random linguistic question

For anyone who speaks Arabic native, fluent, third, started two weeks ago or even cares....

Over the last nine months between work and other stuff, I lost duolingo entirely and went back to start over my Hindi (interesting and related here, but I'll come back) I saw they added Arabic, Navajo, and a couple of others, and even if I don't plan to start anything new, I like to start the first lesson to look around, kick the tires, etc. Then I spent three hours happily working through the first two Arabic alphabet skills before I realized what I was doing, which is super weird since I've never actually in my entire life spent any amount of time looking at Arabic script other than when friends would write things and I'd say "pretty" because yes it is, and also, Americans are intimidated by words that look like modern art to us or something, IDK. Americans, dude; we're like this.

I do not know whether this is true or not, but Arabic within the context of Duolingo shares a lot of basic southern drawl rules in how to deal with vowels and the perfectly logical uses of 'ha', 'ya', and 'ay' when vowels try to be boring. I'm not saying I am going to expertise this shit, but it's nice to be hanging in a language that is like 'maybe more Atlanta around here, but here, rural central Texas farmer is perfect, well done!'

Which has had the funny side effect of having to work codeswitching my English out of 'so that's a lot of drawl' which I can hear and have to fight down. This really doesn't happen anymore unless I'm in a conversation with another Texan (born or assimilated) and on first drawl, we both devolve. (We don't do this around Yankees unless we're screwing with you. Yes, you aren't crazy, it is deliberate, we call this 'fun'.) I never defaulted into a hard drawl--Texas variations include twang and a lot lot lot of Mexican Spanish and Texan Spanish influence and my parents spoke two different dialects of Central Texas (Austin and rural Hill Country)--but once you get any drawl variation, it's fairly easy to adjust to anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon from Kentucky and Georgia to northern Louisiana (French-Creole influence then becomes a thing and you have to rebase the rules).

More importantly, I never ever do it at work, because while everyone is fluent in English, I use 'diction is your friend' rules. We all work in tech, and often, I'm the only native English speaker in the room with everyone else super fluent in English but in second, third, fourth, and fifth position with diffent first language start values of, in order of frequency, Hindi and Telugu (yes, I do feel inferior thanks for asking). So I start precise and read the room as Hindi-first language and Telugu-first language speakers also have some variation in how they learned English. Again, perfect fluency everyone (see me, inferior) but that means it's super easy not to even realize something may be off and double check.

(Note: for any native Hindi speakers who come to Texas; eighteen months, you will be saying y'all regularly, lose some 'g' on more than a few 'ing's, and that's just to start, you won't notice, and that means Texas has claimed you for its own for all time and you're now Texan. You can physically leave, sure, but your linguistic English centers are now ours. Y'all will never leave your vocabulary and those 'g's are pretty much lost forever unless you concentrate very hard speaking for the rest of your life. I didn't make the rules, okay, I'm a victim too, this is just how Texas rolls. Welcome, my brothers and sisters; we're all in this together.)

Now, back to Hindi, which is what i was doing before Arabic southern drawl seduction; I erased all my progress because I remembered nothing, my own fault; it took me way too long to form pattern-recognition of Hindi script when they got to consonant-vowel sounds. When I started, I confirmed I have no goddamn language centers: I knew nothing.

This depressing state of affairs continued until lesson one, level three, and it wasn't like a dramatic flash of memory, an amnesia patient going "I REMEMEBER EVERYTHING" but just--there. And this time, my brain set up correct organization.

The first time, it took me a month to get through alphabet lessons one and two, all five levels, by which I mean until I did all lessons perfectly and that was a lot of repetition for something that still barely stuck. This time, it was three hours, give or take, and even better, everything was organizing immediately by consonant --> consonant-vowel --> consonant-vowel-vowel, etc. And I cannot say this enough; this is not like accessing active memory. I don't actively remember anything from before, but I do know that unlike last time, it's persisting. I no longer feel like I'm writing on a white board with an almost empty marker I keep having to go back and frantically rewrite as it fades (quickly), but have graduated to a number two pencil where I need to be careful of smears but remains legible.

Right now, anyone multi-lingual is wondering what sort of deal with Satan happened that I acquired my native tongue or even understand what language is; welcome to my life. I think my language centers weren't appropriately tested before deployment to the live environment via birth and so are not working by design. And this is why testing is important.

Comments

Re: Testing is always vital!

[ratcreature]

I'm pretty sure you can drawl German, just not with the standard pronunciation. German is very diverse with regional dialects, as much or more so than English. Even as a non-native speaker I have rarely any trouble with regional variations of English, but German dialects often aren't mutually intelligible for native speakers from a different region and people have to code switch to standard.

Not all German dialects do the glottal stop, and not all to the same extent. Like I think Swiss German doesn't use glottal stops, but then the dialects there are really hard to understand. But I think their regional version of standard German doesn't do glottal stops either. Neither does Austrian German, I think. But that's pretty understandable compared to Swiss.

I have actually seen Austrian German described as "drawling" in English. I'm just from the North and we put in more glottal stops than average I think, at least I've seen pronunciations with extra glottal stops in the middle of words labbeled as "Northern".

But if you listened to an Austrian German speaking their dialect you'd hear that it sounded significantly different from Standard even without understanding anything. Though I'm not sure it's quite analogous to Texan versus Midwestern English.

ETA: Here is a YouTube video with someone older from Vienna talking in his dialect (https://youtu.be/0bIcZVLmuFY). I can mostly understand what he's saying after acclimating a little, but it's quite removed from standard.