My Experience In Languages: An Overview

Written By Brandon Douglas

– C2 (advanced) –

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As a language educator, I strongly believe that it is important to have a passion for language learning and communication. This passion must go beyond the professional scope and into one’s personal life. This is not to say that one should not have a healthy work/life balance–because such is essential–rather I believe that one should practice what one preaches in terms of language learning; every language educator should either have been in or is in the same situation as their students, applying instructed language learning strategies while learning a language outside of work. Doing this aids a language educator to better understand the language student perspective. Ultimately, this can help inform the educator’s teaching methodology, particularly in correction, as one will have a better comprehension as to where a student’s mistakes come from, and motivation (through relatability), as one will have developed empathy for the sociocultural particularities of a specific student population and those adjacent.

It is this belief of mine that has influenced my decision-making regarding my education in becoming a language educator. These academic decisions are, of course, different for every language educator, and not one trajectory is better than another. Each trajectory is uniquely beneficial.

So, what path did I choose for my education? Among personal, university and professional study, I have chosen to have done research on and to have learned to communicate in, at one time or another, a variety of languages around the world (it should be noted that fluency has not been reached in the majority of them). Below you will find a list–which is as exhaustive as I can recall–of all the languages that I have both dabbled in and spent an extensive amount of time studying. These languages are organized geographically in terms of origin, where geolinguistic variants are identified in parentheses and transcontinentality is simplified to one location. To make matters more interesting, I have also included some of my favourite characteristics of each language and its variants.


EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

  • English (Canadian, American, British)

    • Canadian English

      • Canadian Rising phenomenon

      • use of under-exaggeration

      • standardized combination of American- and British-isms

    • American English

      • British influence in regional dialects (pronunciation, idioms, native-speaker mistakes, socioeconomic nuance)

    • British English

      • diversity of accents

      • similarity of logic with other European languages

  • Irish

    • pronunciation rules

  • Basque

    • isolated origin

    • simple pronunciation rules

    • pronunciation of the “TT” letter combination

    • dialectal varieties

  • Portuguese (Brazilian, European)

    • Brazilian Portuguese

      • debuccalization of internal and final syllables containing DI/DE/TI/TE

      • voicing of non-existent vowels between consonants in initial and internal syllables, as well as after consonants in final syllables

      • nasality

      • rhythmic quality of speech

    • European Portuguese

      • shared logic of continuous verb forms with English

      • similarity of pronunciation to Castilian Spanish

  • Spanish (Mexican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Venezuelan, Chilean, Argentinian, Castilian)

    • Mexican Spanish

      • use of vulgarity in everyday speech, particularly in terms of endearment

      • influence of local Indigenous languages (vocabulary, pronunciation)

      • use of leísmo

    • Puerto Rican Spanish

      • high speed of speech

    • Colombian Spanish

      • rich use of colloquialisms

      • use of a variant of yeísmo

    • Venezuelan Spanish

      • influence of local Indigenous languages and Nigerian languages (vocabulary)

      • debuccalization or aspiration of the letter S at the end of syllables

      • debuccalization of final syllables containing the DI letter combination

    • Chilean Spanish

      • lack of plurality in speech

    • Argentinian Spanish

      • influence of Castilian Spanish

      • use of sheísmo and zheísmo

    • Castilian Spanish

      • lack of seseo

      • lack of yeísmo, or use of lleísmo

      • use of leísmo

      • influence of Arabic (pronunciation)

  • Catalan

    • seemingly equal combination of influences of Portuguese, Spanish and French

    • use of schwa

    • the “L·L” letter/diacritic combination

    • use of Castilian lleísmo

  • French (Quebecois, Acadian, Chiac, Caribbean, Metropolitan, Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian)

    • Quebecois French

      • influence of religion on vocabulary

      • pronunciation of the letters T and D, as well as the -AR and -OR letter combinations

    • Acadian French

      • influence of rural Metropolitan French (pronunciation)

    • Chiac

      • influence of old-fashioned North American English (pronunciation, vocabulary, rhythm)

    • Caribbean French

      • mixture of Indigenous and sub-Saharan African dialects

    • Metropolitan French

      • use of anglicisms and code switching

      • predictability of irregular forms

    • Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian French

      • influence of Arabic (pronunciation, vocabulary)

      • similarity of native-speaker mistakes to English-speaker mistakes

  • Occitan

    • pronunciation

    • rhythm

  • Danish

    • the /ð/ sound

  • Norwegian

    • Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

  • Swedish

    • pitch accent

    • subtle nasality

    • the letter Å

    • influence of religion on vocabulary

  • Esperanto

    • importance of grammatical objects

  • Slovak

    • rich use of grammatical cases

    • practical variety of diacritics

  • Italian

    • rhythm

  • Romanian

    • combination of Latin and Slavic influences

  • Greek

    • writing system

    • similarity in pronunciation to Castilian Spanish

  • Georgian

    • writing system

    • variety of “K” sounds


MIDDLE EASTERN LANGUAGES

  • Turkish

    • vowel harmony

    • alphabet

  • Hebrew

    • simplicity and economy of the writing system

    • glottal sounds


ASIAN LANGUAGES

  • Punjabi of northern India

    • staccato-like prosody

    • ultra-marked trills and fricatives

  • Mandarin

    • simplicity of verb tenses

    • monosyllabic nature of lexicon

    • lexical logic

  • Khmer

    • complexity of the writing system

  • Vietnamese

    • shared writing system with English

    • practical use of diacritics

  • Korean

    • simplicity of the writing system

  • Japanese

    • near omnisyllabic stress

    • intonation

  • Tagalog

    • shared writing system with English

    • G sounds

  • Indonesian

    • shared writing system with English

    • simplicity of grammar

    • phonetic pronunciation


Indigenous Languages

  • Ojibwe

    • agglutinative structure

  • Salish

    • richness in geographical lexicon

  • Halkomelem

    • richness in geographical lexicon

  • Hawaiian

    • simplicity of the alphabet

  • Nahuatl

    • pronunciation of the TL letter combination

  • Guaraní

    • glottal stops

    • nasality

African Languages

  • Modern Standard Arabic

    • importance of diglossia

    • influence of religion on vocabulary

  • Egyptian Arabic

    • glottal sounds

    • widespread understanding

    • influence of religion on vocabulary

  • Lingala

    • warmth in vowel pronunciation

  • Igbo

    • warmth in vowel pronunciation

  • Yoruba

    • warmth in vowel pronunciation

    • use of register

  • Mozambican Swahili

    • warmth in vowel pronunciation

    • rich use of cases

    • subtlety in pronunciation of the MB letter combination

  • Xhosa

    • click sounds

  • Afrikaans

    • glottal sounds

    • frequency of cognates with English


Apart from English, what languages do you have experience with? Are you learning any other languages in addition to English? Let me know what those are in the comments below.

Brandon Douglas
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