, I know a few. The children got examined every half a year from several subjects in a czech school, similarly to homeschooling students, and their Czech is not so bad (now years later), compared to those that weren't taking both paths. They have a slight accent but still sound native, you need to look for it a bit. More noticeable is the way they sometimes look for words.

It is very different for the older people. People 40+, who had moved abroad during communism, they weren't expats. They were emigrants with very few ties and irregular contact with the home country. Plus no internet to hear it. Yes, some have kept a high level in some ways by reading and meeting other emigrants. But our former minister for foreign affairs Schwarzenberg sounds younger and "fresher" in German (the way he speaks in looking his age are two main things his haters criticise a lot. But if they found an opportunity to hear him in German, they would see the difference and wouldn't blame his age ). Or Madeleine Albright. She kept a level of Czech sufficient to discuss complex matters and say everything she wants. But she sounds like an american who learnt Czech to outstanding level. Outstanding compared to what we expect from americans. She has a clearly american accent but can be understood. She sometimes searches for vocabulary and makes grammar mistakes. But she was taken away 4 years old.

Another factor: they encounter the same problem language learners do. It is hypereasy to stay in contact with English anywhere you go, it is so easy it complicates immersion. But it is not so in the other languages. I guess Russian natives may not have that much of a problem but I am just guessing here, based on the Russian immigrants in the Czech Republic, who are also not perfectly native like in both usually, and they are usually worse at Czech, including those who arrived as schoolchildren. The Russian communities worldwide tend to be bigger than some of the others and the sheer amount of media is bigger, plus they have very good pirate sites (btw the eu parliament recently made licensing for movies and similar stuff easier in some ways, so buyers of the rights could get rights for the whole EU. But they failed to remove the geoblocking, due to lobbyists.). So Russians may value their language and roots higher than other slavic language natives, despite the fact more % of Russians live abroad than Poles or Czechs as far as I've read. And they have easier time keeping up with the language with the language thanks to more stuff being produced.

[Stelle]

Is it really rare? Many of my young students (7-8 years old) speak both Russian and English fluently. I also have several coworkers who were born in Canada to Russian families, and they're fluently bilingual. We have a large Russian community in our area, so people who live here have constant exposure. I'm not sure how fluent those children would be as adults if they were born to the only Russian-speaking family in a monolingual English town.

I do know lots of second-generation immigrants who can understand their heritage language perfectly, but can't speak it.

But the idea of "losing" a native language after moving in your 20s is a bit strange to me. I wonder if it was just an accent change that would be quickly reversed after moving back home. If I spend a full weekend with an English-speaker from another country, then I unconsciously start mimicking their accent. It's a little bit embarrassing. Ha!

[Speakeasy]

Bilingual English-Slavic Speakers
I believe that there are several reasons why it is rather unusual for a native English speaker to become perfectly fluent in a Slavic language, or any other language, for that matter. Here’s my take on the matter:

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics
Approximately 360 million people speak English as their first language, dispersed throughout the world as follows: United States 258 million (72%), United Kingdom 62 million (17%), Canada 32 million (9%), Australia 20 million (6%), New Zealand 3.8 million (1%). With the exception of the U.K., none of these countries are situated close to a region that has a significant Slavic speaking population and none of these countries have significant trade relations with such regions. Even though, since the 1950’s, all of these relatively prosperous nations have included foreign language instruction in their public school curricula, the focus has tended to be on the “commonly studied” languages of Spanish, French, German, Italian. Without wishing to start another raucous debate on the subject, I will offer my personal observation that, following several decades of effort and untold billions of dollars invested in these country’s educational systems, the results have been somewhat less than stellar! What makes anyone even think that the individual efforts of an infinitesimally small number of university students who choose to study a Slavic language in any of these countries would actually “move the meter” on the question of bilingual English-Slavic speakers?

