When You First Start Learning A Language The Meaning Of All Of The Words That You Learn Depend Entirely

another linguistics question, do you guys make distinctions between the accents of non-native speakers and accent from within the native speaker group? if so, how do you tell yhem apart, and what are some distinctions between them? I assume there's some kind of structural difference between the two

Yeah, so the first thing I should clarify here is that there is no technical difference between a "language" and a "dialect". Linguists often use the term "language variety" to be maximally clear on this point. French is a language variety, Bavarian (traditionally called a dialect of German) is a language variety, California English is a language variety. One language variety can be part of another: California English is a variety of English, "English" itself being a broader variety with many sub-varieties. We might further split California English, perhaps into Southern California English, Northern California English, and California Central Valley English, or some such. In the extreme, we can look only at the speech of an individual person; this is called an idiolect. Every human being who speaks a language speaks in their own unique idiolect, which differs from the speech of other humans in various ways. An idiolect is also a language variety.

Now, linguists do make a distinction, a very important distinction, between native and non-native speech. Roughly, a native speaker is someone who acquired a language by exposure during childhood. They were not explicitly taught the language, but picked it up by virtue of being surrounded by people who speak it. Human children seem to have various sorts of special cognitive mechanisms for acquiring language in this way, many of which we lose as we get older. This early period of life in which humans are primed for language acquisition is called the "critical period". There is a lot of debate about what exactly defines the critical period and when it ends (it's more of a gradual taper than a sharp cutoff), but there is basically no debate over the idea that children and adults have at least some fundamental differences when it comes to language learning. A non-native speaker, then, is someone who learned a given language in adulthood, after the critical period of language acquisition.

When linguists speak of a language variety, by fiat they take that variety to be defined by the speech of its native speakers. That is to say: the grammar of English is defined to be that set of rules which describes the speech of native English speakers. Where different varieties of English disagree, a thorough descriptive grammar will make note of that variation, and researchers will zoom in and study on its own terms the grammar of each relevant sub-variety. Every human is, by definition, a perfectly fluent speaker of their own idiolect in any language they acquired during childhood.

So, you asked about the difference between native and non-native "accents". In light of all the above, there are two differences:

First, there is the difference between native and non-native speech in general. Non-native speech is characterized by certain artifacts of the adult language learning process, including carry-over from one's native language(s), which broadly do not affect native speech. Thus, a non-native "accent" is different from a native "accent" in various empirical ways which are pinned down and studied in the field of second language acquisition.

By virtue of the way we have set our definitions up, above, native "accents" differ from non-native ones in that a native "accent" is in fact synonymous with a language variety; rather than being an imperfect specimen of some predefined standard language, it is a definitionally perfect exemplar of a particular linguistic system in its own right.

You could, of course, take up the linguistic system represented by the speech of some adult learner as an object of study in its own right, and some people do. But by and large, the standard which is taken up in linguistics is "language varieties are defined by the speech of their native speakers". I think this is a quite reasonable place to draw a line, especially in light of the empirical differences, as mentioned, between native and non-native speech.

well, guess I have to rebog now

sigh

Midnight Rain

I was looking around backstage, and there was in one corner was one of the exits. This was at 7:55 am, and it was pretty dark. The only light was emanating from the exit sign. It looked pretty creepy, so I ended up taking a picture of it and then edited it a few different ways

Original photo:

Edited photos:

You know we don’t actually have an accurate count of how many bilingual people there are in the US because our census asks people “do you speak a language other than English at home?” and not what some other countries might ask which is “can you comfortably have a conversation in a language other than your native language” or something similar.

When people say “20% of Americans are multilingual” they mean that 20% of Americans speak a language at home other than English.

This doesn’t account for people that speak English at home but also speak another language. I personally know multiple people who speak Spanish or another language even though they speak English at home. I know someone who speaks six languages conversationally and she’s not getting counted by these statistics because she speaks English at home.

We don’t actually know accurately how multilingual the US is. Like imagine if they just asked Dutch people if they speak a language other than Dutch at home. The Netherlands has a multilingualism rate of something like 95% but that number would probably go down substantially if you just asked if they speak Dutch at home or not.

I 100% agree with this statement. Although I have been blessed enough to have really good history teachers for most of my life (having it as a hobby is definitely so much better though)

cold tanuki udon because it was hot today

Matricaria chamomilla

Let's start this year strong ᕕ(⌐■_■)ᕗ

more plant illustrations are waiting on my ko-fi!