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Megaman en m (talk | contribs) I don't see how this is at all relevant |
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Guy asks rhetorically, "Which of the two languages spoken in Port-Olry do you think the Catholic missionaries learnt and used? Could that possibly be because it was easier than the other?"
== Perceived difficulty ==
A common conventional wisdom is that some languages are inherently harder than others. This belief applies to first and second language learning. It is not supported by scientific evidence.
The perceived difficulty of second language acquisition entirely depends on the language one’s learning and its relations to one’s native language. In a study conducted in 2013, scientists <ref>{{cite book |last=Cysouw |first=Michael |editor1-last=Borin |editor1-first=Lars |editor2-last=Saxena |editor2-first=Anja |title=Approaches to Measuring Linguistic Differences |publisher=De Gruyter Mouton |year=2013 |pages=57-82 |chapter=Predicting language-learning difficulty |isbn=978-3-11-048808-1}}</ref> used [[Foreign Service Institute|FSI]]’s data to try to identify the criteria that have an influence on the difficulty of foreign language learning.
* First, a language that is genetically related to the learner's native language will be easier to learn than a language from a different family. This is mostly due to language structure. The closer a language is to another, the more similar their structures will be (this applies to sounds, grammar, vocabulary, and so on).
* Another criterion is the [[writing system]]. It will be quicker to learn a language when writing with the same writing system as the first language, than a language using another writing system.
Therefore, the most complicated language to learn for an English native speaker would be for example a non-[[Indo-European languages|Indo European]] [[Ergative-absolutive alignment | ergative language]] with a different writing system that uses postpositions.
Another study <ref>{{cite book |last=Stevens |first=Paul B. |editor1-last=Wahba |editor1-first=Kassem M. |editor2-last=Taha |editor2-first=Zeinab A. |editor3-last=England |editor3-first=Liz |title=Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals in the 21st Century |publisher=Lawrence Erlbaum Associates |year=2006 |pages=35-66 |chapter=Is Spanish really easy? Is Arabic really so hard? Perceived difficulty in learning arabic as a second language |isbn=978-0-203-76390-2}}</ref> conducted in 2006, started with the commun idea that Arabic is a difficult language for an English native speaker, more than for example Spanish or German. This study is also based on the FSI classification of languages according to their difficulty, placing Arabic in the fourth (relatively difficult) group. The study thus compares Arabic on many different levels with other languages, contrasting that in this case, Arabic is not that difficult compared to others. It gives many examples of characteristics which are easier in Arabic than in other languages perceived as easier to learn. For instance, verbs in Arabic, despite the complexity of their consonant roots, are easier to learn than those in other languages, because Arabic has very specific sub-rules and only one [[Morphology (linguistics)#Paradigms_and_morphosyntax|verb paradigm]]. Spanish, as well as other languages, is therefore more complicated than Arabic in its verb tenses; French is more complicated in its phoneme-graph correspondence; German, Polish and Greek, in their complex case [[inflection|inflections]] and Japanese in its complicated writing system. Despite the few easier characteristics of Arabic compared to others languages, English native speakers perceive this language as more difficult because it differs to a large extent from the same English characteristics. There are thus many parameters that can be used to measure the difficulty of a language compared to another.
This belief is not often addressed for [[language acquisition| first language learning]]. If it was, it could give some insight on if some languages are inherently more difficult than others to learn. However, some studies look at some linguistics characteristics in particular. There is some evidence<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Bleses |first1=Dorthe |last2=Vach |first2=Werner |last3=Slott |first3=Malene |last4=Wehberg |first4=Sonja |last5=Thomsen |first5=Pia |last6=Madsen |first6=Thomas O. |last7=Basbøll |first7=Hans |year=2008 |title=Early vocabulary development in Danish and other languages: A CDI-based comparison |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-language/article/early-vocabulary-development-in-danish-and-other-languages-a-cdibased-comparison/D12A283664A8BA4A695D0DDF3378555A |journal=Journal of Child Language |volume=35 |issue=3 |pages=619-650 |doi= 10.1017/S0305000908008714 |access-date=2020-05-18}}</ref> that sound structure might influence early lexical development in children. Danish children were found to have a slight delay compared to other languages, who show a similar pattern. On the other hand, they seem to catch up on the delay when they reach two years of age. This shows that sound structure might have an influence on the difficulty of a language. There is, however, not enough evidence to confidently say that some languages are easier or harder to learn as a first language.
==Language complexity and creoles==
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