Comment by yannis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yannis | Hacker News Reader

My son is fully bilingual in Afrikaans(sort of a Dutch Dialect) and English. When he was a toddler he would speak fluently to his grandmother in Afrikaans and would turn in the same conversation and seamlessly talk to me or his mother in English. He kept this ability right into about the middle years in Elementary School. After that this ability somehow diminished and he would throw English words into an Afrikaans conversation or vice versa. He is thirteen now and speaks both languages very fluently (but the switching between the two languages now is more conscious). At the toddler stage it was as if his brain was combining the two languages into one.

From my own personal experience I noted that, there is a point when you start to think - in the new language and that is the real turning point. It also appears sort of in computer languages as well.

When people from different linguistic cultures mix they tend to develop their own language for example fanagalo [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanagalo].

This paper from the Center for Applied Linguistics has some good pointers http://www.cal.org/resources/Digest/digestglobal.html as regards to languages and education.

Interesting!

Three of my siblings are bi-lingual Russian/English. At first they mixed things up terribly, but after their Russian grandmother spent a year with them they were suddenly able to completely separate the two. Grandma doesn't speak a word of English, whereas both parents speak both languages, so we speculated that what they were doing was 'the easiest thing that works'.

When I speak in Norwegian I toss in English words all the time (because I can get away with it - all Norwegians seem to speak English). In French I don't leak English into it. In English, I rarely (if ever) slip Norwegian or French into it.

Where I really get into trouble is when I'm in a conversation with Norwegians, French, and English-speakers at the same time, because I end up trying to translate Norwegian to French, French to English, etc, and end up speaking the wrong language to pretty much everyone involved.

If you want to raise your kids bilingually one way is for you to only speak to them say in Norwegian and your wife to speak to them only in English. It is a very interesting subject especially fro an evolutionary point of view - what's happening to you when you speak to your friends is normal it happens to all my friends an myself. You can imagine if your friends and you and your families were isolated say in Island for 200 years your descendants would have been speaking a new language composed of Norwegian, French and English.

Yeah, I know this, it's horrible. My problem is with speaking French, Spanish and Italian. Only one of the languages is fine, but once there are two or more, I start mixing words together really badly.

I think it's because those languages are so close to each other - like C++, C# and Java - which was probably the reason I could become reasonably fluent in each of them in the first place. I actually learned Italian by "prototypal inheritance", gradually substituting Spanish words and grammar as I learned their Italian equivalents while living there.

This is called "code switching" and is just something that happens (with all people, but particularly children) in multilingual environments. A former teacher of mine was writing her dissertation on it when the students she was studying went home for holidays and returned speaking only their native language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

Afrikaans is not a "sort of a Dutch dialect".

It is a separate language, derived from Dutch (note, there are difference Afrikaans dialects). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaans

Interesting write-up of what is considered a "dialect", and how it differs from "language": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect

From a certain perspective no one speaks a "language," everyone speaks a dialect of a language. My mother language is Greek but I speak the Cypriot dialect. Mainland Greeks have great difficulty understanding Cypriots talking but not the other way round. This is very true of Afrikaans too. It is easier for an Afrikaner to understand Dutch but not the other way round. But you probably right I should have called it a language.

Right, Cypriot Greek is a dialect, similarly the German dialects spoken in Austria.

Afrikaans actually has an ISO-639 language code.

If you put a lot of emphasis on "sort of" it is.

Only if you have an imperialist/colonist slant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_dialects#Sister_and_daugh...

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