I don't think anyone who has posted would disagree Ed. By your definition I would be bilingual and my wife 100% is. The book I have been reading that prompted this discussion has someone who is very deep undercover in a country not of his birth or upbringing passing himself off as a native. To come under suspicion that he is not a native would result in his capture/death. It is that kind of book. It simply got me wondering just how difficult this would be to pull off and whether anyone here is, or indeed know people who might be able to do such a thing, i.e., pass yourself off as a native in more than one country. I guess language is just the most obvious aspect of it, and the one you absolutely have to nail in the first instance to pass muster. The more subtle things like cultural values and stuff might just be possible to blag your way around.
I’ve also known a few Swedes who spoke English with a Yorkshire accent.
Accents are funny things. Here in East Lancashire there's an above average population of people of Asian descent. The ones of my generation and younger have evolved a sort of hybrid accent which is half ****stani and half Northern England.
I never really gave it a great deal of thought until I was dating a lass from South Wales (near Bridgend). Down there it's almost 100% white, the only brown face I ever saw was living the stereotype in a corner shop. After 30 years of conditioning I had a proper cognitive dissonance moment when he opened his mouth, he had one of the thickest Valleys accents I've ever heard.
Just ask a french person to say ‘Hospital’, the H normally gives them away as non native
Squirrel is a good test word for Germans and Scandinavians.
The word you're looking for here is "shibboleth."
I wish I had tried harder at school when studying languages
I think teaching of modern languages would be better taught by spending 3 years in secondary school teaching pupils about language structure so that the differences and similarities between all languages start to make sense.
Agreed on both points.
In French at school, the teacher explained verb forms as being Past Imperfect and so forth. It was years later - like, literally just a couple of years ago - that I suddenly realised that words like Pluperfect aren't inherent to French but describe language generally including English. Then it hit me, he'd assumed that we knew what these terms meant from English lessons but we were never taught them so we didn't have a bloody clue what he was on about. It was just another thing to have to learn in the midst of trying to learn a foreign language that none of us had ever seen or heard beyond "ecoutez, et repetez!" (Apologies if I've got the tenses wrong there, blame Mr Haydock.)
And the irony in all that? For at least one year, our English teacher was his wife.
Ok, so re-reading my comment - 'full understanding of all the slang, cultural references, humour and all those other nuances, and the ability to manipulate them' should have been caveated with the words 'that a native speaker of your age / educational background / social demographic might reasonably be expected to understand'.
The bar is high for bilingualism; but my point is that it's not just about getting the words and grammar correct, it's the cultural understanding as well. But of course it's not binary, it's not like you either are or are not bilingual; rather it's a sliding scale.
You make a good point in your first post though:
Bilingual is just being totally fluent in two languages as someone else noted above. No need to even think about about it, once in context the brain operates in the appropriate language and it can be quite hard to even find words in the other which is the very specific exercise of simultaneous translation.
Being able to naturally switch from one language to another with ease, being able to think in that language and not just figure out what you want to say in English then translating it in your head, that's bilingualism. I remember one of my former teachers saying that when you start dreaming in the target language, that's when you know you're getting there!
The word you’re looking for here is “shibboleth.”
Nope, not looking for it. Perfectly aware of the definition, but 99.9% of people will understand 'test word' not so much shibboleth
I think teaching of modern languages would be better taught by spending 3 years in secondary school teaching pupils about language structure so that the differences and similarities between all languages start to make sense.
100%. Understanding the correct syntax and grammar of your own language first makes the whole process so much easier, otherwise you just transpose an error from your native tongue to the other language. For example, Brits are terrible for putting prepositions at the end of sentences; however, if you learn where they should go in English, then understanding where they should go in French / Spanish becomes so much easier.
Another example: I spent 4 months in Pokhara learning Nepali full time. The syntax and grammar is obviously different to English but the concepts are the same. As someone with a languages background it was relatively straight forward to get my head around, but for the the others on the course it was hell. However, when I started to explain what all the terminology meant in English and more importantly why it is so, then everyone found it easier.
When I explained he hadn’t ‘gone to the UK’ but was from the UK they were blown away. For years they thought he was a fellow Russian national.
