On the weekend I was having brunch with a polyglot friend who asked me, "How do you answer the question, 'How many languages do you speak?'"
Before I continue, I should point out that just about everyone I know who has had to say, "I'm a linguist" or "I study linguistics" has also faced the inevitable question, "So how many languages do you speak?" It's such a common phenomenon that most language / linguistics-related blogs would have a post covering the topic and there's even a Facebook group named 'You're a Linguist? How many languages do you speak?'
(The other usual comment is "I'd better watch what I say around you" and I've even had a good friend who was shocked when he realised I wasn't a grammar Nazi or a punctuation Nazi (like srsly, wtf?))
Anyway (and before this post spirals into a rant about how linguists should not be expected to be polyglots), the question asked by my friend raises two issues that gives me constant grief: since I am a polyglot, how do I quantify the number of languages that I speak? And more importantly, how on earth do I give an answer that will satisfy both me and my interrogator?
Measuring language competency, or rather 'competencies', is a pretty big issue in language testing and personally, I always have a (self-assessed) 'Language Competencies" section near the start of any CV I submit. Following the format of a professor's CV, I list English as my native language, then specify my 'reading/written competence' and 'spoken/listening' competence for each subsequent language. It looks like this:
• English (native language)
I always put a maximum of 5 languages (depending on the job, I might just list 3 so I don't look too much like a wanker). The adjectives I use with regard to competence are 'full', 'excellent', 'good' and 'basic', whatever 'full' means since I'd still need a bilingual dictionary if I was reading a French book. And yes, I might sometimes overstate my competencies. After all, it is a CV, and I do want to highlight the fact that I possess more language skills than your average monolingual English speaker. And breaking down the competencies into two categories seems to be a more 'honest' reflection of my language skills, even if what I'm referring to are different aspects of grammatical competence (using Canale and Swain's 1980 terminology).
It still doesn't make answering the question "How many languages do you speak?" any easier though. If I listed out all my competencies in a normal conversation, I'd sound like an academic suffering from Aspergers (or, maybe just an academic). It's worse as a linguist interested in phonetics and morphosyntax, because I know a lot of stuff about languages that I don't speak. For instance, I wouldn't even consider myself a speaker of Sumi, even though it's the language I worked on for my Masters. It also doesn't help that I know short phrases from Greek to Japanese to Sherpa...
So lately, I've begun responding to the question by saying, "The better question would be to ask: how many languages can you survive in?" I suppose when I talk about survival, I mean being able to handle a wide range of communicative contexts in a particular language. I then list 3 or 4 languages.
Of course, this brings up the issue of how many such 'contexts' are needed for me to qualify as being competent. For instance, in Guwahati I'm happy to jump into an auto and give my driver basic directions in Assamese, but I would not be as comfortable trying to buy a SIM card only relying on Assamese. (I wouldn't be able to hold an entire conversation in Assamese either.) Also, 'survival' implies strategic competence (using Canale and Swain's terminology again): I could still survive in a foreign language situation with minimal language skills by relying on non-verbal means to get my message across.
So I guess It's not ideal, but most people really don't care for that much detail anyway.
I mean if I felt like it, I could always go with my other measure of language ability:
How many languages do I speak well enough to swear at people in?
Before I continue, I should point out that just about everyone I know who has had to say, "I'm a linguist" or "I study linguistics" has also faced the inevitable question, "So how many languages do you speak?" It's such a common phenomenon that most language / linguistics-related blogs would have a post covering the topic and there's even a Facebook group named 'You're a Linguist? How many languages do you speak?'
(The other usual comment is "I'd better watch what I say around you" and I've even had a good friend who was shocked when he realised I wasn't a grammar Nazi or a punctuation Nazi (like srsly, wtf?))
Anyway (and before this post spirals into a rant about how linguists should not be expected to be polyglots), the question asked by my friend raises two issues that gives me constant grief: since I am a polyglot, how do I quantify the number of languages that I speak? And more importantly, how on earth do I give an answer that will satisfy both me and my interrogator?
