Why Can I Read Spanish but Not Speak It
The Small Island Where 500 People Speak Nine Unlike Languages
Its inhabitants can understand each other thanks to a peculiar linguistic phenomenon.
On South Goulburn Isle, a minor, forested isle off Australia'south northern declension, a settlement called Warruwi Community consists of some 500 people who speak amid themselves around nine unlike languages. This is one of the last places in Australia—and probably the earth—where and then many indigenous languages be together. In that location's the Mawng language, simply also 1 called Bininj Kunwok and some other called Yolngu-Matha, and Burarra, Ndjébbana and Na-kara, Kunbarlang, Iwaidja, Torres Strait Creole, and English.
None of these languages, except English, is spoken by more than a few thousand people. Several, such as Ndjébbana and Mawng, are spoken by groups numbering in the hundreds. For all these individuals to understand i another, i might wait South Goulburn to be an island of polyglots, or a identify where residents take hashed out a pidgin to share, like a sort of linguistic stone soup. Rather, they just talk to 1 some other in their ain language or languages, which they can do considering anybody else understands some or all of the languages but doesn't speak them.
This arrangement, which linguists call "receptive multilingualism," shows up all around the world. In some places, information technology'southward adventitious. Many English-speaking Anglos who live in U.S. border states, for instance, can read and encompass quite a chip of Spanish from being exposed to it. And endless immigrant children learn to speak the language of their host country while retaining the ability to understand their parents' languages. In other places, receptive multilingualism is a work-effectually for temporary situations. Merely at Warruwi Customs, it plays a special part.
Ruth Singer, a linguist at the Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity Project of the Australian National University, realized this by chance, and wrote about receptive multilingualism at Warruwi Community recently in the periodical Language and Communication. In 2006, for one of her trips for fieldwork on South Goulburn, Vocalist and her husband had a Toyota truck shipped from Darwin by boat. Though the island'due south non very large, there aren't many cars, so having 1 is a social lubricant. Singer and her husband became friends with a local married couple, Nancy Ngalmindjalmag and Richard Dhangalangal, who had a boat and trailer merely no car, and the two couples ended up going fishing and hunting, and earthworks up turtle eggs on the beach. That'southward when Singer noticed that Nancy always spoke to Richard in Mawng, only Richard always replied in Yolngu-Matha, even though Nancy also spoke fluent Yolngu-Matha.
"One time I started to work on multilingualism and tuned my ear into how people were using unlike languages," Vocalist wrote in an email, "I began to hear receptive-multilingualism conversations all over Warruwi, like between 2 men working on fixing a fence, or between two people at the shop."
At that place are a variety of explanations for this, Singer says. In the case of her married friends, Richard didn't speak Mawng, because he wasn't originally from Warruwi Community. If he did and so, information technology might be perceived as a challenge to rules that exclude outsiders from claiming certain rights. Too, Yolngu-Matha has more speakers, and those speakers tend to be less multilingual than speakers of smaller languages.
More broadly, people at Warruwi Community avoid only switching to a shared linguistic communication because there are social and personal costs of doing so. Some families insist that their children speak just their language, usually their father's. Languages are associated with particular pieces of country or territory on the isle, and clans claim ownership of that state, so languages are as well considered to be endemic by clans. I can only speak the languages one has a right to speak—and breaking this brake tin be seen equally a sign of hostility.
Nonetheless, neither restriction applies to understanding a language—or as Nancy put it in an interview with Vocalizer, to "hearing" it. Singer suspects that receptive multilingualism in Australia has been effectually for a long fourth dimension. The miracle was noted by some of the primeval European settlers on late 18th-century expeditions into the Australian interior. "Although our natives and the strangers conversed on a par, and understood each other perfectly, all the same they spoke different dialects of the same language," one settler wrote in a periodical.
While Australia isn't the only place in the world where receptive multilingualism happens, ane thing that makes it dissimilar in Warruwi is that those receptive skills have a status as existent proficiencies. Where the academic foreign-language field tends to see such skills as language one-half-learned, as an incomplete—or even worse, failed—acquisition, at Warruwi a person can merits receptive skills in a language equally part of their repertoire. The Anglos in Texas aren't probable to put "understands Castilian" on a task résumé, while the immigrant children might be embarrassed that they tin't speak their parents' languages. Another difference is that people at Warruwi Community don't run into receptive skills as a path to spoken abilities. Vocaliser'due south friend Richard Dhangalangal, for example, has lived most of his life with speakers of Mawng, which he understands very well, merely no one expects him to start speaking information technology.
Receptive multilingualism has been institutionalized in some places. In Switzerland, a country with four official languages (from 2 different language families), receptive multilingualism has been built into the educational system, such that children learn a local language, a second national language, and English from an early age. In principle, this should allow everyone to understand everyone else. But a 2009 written report showed considerable monolingualism amongst Swiss citizens; Italian speakers tended to be the most multilingual and French speakers the least. Moreover, each grouping of speakers possessed strong negative attitudes most the others. Just as in Warruwi Customs, social factors and ideas almost language shape the life of many languages in places like Switzerland.
But even someone in Switzerland might consider the status of understanding-without-speaking in Australia to exist no large deal, given that many people in Europe tend to have related languages in their repertoire (think Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages). This allows them to draw on cognate vocabulary and grammatical structures for passive understanding. The languages from Warruwi Customs, by contrast, come from six different language families and aren't mutually intelligible, so those clusters of receptive skills amount to something quite sophisticated. Not enough is known about receptive multilingualism to know how many languages someone could understand only not speak.
Whether in Switzerland or at Warruwi Community, one advantage of receptive multilingualism is that people can express who they are and where they're from without forcing other people to be that thing, too. According to Vocaliser, this creates social stability at Warruwi Community, considering all the groups feel comfortable and confident with their identities. "The social and linguistic diversity at Warruwi is seen every bit essential to social harmony rather than as a barrier, underscoring the need for people to assert diverse identities instead of everyone identifying as the same," she writes. "When in that location's no larger hierarchical social structure such equally chiefdom, kingdom, or nation, maintaining the peace is no easy thing."
One selection for keeping the linguistic peace in other parts of the earth is for everyone to opt into speaking a language they all share, possibly fifty-fifty a lingua franca. This is called "accommodation," which at its core is nigh reducing differences amongst people. Just in some places in the earth, accommodation is dis-preferred, even unthinkable. In the case of Warruwi Customs, Vocalizer notes that people who pale a claim to the community (and past extension its linguistic communication) would exist unwilling to speak some other language.
And that'southward one lesson to exist learned from receptive multilingualism at Warruwi Community: Small ethnic groups are surprisingly circuitous, socially and linguistically, and receptive multilingualism is both engine and consequence of that complexity. It may too be a central to ensuring the future of pocket-size languages as the population of speakers dwindles if more was understood about how to turn receptive abilities in a language into being able to speak it. "If nosotros understood receptive abilities meliorate, we could design language didactics for these people," Singer says, "which would make information technology easier for people who only understand their heritage language to outset to speak information technology later on in life."
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/11/receptive-multilingualism-small-languages/576649/
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