I see racists are doing "did you know X% of kids in Glasgow/London/Birmingham don't have English as a first language!?" bullshit again.
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I see racists are doing "did you know X% of kids in Glasgow/London/Birmingham don't have English as a first language!?" bullshit again.
BILINGUAL. The word you're looking for to smack them down is 'bilingual'. Most children who 'don't have English as a first language' have two languages. Sometimes more! Why do you hate this? It's fucking beautiful!
One of the things that made me fall in love with London was a visit to Sainsbury's in Whitechapel a couple of weeks after I'd arrived. I always swore I'd leave London quickly - it was dirty and smelly and busy and stressful. But I grew to love it pretty quickly, not least because when you have so many people in one place, people suddenly become endlessly fascinating.
Anyway. Sainsbury's.
A lad was scanning a lady's shopping through the checkout, got to the end and asked her something. 🧵
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One of the things that made me fall in love with London was a visit to Sainsbury's in Whitechapel a couple of weeks after I'd arrived. I always swore I'd leave London quickly - it was dirty and smelly and busy and stressful. But I grew to love it pretty quickly, not least because when you have so many people in one place, people suddenly become endlessly fascinating.
Anyway. Sainsbury's.
A lad was scanning a lady's shopping through the checkout, got to the end and asked her something. 🧵
Can't remember what, probably 'do you have a Nectar card?' or sthing. The lady was quite old, and wearing niqab, so he couldn't see her face, but she just tilted her head to the side like she didn't understand and this kid immediately switched language and asked again.
Another head tilt.
And he asked again, this time in a new language.
She got it, and chatted back to him.
Blew my mind, honestly. This kid who was working a shift in Sainsbury's was just CASUALLY TRILINGUAL.
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Can't remember what, probably 'do you have a Nectar card?' or sthing. The lady was quite old, and wearing niqab, so he couldn't see her face, but she just tilted her head to the side like she didn't understand and this kid immediately switched language and asked again.
Another head tilt.
And he asked again, this time in a new language.
She got it, and chatted back to him.
Blew my mind, honestly. This kid who was working a shift in Sainsbury's was just CASUALLY TRILINGUAL.
As someone who'd grown up in a place with very little immigration, then spent a couple of years abroad struggling to learn as much of the language as I could to get by, it absolutely floored me that I now lived in a city where people working the checkout in Sainsbury's could casually switch languages just to make it easier for an old lady to get her Nectar points or whatever.
What an astonishingly beautiful thing.
What a gift!
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As someone who'd grown up in a place with very little immigration, then spent a couple of years abroad struggling to learn as much of the language as I could to get by, it absolutely floored me that I now lived in a city where people working the checkout in Sainsbury's could casually switch languages just to make it easier for an old lady to get her Nectar points or whatever.
What an astonishingly beautiful thing.
What a gift!
@girlonthenet something a lot of people from English speaking countries forget is that globally, being multilingual is the norm, not the exception.
In the UK we should be teaching a second language from a much earlier age.
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@girlonthenet something a lot of people from English speaking countries forget is that globally, being multilingual is the norm, not the exception.
In the UK we should be teaching a second language from a much earlier age.
@quixoticgeek @girlonthenet I mean, afaik it's mostly the norm just cause of British and later American imperialism, most people who are bilingual speak their native language and English
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@quixoticgeek @girlonthenet I mean, afaik it's mostly the norm just cause of British and later American imperialism, most people who are bilingual speak their native language and English
@hazelnot @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet
I'm not sure that is entirely accurate. Sure, British and American cultural colonization means English is for many a pragmatic choice as a foreign language, but I think in many environments other languages have historically been the first choice as a second language: Russian, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, ..., making English the third or fourth language to learn.
For me, English was the third language. -
@hazelnot @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet
I'm not sure that is entirely accurate. Sure, British and American cultural colonization means English is for many a pragmatic choice as a foreign language, but I think in many environments other languages have historically been the first choice as a second language: Russian, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, ..., making English the third or fourth language to learn.
For me, English was the third language.@hazelnot @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet
Btw, it might shock some of the native English speaking readers that at high school I was taught 4 different foreign languages.
I dropped out of Latin after a year because it broke my brain.
I dropped out of French after two years because the Latin took French down with it.
I dropped out of German after two years because the teacher told me that since I already spoke German fluently, there wasn't anything useful he could teach me.
So that left just English. -
@hazelnot @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet
Btw, it might shock some of the native English speaking readers that at high school I was taught 4 different foreign languages.
I dropped out of Latin after a year because it broke my brain.
I dropped out of French after two years because the Latin took French down with it.
I dropped out of German after two years because the teacher told me that since I already spoke German fluently, there wasn't anything useful he could teach me.