Lingua Franca versus Category 4 Languages
English the most widely-spoken Lingua Franca presently used throughout the world. It is so irritatingly omnipresent that members of this forum frequently share their “strategies” for gaining the "local" populations’ cooperation in their attempts at practicing their hard-earned B1 foreign language skills. Yes, the most widely-spoken Slavic language, Russian, is also a lingua franca; however, its range of coverage is limited to the Slavic speaking regions and, for historical reasons, even many members of the former Soviet Union have turned away from learning this particular Lingua Franca. Given (1) the very limited institutional support in the English-speaking countries for the learning of Slavic languages, (2) the extremely limited practical opportunities for developing a high level of skill in speaking a Slavic language in these countries, (3) the level of difficulty associated with learning a Category 4 foreign language, (4) the limited rewards for acquiring such a skill, and (5) the fact that native English speakers already speak the most widely-spoken Lingua Franca presently used throughout the world, there is no incentive (beyond the notion of some level of personal achievement) that would generate a large number of bilingual English-Slavic speakers.

The Golden Rule (He Who Has the Gold, Makes the Rules)
I disagree with Cavesa’s assertion that the Slavic languages lack prestige. For many of the Germanic-and-Latinate-speaking peoples (sensitive, intelligent individuals), the Slavic languages represent an almost irresistible source of intellectual and cultural wealth. The question is not one of “prestige”, it is one of “economic clout.” The same holds true for Spanish; great language, great cultures, but not much clout. Finally, where I would most definitely not deny the vast cultural richness and attraction of the Chinese languages, what is “really” driving the sudden surge in desire to learn Mandarin? Prestige? Nope, remember the Gold Rule! Despite the limited opportunities for learning and practicing Mandarin in the English-speaking nations, we can all be sure that the number of bilingual English-Mandarin speakers will surpass that of English-Slavic speakers in no time at all. As soon as a Slavic language assumes the economic clout of China, its speakers will be able slack off. Until then, ...

That’s all I got to say about that – Forrest Gump

[Chung]

Hello everyone!

So I've been working in Warsaw, Poland for the past 2 of months, and lots of my students have cousins who grew up in Chicago, Germany, Canada etc. One comment I often get is that I speak better Polish than their cousins in the states. (I don't believe this to be true, since my level, according to a reputable Polish school's entrance exam, is "strong B1").

Regardless, I've heard soooo many stories of Polish people forgetting Polish. Let me give you some examples

#1) I know a girl my age, 24 years old, who moved from Poland to the US when she was 16. She has absolutely zero accent in English. (she was very self-conscious about her accent and went to speech therapy for years, and claims she only totally lost her accent ~2 years ago.) She talked to my girlfriend, who has never been outside of Poland for more than a month at time, and my girlfriend said her Polish was super American; Even I could hear her American accent. Supposedly it was not only her accent, but her grammar as well that was "messed up."

#2) A student of mine told the following story: Her cousin, who she's very close with, moved to Germany when she was in her 20's for 2 years and didn't talk with her family at all, she had supposedly got into trouble and had to leave Poland. When she came back 2 years later she had a very strong foreign accent, people in shops would even switch to talk with her in English. side note: lots of Poles in Warsaw are VERY enthusiastic about speaking English. If you give any hint of not being native they will try to speak English with you.

#3) My student's cousin moved to Canada when he was 7 years old, and he's now almost 40. His parents speak to him only in Polish. My student told me that this cousin cannot speak in Polish at all. He struggles to put together even the most basic sentences.

These are only 3 stories, but I think you guys got the idea. I've heard at least 5 more similar stories - Polish children moving abroad and loosing their ability to speak fluently, not to mention speak native-like.

I have heard similar stories with Russians also, except for those who grow up in an ethnic enclave, e.g. Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

Spanish speakers rarely have this problem. Not all of them are able to pass for a native, but I haven't met any who are unable to speak fluently. I also have Japanese and Chinese friends who are fluent, or (according to them,) perfectly bilingual in both languages, (the one's who are "equally fluent" in both languages attended Chinese/Japanese school on the weekends.)

