I recently made a new acquaintance in the multilingual sphere, a Finnish mother of bilingual children (French/Finnish) and educated in the field of multilingualism to boot. She is currently collecting the experiences of parents raising bi-/multi-lingual children in order to construct what I am sure will be a very warmly welcomed guide for parents in the same situation, or people considering following the same route. I received the survey the other day and question 2 had me stumped:
“What languages are the children exposed to in the home?”
At first I thought this was quite straight forward, Norwegian and English. Then I decided that I might put down Spanish as well, seeing as I am actively trying to influence the children to learn, even though I don’t have any goal of making them fluent. But then I started thinking and it dawned on me that if I were to answer truthfully, naming all the languages that my children would be exposed to at home during, let’s say a normal week, the list would not end with Spanish. The top three languages are merely the ones they will hear their parents use. Watching TV they will likely be exposed to several European languages.
The most commonly heard languages (in addition to English and Norwegian) would be Swedish, Danish, German and French, and of course Sami. While the children will hear enough French and German from TV and films by the time they’re 7 or 8 to easily recognize the languages, they will not be able to understand much without studying them actively. They know the odd word in German or French, but that’s simply a result of having a language loving geek for a mother, who will not stop going on about the relationship between languages and the etymology of words.
As for the other Scandinavian languages there’s a different story. Ever since I can remember I have been able to understand spoken Swedish and Danish quite well, and reading them poses no problem what so ever. I actually believed that all Norwegians would have the same degree of understanding without even practicing the languages simply because the Scandinavian tongues are so similar both in grammar and vocabulary. When I had my children I was shocked to discover that young Norwegian kids, at least mine, didn’t understand Swedish. Norwegian television has always aired a lot of Swedish children’s shows, particularly films and series based on the works of Astrid Lindgren. When my daughter watched these shows she paid attention but when I asked her whether she could understand what they said she answered that she only recognized a few words. As she grew older her ability increased, and now at 12 she has no problems understanding all but a few words of Swedish. Danish is harder, but probably mostly due to the fact that there aren’t as many Danish programmes as there are Swedish ones. Most people I know find reading Danish easier than reading Swedish, because the written languages of Denmark is closer to standard Norwegian (bokmål), but they understand spoken Swedish better than spoken Danish.
So, how to class these languages? In Norway you wouldn’t put Swedish your CV, as it feels akin to cheating, the language is almost like a dialect of my own language and I would count knowing a dialect as knowledge of a separate language. On the other hand I had to learn to understand this language. It isn’t my mother tongue. I understand it, I can read it, but I would never speak it because I don’t have to. If I encounter a Swede I would speak to him (slowly) in my own language. At the most I would throw a few Swedish words in if he had trouble understanding the Norwegian ones. (In Norway we even have a word for it; Svorsk (Sworwegian))
I still don’t know where I’m going with this, but it is clear to me that while Norwegian is the majority language, and English is the chosen minority/school/home language, my children are exposed to a number of languages at home, and I for one am really happy that we live in a place where that is the norm! :)
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