MP-Lingualism - It's not what you think.

[Trond Trosterud]

28.10.2004 kello 14:43, hsmr at gol.com kirjoitti:

  MonoPlus-Lingualism
> Reluctant to employ the word bilingualism in any context that does not
> include equal ability in two or more languages, of which one is one's
> mother tongue (mother tongue employed in its strictest sense), and
> equally dissatisfied with the term multilingualism used in the
> bilingual context that I have just defined,

What about the following: A person speaking L2 well enough to being
able to bring up his/her child in L2 is bilingual."

As you see, it boils down to what we use the languages to, more than
what linguistic abilities we have. If we are interested in lg shift, my
definition above is the only one we really care about. And I can tell
you from experiences in Northern Scandinavia that you need surprisingly
small L2 knowledge to qualify to the definition. And claiming that a
person raising his/her child in a language L is not a (second lg)
speaker of L is just absurd.

> I have decided to coin a new term -- mono-plus lingualism
> (mp-lingualism) for short.

... but you did not give an explicit definition of what you meant with
the term. So, is mp-lingualism to be understood as "bilingualism
light"? "I am mp-lingual if I have *some* knowledge of L2"? Where is
the border line?

> Quite frankly I am tired of being told that I live in a bilingual
> world, when the majority of those who claim to be bilingual can barely
> hold a comfortable conversation in their second tongue. Indeed, anyone
> who can say hello and good-bye in more than one tongue, nowadays,
> calls himself bilingual. The term is simply no longer meaningful.

Again: It is more a question of function than of skill. If you function
in a Lx-society, then you are an Lx-speaker (or reader/writer, in the
age of the Internet). You may function with or without problems, heavy
foreign accent, more or less restricted vocabulary, but that is a
different issue. And how do we measure the ease? If I meet a bilingual
French-English speaker (from Quebec), and it turns out that my French
is so poor that it is just too impolite not to switch to English, then
my French does not qualify.

If you, an English speaker, are dropped somewhere in the middle of
Scandinavia, the middle of France, or in the Middle of Mali, I am sure
you will find these distinctions meaningful.

> For example, is a nation that can read in two languages, but can only
> speak in one bilingual?

Yes.

> is a nation that can barely tell you how to find your way to the next
> street corner in the local, wide-area language, and barely knows what
> is written on the back or front of his own t-shirt in the same
> wide-area language, bilingual?

No.

> Is a nation in which everyone can tell you how to get to the next
> street corner in the wide-area language, but forces you to say the
> same thing in four different ways in that same language, before
> communication is finally achieved, bilingual? Only poorly so.

Or, better: No, it isn't.

> Is the world becoming more mp-lingual? Yes. Is it bringing the world
> closer together? Probably not. People feel close when communication is
> easy, and they know what to expect. This is rarely the case in
> multiethnic urban settings, where everyone speaks a different
> language, and few can speak the wide-community language very well.

I would guess that your multiethnic urban population probably is
bilingual, even though it does not speak L2 "very well" ("very well"
according to what standard?). It must be hard for a multiethnic
minority to be monolingual, if only for the fact that it cannot
establish a common L1 different from the wide-community L2 anyway.
Thus, when "everyone speaks a different language" and "everyone" live
mixed, close to each other, bilingualism is a probable outcome.

> Human beings are creatures of habit, and in the absence of habit there
> is anarchy. Language is a part of that habit, and if the habit is not
> developed, maintained and well understood by most, it becomes useless
> as a means of healthy social interaction.

We disagree on the meaning of both "anarchy" and "healthy", but that
would be a different thread, so I'll leave it at that.

Trond.


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Trond Trosterud                                        t +47 7764 4763
Institutt for språkvitskap, Det humanistiske fakultet  m +47 950 70140
N-9037 Universitetet i Tromsø, Noreg                   f +47 7764 4239
Trond.Trosterud (a) hum.uit.no          http://www.hum.uit.no/a/trond/
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