Talk:Interlanguage

Linguistics: Applied Linguistics C‑class Mid‑importance

	Linguistics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Linguistics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of linguistics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LinguisticsWikipedia:WikiProject LinguisticsTemplate:WikiProject LinguisticsLinguistics
C	This article has been rated as C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by Applied Linguistics Task Force.

How is an interlanguage different from a pidgin? I'm doing a report on pidgins and creoles and I don't quite understand the distinction.

Nabarry 01:13, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A pidgin is a means to an end - create some communication between speakers of different languages without anyone going through the trouble of learning the other language "properly". Any ad-hoc construction or expression is acceptable in the early development stages of a pidgin, as long as it is actually comprehensible to others in the same context. I.e. a pidgin will NOT strive to "become" one or the other of the two (or more) languages that are involved - as soon as the communicative goal is achieved, no further development or invention is necessary.

An interlanguage, in turn, is ultimately something that has only ONE speaker, the learner. At the very beginning of language learning, the learner has some idea of what the foreign language is like, how it works. According to these ideas, s/he produces utterances. Now some of these ideas may be correct (at least for the time being), others may be wrong - the learner will (hopefully) notice that, and at some point come up with a new and better idea of how the other language works. And so on. And that's what the interlanguage is: the developing "idea of how the other language works".

IMHO "groups of speakers of an interlanguage" is a meaningful claim only from a typologocial perspective - although every learner will develop their very specific, own interlanguage, we can expect that the interlanguages of native speakers of the same L1 with similar language biographies, learning the same L2, will show more similarities with each other than with the interlanguage of e.g. a native speaker of language X, or with the interlanguage of someone who boosts their learning of L2 with their knowledge about a typologically related language Y.

That any help? -- Molasaria 20:04, 6 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Molasaria - I've edited part of your quote above and added it to the article. It was just such a short and well-worded description of interlanguage that I couldn't resist! Of course, I'll take it down if you don't want it there. — GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 05:31, 19 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Embarazada

Contributors to this article may be interested to know that the article on Embarazada (the Spanish for "pregnant" and an example of a false friend) is currently up for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Embarazada. Flapdragon 10:23, 12 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

References

To do: Change references to Template:Harvnb and citation templates. — GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 04:49, 19 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cleanup

I have just copied a lot of content over from second language acquisition. Because of that, this article has started to look a lot more like an essay, and so I put up a cleanup template until I can get round to fixing it. If anyone wants to have a go at cleaning it up first, you are more than welcome. It needs:

Clearer sections
Readability editing
More citations
Citation checking, as a lot of them are vague.

— GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 04:54, 19 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]