Why is this? Is it a phonetic thing? Or is the grammar and structure so different, yet similar enough at the same time so as to cause interference. I know this is all anecdotal, but this really been piquing my curiosity.

What I'm curious about is whether or not this is "the norm" or if these stories are exceptions. Let me know what you guys think.

I pick up two senses in this thread.

1) Why is it so rare to be perfectly bilingual in English and a Slavic language?
2) Do native speakers of a Slavonic language lose knowledge of their native language faster than native speakers of other languages when everyone involved spends a long time in an environment where only a language other than the respective native one is used?

For 1) I think that it's rare to be perfectly bilingual or rather to be equally (and natively) skilled in any pair of languages. I see trouble with the adverb "perfectly" because then it suggests to me that someone knows these two languages so well that he/she is adept in using all registers, and attuned to the cultural references and nuances of both languages to the same natively high level. That's a rare bird. It's more likely to see "perfectly" bilingual people to be ever so slightly more comfortable in one language compared to another, but for most intents and purposes, and from the standpoint of outsiders, these people are perfectly bilingual. The only instances of where I've seen this virtual (or near-)perfection is in a couple of Fennoswedish friends. I wouldn't be surprised if their Swedish were very slightly better than their Finnish, though because of attending high school and university (both in Finland) where Swedish was the language of instruction. However Finnish and Swedish were the languages at home (one parent is a native speaker of Swedish, and the other is a native speaker of Finnish and fluent in Swedish as a second language), and they've lived in cities where Finnish was/is the native language of the majority. They've also worked in places where Finnish was/is the usual language of their customers and workplace.

See Is it possible to be fully bilingual? By “fully bilingual” I mean that a person can speak two languages with equal fluency. on Quora which is very similar to the thread's title, and has some interesting anecdotes. My comment above on (im)perfect bilingualism is exemplified by this excerpt from the thread in Quora, although it seems colored by the Vietnamese Finn's admission that she hadn't learned formal (standard?) Vietnamese.

[...] Even though a person is fully bilingual in two languages, he/she may not have the same competency in their different registers. A Vietnamese Finn told that she spoke both Finnish and Vietnamese as the native level but couldn't understand much of Vietnamese TV news because she hadn't learned formal Vietnamese.

For 2), I find it weird for anyone's knowledge of his/her native language to be so strongly affected in just a few years of being removed from the native-speaking environment (especially if he/she has moved away no earlier than late adolescence). I've met a few immigrants from Eastern Europe now in their 30s and 40s who've crossed the pond over the past ten years, and they still speak their native languages just fine to my ears (and their English is very good, but accented, and every now and then, some bit of slang, phrasal verb or conjugation will trip 'em up in a way that a native speaker like me wouldn't experience). I've run into spelling mistakes, and some oddities in their use of the native language that differ from what I've learned from textbooks (e.g. it's always a little funny when I see them capitalize always the first letter of the days of the week like we do in English because this convention is not followed in Slavonic languages or Hungarian, among others), but it's not as if after 5-10 years these Slavs and Hungarians now speak their native tongues with strong-ass English accents or code-switch often because their active native vocabulary has shrunk drastically, let alone lose the ability altogether in their mother tongue. It's a little bit like how you observe that many native speakers of Spanish after many years in the USA are still fluent in Spanish, if not always quite native-sounding.

[galaxyrocker]

Spanish speakers rarely have this problem. Not all of them are able to pass for a native, but I haven't met any who are unable to speak fluently. I also have Japanese and Chinese friends who are fluent, or (according to them,) perfectly bilingual in both languages, (the one's who are "equally fluent" in both languages attended Chinese/Japanese school on the weekends.)

