But natives are the only standard we can measure language on. If even natives don't speak the language correctly, then there is no correct language.

I'm just going the other way round and defining correct as whatever the natives speak.

I didn't mean to imply that everything a native speaker says is correct, I meant that whatever native speakers as a whole use frequently in speaking and writing is correct.

edit: Rereading this I think the word correct sounds very absolute. What I mean is that I think the language consists only of that what is actually frequently spoken and written by the users of said language.

edit2: I'm not sure where this debate leads... I think we can agree that what a mistake is is very relative. To some "If I was you" constitutes a mistake, others don't even recognize anything odd about it.

Last edited by apirx (2013 January 20, 1:59 pm)

I think where it leads, touching back on the original topic, is that there's a continuum of competency in both the native L1 and foreign L2 camps. Probably much of a time there is a gap in between, but there can be an overlap as well. That is why a small number of L2 learners I know end up being more skilled in the language than some L1 users I know.

I believe various researchers have given several fairly formal definitions of language fossilization. But if I were to define it as a state where a language learner reaches a plateau of compentency in a language and continues to make the same mistakes despite continued exposure, then many of the most fossilized language learners I've encountered myself have been native speakers.

As a native speaker of a language, it's easy to become comfortable and complacent in that language. And as we know, foreign language learners can also fall into that state, particularly when they reach a comfortable skill level.

Many of us here are fairly beginner level Japanese learners, which is why we communicate on an English language forum. Yet, many of us speculatively worry about a future when our skill levels may plateau, even though we may actually be extremely far below the level where that may occur. If you can continue to carry that level of concern and motivation over your years of language study, I imagine that that would lessen your chances of fossilization, and even become like the few L2 learners who manage to exceed the skill of many L1 speakers.

Marumaru wrote:

What is your L1 undead_saif?

EDIT: But you write very well…

Thanks. Does it matter what my L1 is? It's Arabic.

Maybe that post was good because I wrote carefully, not spontaneously.

I didn't read the rest of the posts. I hope a good suggestion was given!

Last edited by undead_saif (2013 January 20, 2:54 pm)

apirx wrote:

The common subset they share is where people understand each other.

Black country
Ireland
Queen's RP
Cool speech on the topic, in standard British English.
Cockney

Normally the standard variant of a language is the one spoken in the capital, with entirely correct grammar(Berlin German, Bucharest Romanian, Tokyo Japanese etc). Not that many natives use perfect standard language, but the standard does exist, and in certain areas is the only acceptable variant(the academia universally requires standard language, and depending on the country TV and media is also required to use standard language). This is because standard English is (at least in theory) intelligible to all native speakers and learners alike, whereas dialects are not. Mutual understanding is hard to achieve between 2 people from different areas; that is why a standard is required to make mutual understanding possible.

If I go to another side of the country and start using the local interjections, vocabulary, accent and typical grammar (we have an extra grammar case in one side of the country), I would not expect to be understood. I would also not understand them if they spoke with their own quirks. We're both native speakers of the same language, so we can toss them aside and use standard language, thus achieving mutual understanding.

Speaking of fossilization, I was wondering. What is it called when someone reaches a plateau in reading and listening comprehension, essentially becoming "deaf" to new words and grammatical constructructs when listening, and skimming over them when reading?

It seems like it's something that goes along with fossilization of production - you stop listening for unfamiliar language, and thereby stop learning them as well. Would that be something like comprehension fossilization or input fossilization?

Native speakers do make mistakes. Native speakers also have dialects.

The distinguishing feature between whether a particular usage is an error or a correct variant, I would say, depends on the perception of what the speaker's target L1/2 is.

So for example, if I say "aks", but would prefer to say "ask", or consult Webster's for a canonical pronunciation if given a choice, or am willing to acknowledge that I have made a mistake, then it is an error. If, on the other hand, I insist that my target language variant is Ebonics and that my pronunciation is correct, then I am making a stronger case, because it is consistent with my personal target.

So a particular native speaker's words are not canonical, since everyone can make mistakes, and when this is pointed out, they may be willing to acknowledge that mistake, or not. I think that's all Zgarbas was saying.

JimmySeal wrote:

yudantaiteki wrote:

How do you determine what is correct and incorrect, if it's not through the usage of native speakers of the language?

Observation of native speakers determines what is correct, but just because a number of native speakers share the same non-standard idiosyncracy, that does not automatically make it a dialect.

The definition of "dialect" is one of degree, everyone has their own idiolect.  If enough people are using the same speech patterns it gets called a dialect.  5 probably isn't enough.

And what say you to English variants like Indian English.  India has people learning English as a first language from people who speak English as a second language, infused with a heavy mix of Hindi grammar and pronunciation.  If the new generation speaks English with exactly the same idiosyncracies of the previous generation, are those idiosyncracies "dialect" for the new generation and "mistakes" for the old generation?  That's contradictory.

It's not really contradictory.  That's one of the ways that certain dialects and creoles have resulted.

