I’m just reading a novel where the main protagonist is supposedly fluent in Chinese, Russian, Franch, English and Japanese, to the extent that he can pass himself off as a native in any of those countries. Now I lived in Germany for 6 years and with a German wife and a TV permenantly tuned to German TV I would consider myself reasonably competent in the language. But I can gaurentee that 2 sentances into a conversation with a German they would know I wasn’t a native. Whilst my accent is pretty good, my grammar is appaling!

I have French friends who have lived in the UK for 60 years whose grammar is perfect, but even now you know as soon as they speak that they are French not English!

So would anyone consider themselves to be truly bi- (or even multi-)lingual? Could you pass yourselves off as a native in more than one country?

My nephews are completely bilingual in english and dutch. They could certainly pass for UK natives

@Edukator must be?

To be bilingual and be able to pass as native you probably need to start speaking the language as a young child hence why my 10 year old sounds as Scottish as anyone else in his class despite Polish being his first language and not speaking English until he was 3 whereas his mum who only started speaking English in her 20s will likely always speak English with a Polish accent but her Russian which she started speaking as a child probably sounds more native (although I can’t tell as I don’t speak Russian)

Chinese, Russian, Franch, English and Japanese, to the extent that he can pass himself off as a native in any of those countries

Its possibly not just the language which needs questioned, there’s a few visual differences too

Be great for a start if you could spell things properly in your first language 😉

[strong]andrewh[/strong] wrote:

Its possibly not just the language which needs questioned, there’s a few visual differences too

haha,good point well made. Maybe not a native in that case, but more as a citizen of those countries perhaps.

[strong]johndoh[/strong] wrote:

Be great for a start if you could spell things properly in your first language

As I hinted, linguitics have never been my stong point. Hence I have the greatest respect (and not a little envy) of people for whom langauges seem to come easily.

My German friend often corrects my English spelling! He is properly bilingual though, does book translations and things. To listen to him you really wouldn’t know he was German, he speaks English with a strong Irish accent! His children are both bilingual and his dog appears to understand both too

I am proficient in English and always assumed that I was equally as adept when speaking Woman. I was able to communicate well enough in Woman to get ladies to undress and do those things without any issue. Thirty years on I realise that my understanding of Woman was fairly basic and my assumed proficiency was related more to the people I was speaking Woman to; I believe I was fooled into thinking I was fluent by people who took pity on me.

Pass yourself off as native in another country? Very rare, surely. Fluent, bilingual and (near) native are all very different things.

My 7yo is properly trilingual but when he speaks to his UK family they say he has an accent. English is or was his first language but you wouldn’t say he sounded native. He’s got my weird accent on some words (sku-wel for school, poo-eh for poor) and a youtuber US accent on others… He will also ham up a foreign English accent in front of his mates in the school play or whatever, so as not to stand out.

I’d consider myself bilingual from various cues – I dream in both languages, often speak the ” wrong” one, when recalling news or whatever I don’t remember what language I heard/read it in. Natives say I have the regional accent of where I live but no-one would mistake me as native. The very best non-native speakers I know will still drop lexical or pronunciation bollocks from time to time, and it’s not the same as when a native speaker does it.

My two kids are – Swedish and English. Wife is trilingual: Swedish, Polish and English. Also, her French is good but she’s not fluent.

People often think i am british even when they know i also speak Danish.

I know a few people who grew up in Welsh-speaking households who sound perfectly normal when speaking English, some Polish people who sound English and one individual who works in the translator industry who is regularly mistaken for being either French, Spanish, Italian or English depending upon which country she is in.

The last one says she has to downplay her linguistic skills sometimes as her clients (big business types and dignitaries occasionally) have been known to distrust someone who can switch between languages and dialects too easily. She is incredibly intelligent and gifted though, mainly due to her parents being highly intelligent and them moving round Europe when she was little. I feel completely inadequate when around her as I can barely speak English let alone another language! She did try teaching me French when I was in college with her but my brain just isn’t wired that way. She can switch language every sentence, especially when drunk, and regularly does so to wind her husband up. Her daughter is multilingual too, being proficient in multiple languages at age four!

Depends what you mean by passing as a native. I speak English real good but I’d never pass as a native cockney, yorkshire person or geordie.
Just like my french might be grammatical as good as a parisian but my accent and idioms would get me found out in Quebec, northern france, any of the franch speaking african countries etc.

