Category Archives: language mixing

Language Rich Europe in the Netherlands – Multilingualism in Business and Education

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lre- pin wheel logo300x267As part of the Language Rich Europe project, we are holding workshops across Europe to discuss the findings and plan the next steps. In this blog post, Lorcan Murray, an intern at British Council Netherlands, writes about the workshop held in Utrecht in November.

Much ado about Language

On an unseasonably warm and sunny day, Projects Team Netherlands made its way to the heart of the country, to the lovely city of Utrecht (which meant Lorcán, the intern, had a much shorter commute, so he was happier than usual!). Our purpose was to host a Language Rich Europe workshop with our partners Levende Talen and Mercator, at the wonderful location of Silverijn, on multilingualism in business and education.

We arrived nice and early to deal with last minute preparations (“put the banner over there. No, over there. Hmm, a bit more the left.”) and panics (“What do you mean, you don’t know where the name badges are?!”), and welcomed our seventy invitees to arrive in dibs and drabs. Some arrived too early; some arrived unfashionably late, but eventually we were all gathered for the introduction from Toon van der Ven, the Chairman of Levende Talen and moderator of the afternoon, which kicked-off the programme.

Mr van der Ven was followed by a panel consisting of Ms Sena Dora International Account Manager at ABN AMRO (about being multilingual at a bank), Ms Debbie Ceiler, director of secondary school Bernardinus College (about her school offering a wide language programme), Dr. Michel Wauthion, Education attaché at the French Embassy in The Hague (about the situation on foreign languages offered in secondary education in France) and Professor Guus Extra (about LRE results for Netherlands and other European countries). Each panel member ended the discussion with a thought provoking point of view. Unfortunately, Your Humble Author was unable to witness this panel discussion, as, well; someone had to welcome the late-comers!

Fortunately, Your Humble Author was able to take part in one of the four group workshops, with each group containing a panel member, and so off we all split to our designated rooms. (Your Humble Author was in Group 4. Group 4 was the best group.) In these groups we discussed the point of view put forward by our respective panel member. In the case of Your Humble Author, it was foreign languages offered in France and the interesting idea of entrelinguisme – where you learn several similar languages at the same time, in this case French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Italian – was debated.

After all too short a time, the lively and interesting discussion was drawn to a close and we all reconvened to relay our findings and recommendations to the other groups. The findings of group 4? That there needs to be a more national consistency in language teaching, rather than have every school have a different language policy. Since you cannot speak every language, the need to be selective in which languages we teach is paramount. How do we choose? Unfortunately, that question proved too big for the timeframe!

The programme came to a close with a nice lecture from Jacomine Nortier from Universiteit Utrecht about the advantages and prejudice of multilingualism, including a delightful video example of code switching: a child switching between English, French, and Filipino in the same sentence!

And so the day came to end with a borreltje in the gezellig basement of Silverijn, and an excellent chance to network. Proost!

Regional and Minority Languages: An inevitable decline?

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Martin Dowle, Director British Council Ukraine, presented the language situation in Wales at last week’s Language Rich Europe launch in Kyiv. In this blog post, he summarises the approaches Wales is taking in order to promote Welsh and prevent its decline.

Is it inevitable that minority languages will always suffer decline? The case of Welsh shows this does not need to be the case. Since its low point in 1991, when just 18% of the Welsh population spoke Welsh, it has started to make a modest recovery. Today, 37% of 3 to 14 year-olds are able to speak Welsh, compared to just 15% in 1971, fuelling recovery from the cradle upwards.

Today, there are an estimated 611,000 Welsh speakers in Wales. Of these, 315,000 are native speakers, and the rest have competency, as a second language, to a greater or lesser degree.

Official figures suggest Wales loses between 1,200 and 2,200 native speakers every year. The number of communities – mostly rural — where 70% or more are native speakers continues to decline. But more people now speak (and are learning) Welsh as a second language in cities such as Cardiff than ever before.

In part this reflects a change in attitude to Welsh amongst non-Welsh speakers. Recent polling suggested 80% of Welsh people saw the language as something to be proud of. This is a far cry from the hostility that greeted the decision by the government in the early 1980s to set up a fourth TV channel solely in Welsh. Attitudes have changed, and this matters.