Uh oh...you do realise you just blew his cover story don’t you? Have you heard from recently? If not, he’s probably in a Russian jail somewhere!!
I suddenly realised that words like Pluperfect aren’t inherent to French but describe language generally including English.
Yes, when considering the French subjunctive it occurred to me to Google about the English subjunctive, which was interesting. Sort of.
Brits are terrible for putting prepositions at the end of sentences; however, if you learn where they should go in English, then understanding where they should go in French / Spanish becomes so much easier.
Brits put prepositions at the end of sentences as that's one of the places they can go. It's not French or Spanish, and has different rules.
You are correct that prepositions can go at the end of a sentence but it is generally considered to be less formal and less grammatically correct. My point is that a lot of people get thrown if you ask them to put the preposition in the grammatically correct place in an English sentence; however, if you understand how it works in English, you are better placed to understand how it works in another language. And of course, English is not French or Spanish (germanic vs romance for a start) but centuries of shared history means that there are plenty of commonalities between them.
Decades ago I bumped into a guy at a party - very neutral RP accent, jumper and tweed outfit - who had been to interview for a low level clerical post in the civil service.
Upon seeing his CV they got very excited and started asking him more technical questions (I can't remember what his specialty was exactly but say something like the mathematics underpinning encryption - the party host was a maths professor).
Eventually he politely asked why, and they said, oh you'd be ideal for such-and-such a post!
Him: you do realize I'm Iranian
Fx: record scratch
He was obvs well aware that he wouldn't meet the security requirements for the job that he would, indeed, have been excellent at, but was fine for a bit of no-clearance-needed paper pushing...
Coming back to the premise for Welshfarmer's book. History is full of fails that show how hard it is melt into a community. Without the complicity of the community it's likely to end in tears. In the débâcle of 1940 many people from the north fled south and west to what became Vichy France. You'd think it would have been easy become someone else and fit in with so mmany displaced people around. In reality the jews were soon identified, stripped of nationality and thrown in camps before deportation to death camps. There's a plaque to them in the local park. And it wasn't as if they were lacking in language skills.
Those that survived benefitted from complicity of communities prepared to take huge risks to keep them hidden/under cover.
I know that often, passing exams just means you're able to do exams... but if you are actually bilingual you should be able to pass C2 in your L2, IMO. At least, after doing a couple of practice tests. Ironically you may not pass C2 in your L1, but that's not what it's for.
http://www.delfdalf.fr/dalf-c2-sample-papers.html
Talking about Jodie Foste's French , Sandra Bullock's German is also excellent. Not a hint of an American accent.
Sandra Bullock's German should perhaps be better for a German. That's a well prepared winner's speech, but she's not so at ease in this one:
I've been in Augsburg in Germany for 17 years and learned German here. There is a significant difference between being bi-lingual and passing off as a local. Regarding being bi-lingual my German wife occasionally grammatically corrects my spoken German but always corrects my local dialect when I come home from the pub after watching football. She does NOT want me speaking the same as those guys.
Funnily though, because I speak German with a Yorkshire accent and Augsburg dialect, I am frequently asked if I am Dutch. This is mainly because people I meet are amazed that a Brit has taken the effort to learn a second language.
99.9% of people will understand ‘test word’ not so much shibboleth
But on a thread discussing language (if nowhere else) is it not better to use the appropriate word and maybe along the way improve the linguistic scope of people who might not have come across that word before, rather than resorting to "man speak words, people know words, words good"?
People often think I’m Dutch when I speak German or sometimes American which to me is bizarre as Americans sound totally different when they speak German compared to Brits but many Germans can’t tell the difference.
@Edukator I think in that second Sandra Bullock clip she changes to English to make the Interviewer uncomfortable as she didn’t like the tone of his questioning rather than having trouble expressing herself in German.