Glaswegian and English

I speak English and Spanish. My accent is mostly Castillian Spanish, as that’s where I’ve lived longest, esp. right as I was becoming really fluent. Generally people can tell I’m a non-native speaker within a few sentences, but a couple of times I’ve gotten away a bit longer/asked if I’m Spanish. It’s always been when talking to someone from a place with a very different accent. So I think my best hope of passing for more than 3 minutes would be to really study up on my vocab while doubling down on the Spanishness, then go somewhere with a completely different accent with relatively little back and forth with Spain. I’m thinking the Dominican Republic. I’d be found out in the 4th minute though when it became obvious that I had no idea what the heck they were saying back back to me.

So would anyone consider themselves to be truly bi- (or even multi-)lingual? Could you pass yourselves off as a native in more than one country?

This pretty much only happens for young children. When you are young, you have very high neural plasticity. As you get older, this decreases and it becomes increasingly difficult to acquire new skills. The movie thing where someone takes a six month language course and then runs around chatting away in casual conversation is utter bollocks. Many adults do become quite proficient, but they never have the intuitive grasp of what is natural that children acquire, and it’s very difficult to acquire natural pronunciation as an adult. Henry Kissenger and Arnold the Terminator are good examples of highly proficient adults with distinctive accents.

I know two Germans who I (normally) can’t tell are not native English speakers. That said, both of them studied in the UK for university and both say that they are far more proficient talking about certain subjects in English. This really surprises me, given that they both spent their formative years only (to my knowledge) speaking German. (Two unrelated people by the way, just coincidence that they’re both German.)

One of my best mates is French, lived in the UK 20+ years and is absolutely fluent. However, the minute he opens his mouth you know he’s not a native although curiously lots of people think he has a speech impediment rather than being non-native!

I’ve also known a few Swedes who spoke English with a Yorkshire accent.

Maybe it’s easier for Germanic rather than Romance language speakers to sound native in English and vice versa?

I know two Germans who I (normally) can’t tell are not native English speakers.

Keep in mind that German and English are fairly closely related languages and there is a lot of shared cultural heritage too, so the sociolinguistic aspect is also relatively easy. When you have languages like Chinese, which has a totally different phonological system, totally different grammatical system, totally different orthographic system, different sociolinguistics, etc., it’s very unlikely that an adult will ever be able to sound natural to native speakers.

both say that they are far more proficient talking about certain subjects in English.

This could because of the way German tends towards cumbersome compound words.

My other half is German but without knowing you’d think she was British.

Learnt 3 languages as a child. Will correct my grammar. Not annoying in the slightest.

I think the accent thing is like a musical ear. I have a friend who is good with languages but his accent when speaking English is obvious. Others only speak 2 languages but have picked up agents really well.

A Norwegian friend of mine is absolutely fluent in Norwegian, Swedish and English – although the English has a slight accent, most people would guess it was just from a different part of the UK.

Her Spanish and French are both passable. Conversational but obviously a non-native speaker.

Is fairly well known for Scandinavians to be at least trilingual. Maybe not to native standards but certainly fluent.

I am. Italian and English. Can pass for Italian native every time, many a pint (media) won in Italian bars from people who didn’t believe I was English, luckily the Italians make you carry your passport at all times!

Back home in the uk it’s great to sit in restaurants with my Italian girlfriend and have conversations in Italian, we can talk about stuff as if we were in private and even comment on other people 😈 I’m sure we’ll get caught out one day but hasn’t happened yet! It’s also funny to see people’s faces when I switch to perfect English

I lived there for 12 years but the interesting thing is that my younger brother who spent a couple years less but moved there at 5 years old speaks terrible Italian with a bad accent

My Italian stepdad who has been in the uk for 40 years on the other hand speaks appalling English. But he’s a dick so maybe that explains that

My friend is truly bilingual, his parents fled from Hungary for political reasons and he was the first of their children to be born in the UK. When he started school at 4 he was sent home and told to come back when he could speak English….
Needless to say he can and does switch between languages mid sentence and you would probably think he was from London with his accent even though he grew up in Derby.

I agree that speaking another language from early childhood is really the only way to sound truly native but there will always be exceptionally gifted individuals who manage the impossible.

I wish I had tried harder at school when studying languages 🙁

All my kids are bilingual (German and English). Three of them are also proficient in a third language, either French or Spanish. If I really try I can pass myself off for a German native speaker but it feels to me more like impersonation so I don’t like doing it. It’s also strange that often I have problems retelling a story in English that I have told before in German.

My father and brother in law are both fluent in Urdu as well as English.

Dad passes as the white missionary guy, BiL is Indian heritage.

As a child I too spoke Urdu most of the day with friends. I was in India until I was 7 – I can’t speak any now now, but can still pick out words in conversation.

Its all about practice for natives too. I have a work colleague who’s French but has lived int he UK for about 20 years and as such doesn’t get to speak French much. When he’s presenting to a French audience he gets more stressed out about his French than what he’s presenting as he’s ‘rusty’ and has to remind himself how to speak it. Similar thing with my brothers Russian wife.

