Languages (was Re: [Sca-cooks] globetrotting)

[Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir]

>
> I should point out that it also boggles me the number of people in the US
> that are barely able to speak English, and no other language, when I look
> at Europe, where the majority of people know a couple languages, if not
two
> and three...

Yes, well, I suppose if Europe had always been united in a single country
and only one language was spoken there, we wouldn't be too interested in
learning other languages either. The need simply wouldn't be there and only
people who were really interested in other cultures and languages would
bother to study them. You Americans don't need to learn other languages as
much as Europeans do, simply because you are so big.

Here in Iceland, 11-year old children are already learning two foreign
languages, a third one is added at age 15 or 16 and sometimes a fourth one
too, so you can't enter university, for instance, without having studied at
least three languages besides Icelandic. But then, we are so few (270,000)
and most of the university textbooks will be in foreign languages - besides,
many young Icelanders have to seek education abroad, as the colleges and
universities here simply are too small to offer everything.

I can write English and Danish quite fluently (speaking these languages is
another matter altogether); I can read and understand spoken Faroese,
Norwegian, Swedish and German, and I can at least cook from recipes written
in Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian and Afrikaans. (I have cooked from
recipes in Hungarian and Papuanese Pidgin English too, but only with the aid
of a dictionary.) But I only consider myself really fluent in Icelandic.

Another side of the coin is that Icelandic, having changed relatively little
in the past 1000 years, is now under a heavy assault from English. I'm not
completely opposed to adopting English/international terms when new words
are needed instead of inventing new Icelandic terms or giving obsolete words
a new meaning (for instance "sími", an old word that means "thread" was used
to translate "telephone" when the first phones came here a century ago and
was quickly accepted by everyone). No, what really worries me is when young
people use English words instead of fairly common Icelandic words - and may
not even know the word in their own language. That is a danger signal to me.
I remember how shocked I was when my son (14 at the time) asked: "Mom, what
is sarcasm in Icelandic?" It is absolutely certain that he will never again
forget the word "kaldhæðni", at least.

Nanna