I think you touch on the answer here -- it's all about exposure and community. And it's more than just hearing the language; they also have to use it, which is why the one person whose parents speak to him in Polish can't respond himself; passive speakers are fairly common (at least from anecdotes I've heard) among immigrant communities. The issue with Spanish is that, at least in the area in the US where I'm at, they tend to stick together. They live together and commute to work together. They raise their kids together, eat together, party together, etc. This leads to the kids having a need to speak Spanish (or, actually, Chuj Mayan in the case here; most of them are from Guatemala and actually speak Spanish as an L2 and English as an L3) with each other, thus allowing them to get a good ability in the language. Add to this the fact that they speak English while in school, and you end up with bilingual kids.

And, as you mentioned, those who are " equally fluent" in Chinese/Japanese went to schools on the weekend. Where they're forced to speak in the language, and use the languages, so they actually learn to use them, and don't just acquire passive understanding. I wonder if the Slavic languages just don't have the community where the speakers would be able to use the language a lot (and that means more than just reading/listening, they'd actually need to speak too), and that might make the difference.

But, that said, I know a kid who I was in Uni with who was fluent in Polish and had a perfectly natural English accent. His parents were both Polish and that's all they spoke to him in. They also made him reply back in Polish, and, from what I remember, they went to Polish Mass, so he was exposed to other people speaking Polish and had people to use Polish with and who he associated the language being used with. Same with a friend who speaks Maltese, though not to the same extent as it was mostly with his family and a few other Maltese people he met. So his is weaker than the guy with Polish, and, unlike the guy who speaks Polish, his brothers don't understand Maltese, despite parents and my friend speaking it; they just didn't have the community and such to develop the use of it.

In my personal case, I notice it with my Irish every time I come back from Ireland. Regardless of how much I read/listen in Irish (which, admittedly, hasn't been a lot recently), if I don't regularly practice using it (actively) my ability degrades, though I pick it back up decently quick once I get into the swing of it again.

Plus, there's also what Cavesa said about prestige coming into it as well, though I think that's lesser to the community aspect of it.

[aokoye]

These are only 3 stories, but I think you guys got the idea. I've heard at least 5 more similar stories - Polish children moving abroad and loosing their ability to speak fluently, not to mention speak native-like.

I have heard similar stories with Russians also, except for those who grow up in an ethnic enclave, e.g. Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

Spanish speakers rarely have this problem. Not all of them are able to pass for a native, but I haven't met any who are unable to speak fluently. I also have Japanese and Chinese friends who are fluent, or (according to them,) perfectly bilingual in both languages, (the one's who are "equally fluent" in both languages attended Chinese/Japanese school on the weekends.)

That is really really not true, like not at all true. There are also a few things going on here. There's no such thing as "perfectly bilingual". There will always be domains where a multilingual person is more comfortable in one language than another.

In terms of Spanish speakers, in the US there's only an assumed idea that Spanish L1 speakers learn English slower or not at all compared their L2 speaking peers. This is the case because there is a continued flow of Spanish speaking immigrants. Even then, children with Spanish as an L2 who grow up in Spanish speaking enclaves (for lack of a better word) in the US still lose at least some of their Spanish unless it's being used a lot in educational contexts (so in additive bilingual programs). How quickly they lose it depends on a lot of things (ie. not just birth order).

In the US, the populations that tend to speak English at lower proficiencies are not those who are coming from Mexico and South America, but countries like Laos and Cambodia. Even then, if they are children, they will end up with subtractive bilingualism (which is basically true of children of every immigrant group who are going to school on a regular basis with rare exceptions - see above).

Children with Chinese as an L1 often get sent to Chinese Saturday schools (in the same way that Jewish kids with observant parents often get to Sunday school except language isn't as big of a component of most Jewish Sunday schools as it is in Chinese Saturday schools). If you want to find language groups in the US that uniformly speak English at a lower proficiency than their L1 it's the Amish (and other Pennsylvania Dutch speaking groups) and Haredi and Hassidic Jews (living in insular communities). The reasons for that have everything to do with a religious decision not to assimilate into wider cultures within the US (which is not a judgment).

I will also note that when we talk about things like language proficiency and statistics we have to wonder what in the world this idea of proficiency is based on. What are they testing? Who are they testing? What is the format of the test?