Excerpt from dissertation work
by Sara Lucatelli
The definitions.
In the 30'S and 50'S it was thought that whoever speaks two languages
in a native way was bilingual. This kind of person is really rare.
After it was thought that bilingual is someone who can speak easily
two languages. In this area there are so many situations starting
from the perfect bilingualism, spoken by someone native in both communities,
to the passive bilingualism, which is someone who can understand perfectly
both languages, but he speaks just one. The dominant language is the
one that the subject speaks in the most natural and easy way. We can
say individual bilingualism when it's independent from the society
that surrounds the subject, and we can say social bilingualism when
a certain community use two languages. The simultaneous bilingual
is someone who learns two or more languages from the birth. The consecutive
bilingual is someone who at the beginning learns one language and
later he learns another one. The limit is around 3 years old, as a
rule the child starts to gain the first competences of one language.
Coordinate bilingual is someone who learned both languages from the
birth and he keeps them separated in his mind (book and libro, which
is a book in Italian, are two different concepts relating to two different
experiences). The composite bilingual is someone who learned the second
language later and he understands the words using the same meaning
of the word from his mother tongue.
Parents and teachers should encourage the child to speak both languages.
So many studies made in Europe showed that keeping the mother tongue
and utilizing it at school it promoters the learning of the second
language. An immigrate child won't learn better the second language
if he will not speak his mother tongue. The mother tongue, it's not
the language spoken by his mother, but it is the language spoken in
the society where the child has grown since at that moment. Foreign
languages are learned because of a cultural or professional interest,
and they are not normally daily used. Second languages are learned
later, and they live together with the first language, they have to
be used for all their functions and they can permit the identification
with the community who surrounds the subject. The interlanguage is
a variety of language spoken by the person in a certain period. When
the subject is about to learn another language, his knowledge will
be partially influenced by the mother tongue and the other languages
learned before. The language system used by this kind of subject is
the interlanguage. The interlanguage can be showed in each levels
of learning the L2.
The Plurilingualism
The context where the Roma people live is rich and various, composed
of the first language which is the heritage who gives an identification,
related to the affects, to the daily life, to the education of concepts
and values This language is the Romany for most of Roma people. It
is also composed of some linguistic competences of other variety of
Romany or other languages related to the communication with other
Roma, or the language of the gagè ( the non - Roma people)
for the communication with the major community, his own level of knowledge
depends on the school grade or the local speech.
Jules Ronjat, a French linguist, was the first to study the simultaneous
learning: he taught his son Louis two languages: French and German.
He found out that to relate each language to one different person
helps his son to learn both languages. Another really important study
is the one of Tabouret-Keller which is about of a little girl named
Eve, she is bilingual in a bilingual community: Alsatian and French
(even the Roma are bilingual in a bilingual community). Tabouret-Keller
said that Eve understood that she was speaking two different languages
later than the other bilingual kids. Probably it's because of the
Eve's different linguistic context, where the two languages were not
so different or related to two different persons. There are three
different way to teach simultaneously two languages: one person/one
language (for example, the mother speaks one language and the father
speaks the other one), one situation/one language (for example with
the mother the child speaks one language and when he is with other
people he speaks another one), one time/one language (in the morning
one language, in the afternoon another one). Usually the child learns
the two languages even without a certain method, but, as it showed
the study of Tabouret-Keller, to relate one language to a situation
it helps the child to learn.
The research
The purpose of the research was to analyse the language of Romany
community's kids, who come in this school, and to see how the mother
tongue and the Roman dialect influence their Italian interlanguage.
At first I analysed the different mistakes that they made. Mistakes
are the different way of interlanguage used by the bilingual kids
when they try to speak a correct Italian. Later I try to explain the
reason why they usually used this mistakes. It's not just because
of the grammar rules of the mother tongue but it's also because of
the education and the linguistic rules given by their families. Also
I wanted to see that learning the languages was possible even without
a relation with a different situation. The most spoken language in
their family is the Rumanian. But in the truth there is not a distinction
between the situation when they speak one language or the other one,
because sometimes they used to speak Italian even between them. Anyway
we can say that the Rumanian is the most spoken language where they
live and Italian is the most one outside their camp. In this research
I recorded the kids talking about the images in some books, after
I analysed their language and I separated the different mistakes that
they made. With the outcomes of this research I try to see how the
Rumanian and the Roman dialect influence the Italian interlanguage
of the kids. Phonological mistakes are more than half of the mistakes.
Grammatical mistakes are less than the other one. The reason of grammar
mistakes is probably because they extend the grammar of the Rumanian
language to the Italian one, that is similar.
The twenty two percent of the mistakes are influenced by the Roman
dialect. Even if the group that I interviewed is not statistically
representative, the outcomes are that the girls are more influenced
by the Rumanian language than the boys. The boys are more influenced
by Roman dialect. Probably because of the different education: girls
are more educated in a house life, boys are more free. The family's
education it's an important item in the process of learning one language:
it's important to know how the family is open to the Italian culture
and what languages they speak in their house. The situation of the
bilingual Roma who live in their camp it is so different to the other
bilingual immigrates who live in a monolingual society. The Roma kids
are bilingual in a bilingual community which is inside a monolingual
society. We have to consider that the kids that I interviewed were
all born in Italy, so that means that the influence of the mother
tongue to the learning of the second language is less than the other
immigrates. But in the same time we have to consider that since the
kids don't go to school they hear a variety of Italian spoken by their
parents influenced by the Rumanian language. Their interlanguage is
not so good. They show difficulties about the first step of the interlanguage,
it's because of the none distinction between the two languages in
two different situations. This kids are at the first step of interlanguage
because they don't use the article, conjunctions and auxiliaries.
