On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 16:18 +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: > Not just languages, dialects. Do you find yourself talking say regionally > accented Italian with someone who has a strong regional accent, and a more > "BBC Italian" (or is it RAI Italian) with someone who has that kind of > educated upper class accent?
it's not clear that the study controlled for class and context. the bilingual hispanic women may well have had a totally different context in which they spoke spanish from where and when they spoke english. this is in fact typical of the US, and to some extent london, which is why i don't pay too much attention to the "200 languages spoken here" rhetoric of new yorkers. in brussels, where expensive pilates studios advertise personal trainers' fluency in english french dutch german spanish italian greek portuguese polish... i doubt that the quadrilingual customers would become different people when they switch between most of the languages they know, except perhaps (depending how long they've been away from home) when they speak their mother tongue to another native speaker. the administrator at my institute in the netherlands who's from across the border in belgium switches between dutch french english and german several times an hour and is certainly not changing personality since it's all in the same context. perhaps when she switches to limburgs dialect she's a different person... but probably not when it's with the accountant, who happens to speak the dialect too. the results of specific studies are unfortunately constrained by the specific subject studied; it is so easy, and sloppy, to generalise. to be fair, the sloppy generalisation is rarely in the study itself (and i have not read this one) but in the press and PR articles around it.; -rishab