So that left just English.@wfk @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet this shocks *me* too tbh, in school we had Romanian (just, grammar and literature, since I'm from Romania), English, a third language of our choice (for me it was between French and German, I picked German and then failed to learn it), and then we technically had Latin in 8th and 12th grades only iirc? And since Latin teachers are Romanian teachers too we really just had an extra Romanian class a week most of the time, and other than that it was like "I know none of you care about actually learning this so I'll just give you high grades so I don't ruin your average"
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@wfk @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet this shocks *me* too tbh, in school we had Romanian (just, grammar and literature, since I'm from Romania), English, a third language of our choice (for me it was between French and German, I picked German and then failed to learn it), and then we technically had Latin in 8th and 12th grades only iirc? And since Latin teachers are Romanian teachers too we really just had an extra Romanian class a week most of the time, and other than that it was like "I know none of you care about actually learning this so I'll just give you high grades so I don't ruin your average"
@hazelnot @wfk @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet
learning multiple languages in school isn't actually that rare (though it is unfortunately becoming rarer over time). many places around the world have the assumption that an educated person speaks 3 languages.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191215235020/http://www.cal.org/content/download/1803/19986/file/AGlobalPerspectiveonBilingualism.pdf
and multilingualism is definitely not a new phenomenon. on the contrary. people in history often spoke more than one language, it's just that those languages usually tended to be closer to each other, say High and Low German, or Hebrew and Aramic.
https://www.letter-daad.de/en/language/when-multilingualism-is-the-norm/
in fact i'd argue the number of languages a person knows decreased since the days of yore, because of the dominance of English but also due to the concept of "one country one language".
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/multilingualism-and-education/multilingualism-as-norm/ED39FE06137B49E1C425CC5F1AE8A997 -
@hazelnot @wfk @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet
learning multiple languages in school isn't actually that rare (though it is unfortunately becoming rarer over time). many places around the world have the assumption that an educated person speaks 3 languages.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191215235020/http://www.cal.org/content/download/1803/19986/file/AGlobalPerspectiveonBilingualism.pdf
and multilingualism is definitely not a new phenomenon. on the contrary. people in history often spoke more than one language, it's just that those languages usually tended to be closer to each other, say High and Low German, or Hebrew and Aramic.
https://www.letter-daad.de/en/language/when-multilingualism-is-the-norm/
in fact i'd argue the number of languages a person knows decreased since the days of yore, because of the dominance of English but also due to the concept of "one country one language".
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/multilingualism-and-education/multilingualism-as-norm/ED39FE06137B49E1C425CC5F1AE8A997@hazelnot @wfk @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet
just to give a few family anecdotes: my mum speaks Hebrew and English. her dad is a native Hebrew-Yiddish bilingual who also has good English and German. his parents spoke fluently all of the above, as well as Polish.
back then you had to know more than one language, at least a bit, to live your daily life. your community had more than one large linguistic population? then you had to know those two well. you also travelled around, say, as a helper clothes salesman (which was my great grandma's job)? make that three. you migrated several times in your life (as my grandpa did)? make that four.as a final fun fact, the oldest example of bilingualism i know of is Rabshake's speech in 2 Kings 18, where Rabshake, one of Sennacherib's messengers, delivers a speech to the Judaites telling them they should surrender, delivered in Hebrew. the people of king Hezekiah then ask him to switch to Aramic, because they can understand that language, and by speaking in "Judaite" (i.e. the Judaite dialect of Hebrew) they're afraid he'll scare their people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Kings_18#Rabshakeh's_speeches_(18:17%E2%80%9337) -
@hazelnot @wfk @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet
just to give a few family anecdotes: my mum speaks Hebrew and English. her dad is a native Hebrew-Yiddish bilingual who also has good English and German. his parents spoke fluently all of the above, as well as Polish.
back then you had to know more than one language, at least a bit, to live your daily life. your community had more than one large linguistic population? then you had to know those two well. you also travelled around, say, as a helper clothes salesman (which was my great grandma's job)? make that three. you migrated several times in your life (as my grandpa did)? make that four.as a final fun fact, the oldest example of bilingualism i know of is Rabshake's speech in 2 Kings 18, where Rabshake, one of Sennacherib's messengers, delivers a speech to the Judaites telling them they should surrender, delivered in Hebrew. the people of king Hezekiah then ask him to switch to Aramic, because they can understand that language, and by speaking in "Judaite" (i.e. the Judaite dialect of Hebrew) they're afraid he'll scare their people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Kings_18#Rabshakeh's_speeches_(18:17%E2%80%9337)@talya @wfk @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet huh... maybe I'm just dumb though cause with the amount of trouble I have learning just one more language now I don't think I would've been able to survive in the area I live in without speaking at least both Greek and Turkish, and probably also Bulgarian as well back then
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@talya @wfk @quixoticgeek @girlonthenet huh... maybe I'm just dumb though cause with the amount of trouble I have learning just one more language now I don't think I would've been able to survive in the area I live in without speaking at least both Greek and Turkish, and probably also Bulgarian as well back then
@hazelnot@sunbeam.city @talya@dybbuk.club @wfk@social.v.st @quixoticgeek@social.v.st @girlonthenet@mastodon.social The thing is that it's really easy to learn a language when you have a use for it. Such as when you live in an area where people commonly speak it.
And it's really hard to learn a language purely academically with no use
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