In 2000, the teaching of Welsh became compulsory in all schools up to the age of 16. The number of Welsh-medium schools is growing, as are measures to build the capacity of teachers to teach through the medium of Welsh.

But the Welsh government’s policy argues the school setting is not enough. Policy seems to me to focus on two areas.

First: the home. It encourages mothers and social carers, midwives, and nursery education to help develop the adoption of Welsh as a first language. If two parents speak Welsh, it’s estimated the chances the child will too are around 80%. If only one speaks Welsh, the chances are halved.

Second: the leisure activities of adolescents. The language is at risk if young people don’t see the benefit of speaking it, or think it’s cool to switch to English. So an effective language policy needs to consider youth culture, peer-group pressure, community attitudes, the global media and social networking. Providing enough cultural and social value to tip the balance in favour of Welsh is a big ask – but it’s essential to long-term survival. So policies really do need to focus on the language of ‘interaction’.

Read more about languages in Wales on the Language Rich Europe website and in our previous blog posts:

- Language Rich Europe Launch – Wales
- Can Google Speak Welsh?
- Speaking Welsh, Living in Brussels

Language mixing in youth language use – an exception or a rule?

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A couple of weeks ago I overheard an interesting conversation while sitting in the park. Afterwards, I started to wonder if what I heard was just a one off example of special kind of language use or nothing special these days, and that’s when I decided to discuss the matter here in the hope of getting some comments from our readers!

This is what happened: There were three girls speaking in English (well, that’s what I first thought). They didn’t have a strong accent and they could’ve well been foreign (i.e. not Belgian) as that park is often frequented by foreigners. After a while I realised that they were speaking in Dutch after all, with a Flemish accent. I listened further and thought I heard English again. Then I thought one of them must be English-speaking while the rest are Dutch-speaking. They kept talking and then I got it: They spoke mostly in Dutch but sometimes, out of the blue, they said something in English. When one said a sentence in English, the others usually answered in English, too, and at some point they switched back to Dutch. An extract of the conversation was something like this:

“Toen ik thuis zat, weet je wat ik plots zag?”

”No, tell me.”

”A huge spider, it was like this big!”

”Oh my god, what did you do?”

”I just looked at it and screamed!”

”Ik zou het niet aankunnen – zo groot!”

”Het was vreselijk, hoor.”

”I can totally believe it.”

I was so surprised to hear the girls speak like this that I wanted to investigate the subject a bit further. I know I mix languages myself, too but I thought it was just because we’re a multilingual family and are used to speaking in many languages. I came across an interesting research entitled National survey on the English language in Finland: Uses, meanings and attitudes, 2011, which found that this language mixing (or, code switching), and in particular, using English alongside with your mother tongue is quite a common feature also in Finland – especially among youth. What startled me is that according to the survey, most people (76.4%) don’t even realise they’re mixing languages! What’s more, this mixing also occurs in writing, which puzzles me even more, in the sense that when you write, you normally take more time to consider what you say whereas speech is more instantaneous and somehow that makes it more fitting for language mixing. Then again, come to think of it, I might stick in a sentence in English myself when writing an email in another language.

According to the article ”[mixing] takes place especially in everyday informal speech situations and in occupational language use” and “Mixing English and the mother tongue was more common in cities than elsewhere”. Both of these findings seem logical.

There’s also the question of mixing words or entire sentences; yet another thing is to use words that have derived from English but have become part of the national language, be it officially or unofficially, such as in this case (see point 36 “English alongside the mother tongue” please). In my experience, this seems to be quite a common kind of usage of English words in another language. I hear it often and use words like this myself; in fact, I don’t consider words like ‘organisoida’ or ‘kompromissi’ as English words anymore.

Still, I’m left to wonder: If this kind of mixing is common language use these days, how common is the kind of use I overheard in the park, in which entire English sentences where used in otherwise Dutch conversation? And, if people use another language in their speech/writing to this extent, can they still be regarded as monolinguals? Where do we draw the line – or, do we even have to draw a line?