Item — HN Reader

That's an interesting mixture!

I know our child with only English and Finnish-speaking parents always preferred to reply in the local language (Finnish) for a long time. He would understand English questions and conversation, but if I said "Do you want to go outside?" the answer would be "Ei!" (no).

It took a year or so before he was consistent in replying to speakers in the appropriate language, and even then sometimes the languages would get mixed up , mid-sentence at times.

Even now I think it is apparent that Finnish is his real native language. Although his English is basically perfect there are rare lapses in grammar that make it obvious he's constructed the sentence in Finnish and translated to English rather literally.

2 comments

Yes, you can detect Finglish working its way in. Finnish overloads verbs with multiple semantics more than English does, and it sets off the Faulty English Detector.

Mostly, when he's tired or distracted, I hear questions like "Where the cat is?" instead of "Where is the cat?", or "What the clock is?" rather than "What is the time?"

I can see where both of those come from, but 95% of the time he asks questions "properly". I realized recently it has been years since he got a persons gender wrong - that was a hard one for him to learn, as with all Finnish people, but it seems to have finally sunk in.

Some errors in English come straight from Finnish, and only sheer quantity of exposure can overcome them I guess.

And consider one of the more subtle English constructions - when to use "so" or "such" with an adjective or adverb. This might be the most common error I see from Finns, and again, perhaps only sheer exposure - esp. written English - might cure it.

We got a Turkish/Greek rescue ~ 3 years ago. Wildly intelligent, can follow simple commands in both languages but prefers to protest in Greek (oi!) and switches to Turkish whenever she wants something (isterim!)

A rescue child?

I've only ever heard "rescue" used for shelter animals, and everything made sense until "both languages."

Then I was really amazed to hear about your talking dog, and after a few reads I'm still not sure what you rescued.

Also, "can follow simple commands"?!?

Maybe the dog barks in Greek but begs in Turkish?

(I'm just poking fun at some of the parent comments who talk about their children like pet commodities)

I too am highly perplexed