Also it was interesting to observe once another work colleague who is French Canadian who translated a presentation I did into French. A French intern looked over it and though I’d attempted to translate it as it was such a crap translation. Not sure if that is because French Canadians generally speak crap French or she too was just a bit rusty after living in the UK for so long.

So quite interesting to observe these things. I can’t imaging living in a different country and speaking their language for so long that my English would become rusty and the other language would become dominiant, but I guess it would be bound to happen. Interestingly my French college says he now thinks in English.

I could hardly speak English until I went to Secondary school. Born in Bangor and raised in Snowdonia. I lived 3 years in Portugal and am now in Austria since 2016.
I made it a priority to learn the language. It makes it so much easier to integrate into the society and culture where you decide to live. I do sound foreign though.
Maybe some incomers from over Offas Dyke should do the same.

Nope. Three years in and, whilst I can understand a normal conversation in Swedish, I run out of words far too easily and quickly to talk it fluently.

I also have a huge problem pronouncing the R sound properly. I think, even if I was fluent in grammar and words (and could get the en/ett thing worked out), my lack of rolled R would identify me as a non-native.

I know two people that are fluent and have the hairstyles to pass as Stockholm natives, but even I can identify they are British by the way they speak Swedish.

I also have a huge problem pronouncing the R sound properly. I think, even if I was fluent in grammar and words (and could get the en/ett thing worked out), my lack of rolled R would identify me as a non-native.

Yeah the rolled r kept me from sounding native even a couple of years after fully learning the language

After a while it just clicked without me noticing though, all of a sudden I noticed I was doing it right!

Just ask a french person to say ‘Hospital’, the H normally gives them away as non native – my French teacher can’t say it properly. Mind you, most of my French sounds appalling…

Squirrel is a good test word for Germans and Scandinavians.

My brother has lived in Paris now for 25 years, and is perfectly fluent (he’s a M&A Lawyer in a foreign language so no slouch). But Parisians all think he’s Belgian and his two sons (born and raised bilingually) still laugh at his accent.

I’m ‘properly’ bilingual in Latvian and Russian and some-sort-of-lingual in English and German. Properly in this case meaning being able to converse freely with native speakers without being asked ‘so, where are you from’ for a while. I could probably maintain a passable impression of a native English speaker virtually for a while, however as soon as I open my mouth I turn into Borat, there’s just no getting around it. Yes, I could spend a lot of time learning to imitate RP but honestly, what’s the bloody point when I walk into a Polish store and even with half of my face being obstructed by a mask they immediately start speaking Polish to me. Why go through all that trouble when I’ll always be a foreigner, no matter how long I spend here?

I can pass for a native Russian anywhere in that massive country (again – only for a while), but speaking without a discernible accent is only a part of that. The other half of the equation is having a shared cultural heritage of growing up as a kid in Soviet Union. You absolutely need both to have any hope of blending in for longer than a couple of pints.

To address the original post: blend in as a native in all 5 cultures? No chance on Earth, just not happening. Up to three different languages and cultures: yes, with some caveats. Of course you can have long conversations about various subjects in more than two languages fluently but that’s not all it takes to be able to blend in for longer than a passing interaction. Idioms, humour, movies/tv shows, social norms: hundreds of things you do subconsciously as a native of a certain region will be picked up by a keen observer quickly and you can’t possibly master all of that in a single lifetime.

I’ve said this before, and disagreed with Edukator on the topic, but most French people can’t tell where I’m from. They can pick up on an accent on some specific words but usually struggle to place it. I guess I am “properly” bilingual. Studied French at University in the UK then did a degree in French literature at Grenoble, with future French teachers (it’s the usual job prospect for anyone studying Lettres Modernes). I agree with comments above that it’s a little like a musical ear in terms of being able to reproduce sounds which are not present in your native language (the difference between “u” and “ou” in French is a good one). I’m quite good at it and though I lack grammar in other languages that I speak a bit, I struggle less with getting the accent right.

I had a former colleague who was fluent in seven or so languages and could pass of as native in at least 3 or 4 (he’s Swiss to start with….) It’s rare but by no means impossible.

Bilingual means fluent in two languages. So yes I am bilingual.

I am not however ‘simultaneous bilingual’ which is having 2 native languages from birth (or very shortly after), which is what a lot of you are mentioning.

But Parisians all think he’s Belgian

I used to able to speak French reasonably well, but without the practice it’s amazing how soon you loose it. Anyway, a guy I used to chat to in a bar thought I was Parisian manly because he thought I was taciturn (just reluctant to open my gob and make a tit of myself)