Language barrier

Language barrier is a figurative phrase used primarily to indicate the difficulties faced when people, who have no language in common, attempt to communicate with each other. It may also be used in other contexts.

Language barrier and communication

Typically, little communication occurs unless one or both parties learns a new language, which requires an investment of time and effort. People traveling abroad often encounter a language barrier.

People who come to a new country at an adult age, when language learning is a cumbersome process, can have particular difficulty "overcoming the language barrier". Similar difficulties occur at multinational meetings, where translation services can be costly, hard to obtain, and prone to error.

Language barrier and migration

Language barriers also influence migration. Emigrants from a country are far more likely to move to a destination country which speaks the same language as the emigrant's country. Thus, most British emigration has been to Australia, Canada, or New Zealand, most Spanish emigration has been to Latin America, and Portuguese emigration to Brazil. And even if the destination country does not speak the emigrant's language, it is still more likely to receive immigration if it speaks a language "related" to that of the emigrant. The most obvious example is the great migration of Europeans to the Americas. The United States, with its dominant Germanic English language, attracted primarily immigrants from Northern Europe, where Germanic tongues were spoken or familiar. Southern Europeans, such as Italians, were more likely to move to Latin American countries such as Argentina and Brazil. In the United States, about one-third of Euro-Americans are of mainly German ancestry, and Italians are a similar large fraction of Argentina's population today. Although there were, for example, Italians moving to the United States and Germans to South America, these were exceptions to an overall trend.

In modern times, emigration from small English-speaking Caribbean countries to the United States is on average two or three times higher per capita than from non-English-speaking countries. In Europe, where many Eastern Europeans have been moving to Western Europe, Romanians tend to move to other Latin-speaking countries such as Italy, Spain, and France, whereas Slavic emigrants do not have a similar discrimination because no Western European country is Slavic-speaking. However, since English is the most commonly studied foreign language in Eastern Europe, the British Isles tend to receive more migration from those countries.

Auxiliary languages as a solution

Since the late 1800s, auxiliary languages have been available to help overcome the language barrier. These languages were traditionally written or "constructed" by a person or group. Originally, the idea was that two people who wanted to communicate could learn an auxiliary language with little difficulty and could use this language to speak or write to each other.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a second approach to auxiliary languages emerged: that there was no need to construct an auxiliary language, because the most widely spoken languages already had many words in common. These words could be developed into a simple language. People in many countries would understand this language when they read or heard it, because its words also occurred in their own languages.

This approach addressed a perceived limitation of the available auxiliary languages: the need to convince others to learn them before communication could take place. The newer auxiliary languages could also be used to learn ethnic languages quickly and to better understand one's own language.

Examples of traditional auxiliary languages, sometimes called "schematic languages", are Esperanto, Ido, and Volapük. Examples of the newer approach, sometimes called "naturalistic languages", are Interlingua, Occidental, and Latino Sine Flexione. Only Esperanto and Interlingua are widely used today, although Ido is also in use.

Other uses of "language barrier"

*SIL discusses "language as a major barrier to literacy" when a speaker's language is unwritten. [http://www.sil.org/literacy/lit90/mothtong.htm SIL, "Mother Tongues: Breaking the Language Barrier"]

Misconceptions about "language barrier"

It is sometimes assumed that when multiple languages exist in a setting, there must therefore be multiple language barriers. Multilingual societies generally have lingua francas and traditions of its members learning more than one language, an adaptation which while not entirely removing barriers of understanding belies the notion of impassable language barriers.

References

ee also

*Multilingualism
*International auxiliary language

External links

* [http://www.interlingua.com An Interlingua website]

* [http://www.esperanto.org An Esperanto website]

* [http://idolinguo.org.uk/#general An Ido website]