"True bilingualism is a relatively rare thing" is a truly bizarre statement for most of the world, I should think. FTR, I was raised "truly bilingual" -- I would go to kindergarten with kinds who spoke X, speak Y with my parents and immediate family, try to speak Y with the butcher until he told me he didn't understand X, then speak X, and be understood. (I think I was 5-7ish, so this is obviously from recollection by my parents.) I'm still fluent in X and Y, although one has suffered in pronunciation terms, but that's mostly through general atrophy from disuse, not because I can't do it, somehow.
I think the exception may be exactly those countries who have some-sort-of-English as their native language (UK/Canada/America/etc.) They can usually afford to not bother with the others.
... though I do think it's a massive shame in terms of general cultural deveolpment. Again, English-speakers don't have this, but the whole "grammtical gender" thing is a massive eye-opener[1], especially is you manage to learn several different languages that not only have different geners for specific things, but also have different numbers of genders. (E.g. Danish, outside of specific persons, has two genders. German and French have three genders -- which, tellingly, don't actually agree across various nouns.)
[1] Not to anything fundamental, just to how absurd language is as a construct.
Given that Norwegian and German have three I would expect Danish to also have three. French has two (le + la).
Danish indeed has "only" two genders, one too many for my taste.
For context, I'm trilingual (used to be bilingual).
I grew up near Boston. A quarter of the kids in my class were bilingual. I don't know how many had native proficiency in their non-English language, but I'm guessing most.
So I thought maybe "true" bilingualism was some hard to attain thing that none of us had. Nope, it just means "native proficiency". AIUI that's a relatively common thing, even in the US, at least in urban areas. And definitely in other countries.
There probably was some local skew in this sample set, but from what I can tell this is definitely not abnormal in cities.
The article seems to be mostly written in the context of unilingual parents who want a bilingual child.
Yes. The core target audience of the article is likely unilingual families who will put their kid in French/Chinese/whatever classes to give them a leg up for Harvard admissions, 15 years later (or, in the NYTime's subtle language: "parents who want to give their kids a bilingual boost").
Obviously if the kid only speaks the language in the context of a classroom, true fluency will never be reached. In a realistic context, true multilingualism is very achievable, and not particularly exceptional throughout most of the world as many other commenters have pointed out.
Implicitly you appear to suggest multilingualism is easy to achieve in [almost] all contexts?
Where parents are monolingual, and the pervading culture is monolingual then there's little opportunity for immersion and few people from whom to learn.
I'd guess that the kids you knew growing up were speaking english in school and another language at home, so they likely don't develop the vocabulary and grammar in their 'home' language that they might have if they were studying it every day in school. From the article regarding kids from bilingual homes who speak english in school: "... they didn’t go to school in Spanish, they don’t read books in Spanish, and when you actually measure the size of their vocabularies, or the grammar they understand, or the coherence of the narrative they produce, they are not as proficient as they are in English".
(Or perhaps I just have a very skewed sample set and even "regular" bilingualism is rare)
Idk. Overall this article didn't sit well with me, for more reason than one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830685).
Bilingual people are a dime a dozen, but it's fair to say truly bilingual people are pretty rare, and almost invariably learned both languages at a young age.
I'm English and live in Lithuania now, and many of my Lithuanian friends can speak perfectly good English without an 'accent'. It's also not uncommon to speak a third language like Russian or Polish, especially if the family has their roots in that country.
These languages do have some shared sounds, but are definatly not just dialects of each other.
In the UK itself, it's estimated that there's a different regional accent every 25 miles or so.
Still, though I think true bilingualism is extremely rare, If by "True" you mean being able to do anything you can in one language in the other language without any hiccups and word-searching and at the same speed and eloquence and precision in all possible situations and contexts.
I've studied at a university level in 3 different languages and am highly fluent in all of them, still there are a lot of contexts where I don't know the specific vocabulary in one particular language or might have problems finding the right word in one language because I'm getting interference from the other ones.