Measuring language competency, or rather 'competencies', is a pretty big issue in language testing and personally, I always have a (self-assessed) 'Language Competencies" section near the start of any CV I submit. Following the format of a professor's CV, I list English as my native language, then specify my 'reading/written competence' and 'spoken/listening' competence for each subsequent language. It looks like this:
• English (native language)
• French (full reading/written competence and excellent spoken/listening)
• Mandarin (...)
• Russian (...)
• (random 5th language) (typically 'basic reading and speaking')
I always put a maximum of 5 languages (depending on the job, I might just list 3 so I don't look too much like a wanker). The adjectives I use with regard to competence are 'full', 'excellent', 'good' and 'basic', whatever 'full' means since I'd still need a bilingual dictionary if I was reading a French book. And yes, I might sometimes overstate my competencies. After all, it is a CV, and I do want to highlight the fact that I possess more language skills than your average monolingual English speaker. And breaking down the competencies into two categories seems to be a more 'honest' reflection of my language skills, even if what I'm referring to are different aspects of grammatical competence (using Canale and Swain's 1980 terminology).
It still doesn't make answering the question "How many languages do you speak?" any easier though. If I listed out all my competencies in a normal conversation, I'd sound like an academic suffering from Aspergers (or, maybe just an academic). It's worse as a linguist interested in phonetics and morphosyntax, because I know a lot of stuff about languages that I don't speak. For instance, I wouldn't even consider myself a speaker of Sumi, even though it's the language I worked on for my Masters. It also doesn't help that I know short phrases from Greek to Japanese to Sherpa...
So lately, I've begun responding to the question by saying, "The better question would be to ask: how many languages can you survive in?" I suppose when I talk about survival, I mean being able to handle a wide range of communicative contexts in a particular language. I then list 3 or 4 languages.
Of course, this brings up the issue of how many such 'contexts' are needed for me to qualify as being competent. For instance, in Guwahati I'm happy to jump into an auto and give my driver basic directions in Assamese, but I would not be as comfortable trying to buy a SIM card only relying on Assamese. (I wouldn't be able to hold an entire conversation in Assamese either.) Also, 'survival' implies strategic competence (using Canale and Swain's terminology again): I could still survive in a foreign language situation with minimal language skills by relying on non-verbal means to get my message across.
So I guess It's not ideal, but most people really don't care for that much detail anyway.
I mean if I felt like it, I could always go with my other measure of language ability:
How many languages do I speak well enough to swear at people in?
I've taken to replying to the "how many languages do you speak" question with "and do you ask a doctor how many diseases they have?" Possibly comes across a little aggressive but it does make people stop and think!
ReplyDeleteYeah, we were talking about this in the lab last week. Simone's started using the 'doctor / disease' response.
ReplyDeleteI suppose when I was writing this, I was thinking more of someone saying, "Oh you're a polyglot, how many languages do you speak?" (Though I seriously can't imagine that ever happening in real life because I would never introduce myself as a polyglot.)
I can swear in several languages that I can't actually survive in. But swearing CREATIVELY ...
ReplyDeleteYes! It's difficult to use 'swearing' as an index of proficiency because many people (especially kids in school) often try to learn swear words in a foreign language first.
ReplyDeleteI was actually imagining a situation where I'm having to yell at people who are trying to rip me off (like once when I was in India) and being able to string together something in the local language in the heat of the moment (which I wasn't able to do).
Yes I suppose thinking about the form of the question before asking is pretty crucial to the response you get. X) I will know for next time I'm having this conversation. It's not fair to simply ask how many languages one speaks because there's so much gray area with languages! You were right about answering for different aspects, reading, writing, speaking, listening.
ReplyDeleteAnyway I never got to the crux of the question, and yes, that was how do you guage proficiency? I do this mostly in one way: if I can hold a conversation, start of topic to end of topic, with someone in another tongue, I consider myself able to speak the language. That's generally how I have done it thus far. If I'm unable to think of a word and use English, that cancels the deal. Harsh I know, but one must have strict rules for these things, otherwise it's anyone's game. ;)
J