I'd actually been wondering about that! In my textbooks it was always "Berlin German", but in Germany it was Hannover German.
That being said, I did find it ridiculously easy to understand people in Berlin . As soon as I drifted away from Berlin in either direction it wasn't so easy anymore.
Most people would also make fun of the Bucharest accent (there's a tendency to focus too much on consonants), but I guess that's just how they name the standard language?

Maybe it has more to do with grammar variation and regional vocabulary than with the accent itself?

Unexpected wrote:

As a linguistics student, I must say this isn't exactly true. Yudantaiteki is right and I'd like to expand on his post.

Even before a person is born (babies can already listen to conversations while in their mother's womb), they have constant contact with what's going to be their native tongue. The early years of their lives is the critical period of language acquisition; that means the way they deal with language is very different from an adult, as they have the ability to "notice" the way their language works, what can happen and what cannot happen in their tongue; the sounds the language uses or not, etc. This means there's no way a native speaker could make a mistake when speaking their own tongue, because they have a complete understanding of how it works.

Of course, by that definition, there are millions of people in the world who are not native speakers of any language at all. They have learned one language as little children, usually from their parents, and then later forgotten that language to various extent, sometimes completely, and then acquired another language. The slightly less common example is international adoption, the more common one immigration, or parents of different native languages who don't share custody of their children. I had a half-Japanese girl in my language class who had grown up in Germany and couldn't get the difference between saying は　or わ　and what sounded like 'va'. Not even Germans make that mistake very often.

JimmySeal wrote:

If the new generation speaks English with exactly the same idiosyncracies of the previous generation, are those idiosyncracies "dialect" for the new generation and "mistakes" for the old generation?  That's contradictory.

Exactly. Because of infinite regress, children of non-native speakers are (strictly speaking) non-native by that definition because in their early years they only hear that language with "typical" non-native speaker mistakes (which happen to be dependent on the non-native speaker's native language, but well...), so they don't gain a "complete understanding." Which makes it pretty much impossible for Indians to learn English as first language in India. Also makes it unlikely that there many native speakers of English in the US unless they intermarried with people of English or Irish descent at some point.

Then, if there is e.g. a set of typical mistakes that French people make when speaking English, and this set is different from the mistakes that Spanish native speakers make in English, and there are millions of people who make these mistakes, does this not constitute a dialect?

Is Haitian Creole a language or a dialect? Is a native speaker of Haitian Creole who speaks French a non-native speaker of French?

Finally, to quote Max Weinreich: "אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט (a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot)." Or, a language is a dialect with an army and a fleet.

Last edited by Irixmark (2013 January 21, 1:21 pm)

The "critical period" is the key it seems. I have a few students who went to international schools in various places around the world, and they all speak with a flawless standard US accent, but they also almost all make a small number of consistent mistakes (different by individual, though) that presumably linguists would classify as non-native.

It does smell of hypostatization to me. You take the set of mistakes "native" speakers make but "non-native speakers" don't, and then you define native and non-native on the basis of those sets, as if native speakers existed as a concept independent of command of a language.

I never even heard the term "fossilization" before, but it's a pretty simple concept with a fancy name, so I'll address it.

As someone who speaks more than one language, I of course am familiar with the problem. The solution too, since it's fairly obvious: if you don't expose yourself to mistakes, there will be nothing to "fossilize". In other words, never expose yourself to the language, as spoken by anyone except people who already know how to speak it properly. That means a few things:

1. if you have a teacher, make sure they're 100% fluent in the language;

2. if you're studying the language in a class where a lot of the class consists of your fellow students speaking the language you are trying to learn, quit that class right away. If you can't quit, stop paying attention. Do your homework for the next class or something; don't worry, the teacher can't fail just for not paying attention, if you're the best student in the class. At worst, you'll get yelled at a lot. Beats sounding like an idiot for the rest of your life.

3. do not try to speak and write the language, as you're learning it; by trying to speak, you are doing what I just told you not to do, you're exposing yourself to the language, as spoken by someone who doesn't know how to speak it properly: yourself. The only exception is reading out loud and repeating something you just listened to. You can do that, as long as you don't get sloppy with pronunciation and have ways to verify that you're pronouncing things correctly (the easiest is to copy/paste your text into google translate, and use the "listen" function)

P.S. In my experience, as far as writing goes, these rules don't need to be applied quite as strictly. Maybe it's because all the tools available to you, that help you write a language correctly (MS Word for instance has been a tool for correcting English spelling and grammar since I can remember), but I've been learning languages by starting to write relatively early, and had no problems because of it. I have done it sparingly though. I can't guarantee that, if you use a language you don't know well mainly to write, you won't run into trouble.

SendaiDan wrote:

Some of the worst advice I've ever heard. Particularly point number two. Who would be so arrogant to do that?

Some of it does sound fishy to me as well. Fossilization is less about the learning of incorrect usage, than about not progressing and learning more advanced and better usage.

For example, in Lardiere's classic fossilization case study of "Patty", a L1 Chinese learner of L2 English, it was observed that among her fossilized language characteristics was failure to learn and use the past perfect tense.

Logically, all else being equal, a learner who does not attempt spontaneous production of the past perfect sentences will acquire that skill more slowly than someone who does, and will therefore have a *higher* probability of fossilization as a result.