Also, I've known a lot of bi/tri/quad linguals in my life (whole family, extended family, friends, etc), and in my studies and I have yet to encounter even one truely bilingual person as I defined it above.
A spaniard who doesn't speak catalan won't understand 95% of a normal convo... Catalan [0] is lexically as distant from the spanish as the Portuguese is [1]...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language
[1] https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among...
I don't know if I'd go that far. I just youtubed catalan and would say I understood about 75-80% of what this guy is saying. [1]
Also, I mainly meant that statement ironically :) Catalan is its own language, its just funny to me that "dialect" is a negative term, language is not, and usually the big country with the military dictates which provinces speak a "language" and which ones are speaking a "dialect".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdiVss0X6V0&feature=youtu.be
Spanish speakers will notice a lot of "familiar words", but most of the time it's difficult for them to extrapolate the meaning of what is being said.
And Romanian, with only some more difficulty.
The big problems I see (as an Italian) when speaking with people from France, Spain, Portugal and Romania is mostly about the pronounciation, admittedly I have studied a little bit of French (that makes the "slightly more distant" language on par with the others).
When it is written, I can usually understand like 90% or more of most text and there are "sinergies", i.e. there is a given word that is different from Italian but is very similar to another word in another of the Latin languages or that is actually directly or almost directly a Latin word.
The issue is with "false pairs", i.e.words that exist (or sound alike or almost alike) in two languages but that have completely different meanings.
Like, to mention a couple reknown ones, "burro" which is "butter" in Italian and "donkey/ass" in Spanish or the Spanish "aceite" which most Italians will instinctively translate into "aceto" (vinegar) while it means "oil".
It’s like saying that german, dutch and english (Germanic languages) are extremely similar… =)
[1]https://youtu.be/2OynrY8JCDM?t=6m43s - interesting video overall
But in Europe I've been sitting on trains directly next to Portuguese speakers and had a very difficult time even understanding say 40% of what they were talking about. It was as if in Portugal they just chew up the words and chop them all up, which makes it super difficult to understand. That wasn't the case with the Brasilians I've spoken too. With them I could actually have conversations and know what they were saying.
But thats just my personal experience.
(I think. One of the characters in "Spotlight" was the most recent time I understood almost nothing.)
Try watching an English person ask an American (in the US) for water or where the herbs are.
However the spoken form diverges much faster than the written form, to the point where it's completely impossible to have an oral conversation.
Right now I live in a situation where I use English and a third language exclusively, and my native language has massively atrophied. If I can't even compare my native ability now with 2 years ago, how could anyone have an exactly matched ability in two languages at the same time in all possible situations and contexts?
Hence I reject your definition since it's useless. I just define true bilingualism as native-level fluency in two languages. There's enough variation in native fluency to give a healthy margin there.
Does India count? China? Russia? Spain? France?
India has tons of mutually unintelligible languages. China does too (some call them dialects). Spain has multiple partially mutually intelligible languages -- and Basque is an isolate (and mutually unintelligible). IIRC Occitan and French are not that compatible either.
Maybe you're thinking about the Basque language instead? I'm from the south of France, Occitanie really. Occitan is certainly different from French, but not completely alien. It's a bit similar to Spanish in closeness. Basque on the other hand is very different and is an isolated language.
No, I know that Occitan and French are not that different, but they're still pretty different. Like you say, similar to Spanish in closeness -- I would definitely consider them distinct languages that take effort to learn.
In Africa it's the same thing, but the European language is more likely to be French than Spanish.
This sort of explains why Germans and Scandinavians in general are so proficient in english.
In many parts of the world bilingualism is the norm.
I don't recall the exact book, but I remember reading a Jared Diamond book about societies in remote Papua New Guinea and meeting indigenous peoples who all spoke several different languages. If I recall correctly he argues that being monolingual is the historic oddity.