I recently stumbled across this article written by Eva Sandoval for the BBC, and I feel it sums up my feelings on language fluency almost exactly. I think people generally have a picture of what it means to be fluent in a language, given pretty well every adult on the planet could be considered fluent in at least one language. The interesting thing to me is at what point in someone’s language development do they become a fluent user of the language? What are the qualities that we look for in fluent users of language?
The article describes things like being indistinguishable from a native speaker to a foreigner, speech rate and utterance rate, and a whole lot of other measures of just how well someone manages to speak a language.
One of the most important aspects to fluency that I feel, being bilingual, is the amount of effort the language takes for the user to use. I think that fluent users of a language are different from proficient users of a language. For me personally, the way this manifests is that I feel fluent in Spanish, but I don’t feel proficient with it in various situations.
The amount of effort it takes for me to speak Spanish is very little; there isn’t a significant difference in the energy expended vs. when I’m speaking in English. On the other hand, listening in Spanish takes a great deal more effort for me than listening in English, and similarly so do reading and writing. In that sense, I would consider myself a fluent speaker, but a non-fluent listener, reader, and writer.
Additionally, there are different contexts and situations in which we use language that we may be more or less proficient in. I don’t think anyone would have mistaken me for a non-fluent speaker of English during my first week working at Starbucks, but I certainly wasn’t proficient at it for a while. Similarly, I am generally proficient at speaking Spanish, in particular when speaking about soccer. However, I’ve never used Spanish in a professional context, and so I wouldn’t be proficient in those situations. In different situations then, I am certainly not proficient and this lack of proficiency could imply a lack of fluency, which I don’t think is the case for my Spanish overall.
One aspect of language fluency I think the article misses is the cultural context. A language and the culture of the places that speak it are inexorably intertwined; to separate them is to lose large pieces of both. As an example, I learned Spanish from my Uruguayan mother, which means that for the most part I speak Rioplatense Spanish. This means that I can sometimes struggle when speaking to Spanish speakers from Spain due to my lack of familiarity with their 2nd person plural conjugations. I might appear like a native speaker when speaking to a Uruguayan, but to a Spaniard I may not appear as such.
However, I was not raised in Uruguay so I lack much of that cultural background. This means that a lot of things like idioms and turns-of-phrase I simply lack the knowledge of or context to use properly. I don’t think any Uruguayan would mistake me for being a native after an extended conversation, does that still make me a fluent speaker of the language? I don’t think this means that someone learning a second language can never be a fluent user of that language, since to a certain extent the cultural context can be learned of. But one’s understanding of the culture of the language contributes greatly to whether or not they would be considered fluent.
All of this thought was spurred on by my recent job hunt, where I have been finding myself filling out a great deal many job application forms, on which there are often fields for which languages you know and the extent to which you know them. Typically they will ask you which language you know, and then for each language make you choose a skill level for various different aspects of a language. On Workday forms, for example, they ask you whether you are a Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced / Fluent user of the language for Overall / Comprehension / Reading / Speaking / Writing. To top it off, they also have a checkbox for whether you are fluent in the language.
I have been finding filling out these fields to be rather annoying, because the words used here are meaningless, at least to me. Given the discussion above, I think a more correct form would ask questions specifically for things that might be relevant for the job. If it’s an application for a retail position, maybe ask questions like:
- Are you comfortable understanding speech in this language in a retail context?
- Are you comfortable making recommendations, building rapport with customers, and providing support for purchases in this language?
For a more business-oriented role, maybe ask things like:
- Are you able to use the language for formal business communication in writing, communicating clearly, quickly, and with the correct tone?
- Could you hold a conversation in a professional capacity in this language?
I’m mostly just throwing out ideas here, but I think these questions immediately give a much stronger picture of how competent the person is in using the language, which for a job application at the very least is the most important thing. Ultimately, fluency is very loosely defined and is closely related to competency, but I don’t think these two concepts are exactly the same thing.