The only time I have ever been fooled by a non native English speaker was when I visited an old German friend of mine quite a few years ago in London and she had other visitors and the conversation was all in English. One of the girls there sounded like a typical London girl until she spoke to my friend in German and it was clear that she was actually Austrian!
closest I got during my French degree during my year in France was someone saying I had a bit of an accent and what part of France was I from
I am bilingual and got rid of my accent. I could probably pass off as a native unless topics like “what school did you go to” or “What was your favourite Tv show when you were a kid” came up There’s things such as not growing up in the UK that are very hard to compensate for. However my case is rare, usually bilingual people are fluent in the language, but still have an accent; unless you are Dutch, somehow they can pick it up easily with barely having lived in the country.
What made you want to get rid of your accent Baboonz? When I lived in the uk I had friends and colleagues from all over the world and I liked their respective accents, it was part of them. Wouldn’t have wanted them speaking RP 😂
It saddens me when someone from, say, catalunya comments on my heavy Basque accent. I preferred when I spoke Spanish like Officer Crabtree. Or when Toshack was manager of Real Sociedad - he’d give post-match interviews in good Spanish with a Welsh accent, and directly translate English idioms which made zero sense in Spanish - the locals loved it!
Question:
Why is the only choice for English as a non-native speaker deemed to be either their own home accent or RP? RP is pretty much dead outside of the Royals and the Rees-Mogg family, but there's plenty of people who have a fairly nondescript 'English' accent which isn't RP. BBC national News is full of them.
A lot of it was unconscious, you could say I immersed myself in the "British experience", and I probably lost it, rather than got rid of it. I also think it makes your life easier, when people can't tell you are a foreigner.
I guess you never met Polish immigrants with a Scouse accent? RP (I guess you mean generic english?) is very much alive in the "middle England", my partner has the generic English accent, hence mine is also generic English; however, when I lived up North, to southerners I sounded northern. Also, its not like your accent never changes.
Edit: I don't watch BBC news much but I would guess that its full of people that have regional accents which have been deliberately toned down.
RP is pretty much dead outside of the Royals and the Rees-Mogg family,
The royals don't speak RP. Think Valery Singleton, the best example of RP to come to mind.
Both the Queen and Rees-Mogg use constructions that are too far from standard English to be considered received pronunciation.
I used to work with an American who had a French wife. He was bilingual with a stereotypical New York accent - think Woody Allen speaking French.
The royals don’t speak RP
Posh, or at very least pompously plonking, carries across most languages though? I remember being surprised when a turkish friend who'd just started speaking english (friend's boyfriend, we'd been communicating mainly in french) was able to put on a posh english accent in telling a joke. Apparently just the tone he used for directing taxi drivers in turkish. Even I can recognise posh french, or think I can (basically when I can understand 50% of the words. Unlike when watching spiral/engrenages). I really should study some linguistics as i find this stuff quite interesting.
One of the things that a search for prefection kills is the fun and playful use of language. I'm not a diplomat representing a country and even if I were I'd still want to appear human with a bit of character. Maintaining a trace of other parts of your life makes you a more attractive person socially.
My Spanish is properly shit, I worked in Cataluña for a year which didn't help. I spend a few weeks in real Spain each year, usually the north west, and even if you're making a complete mess of it people appreciate your efforts and warm to you.
Anyhow here I am struggling in Spanish:
Derission welcome 🙂
Squirrel is a good test word for Germans and Scandinavians.
I heard that some Americans attempted to teach a Chinese friend of mine to say Squirrel. What chance did she stand, they can't say it themselves?
After living 20 years in the UK, I can call myself bilingual in French and English, but my southern France accent is still strong.
We are back living in France and my 12 year old daughter, can speak and write both perfectly. Last year her French teacher at school could not believe she only moved to France 3 years earlier. The only thing she struggles with at school is writing with letters attached.
My American wife says 'squirl', she insists it only has one syllable.
Re 'Allo 'Allo, I have seen it dubbed into French. It actually works much better because the undercover gendarme actually speaks mangled French as the character is supposed to - and the airmen weren't dubbed at all!
writing with letters attached
I'm going to leave that 🙂
Americans attempted to teach a Chinese friend of mine to say Squirrel
They say it better especially in the south: "squrrrrl"; just like in Nooo Yoik they say coffee better: "kwaurfee" than we do here.
