I have spent about 50 years wondering why next to no Danes are able to communicate privately or professionally in the real world of Greenland in spite of the fact that hundreds of highly motivated Danes every year enroll in Greenlandic for beginners.
After many years of studies of Greenlandic and extensive readings in the international literature about L2 acquisition I believe that I glimpse central parts of an explanation though not the full explanation. Unfortunately, the factors are interconnected in rather complicated patterns so to understand the next few paragraphs you will need to keep a number of balls in the air. I cannot offer you an uncomplicated explanation of interconnected, complicated facts but here is an attempt to keep it is down-to-earth as possible.
Learning a language and acquiring a language are very different situations
During the 60-s a dramatic paradigm shift in L2 teaching took place when next to all applied linguists and language teachers gave up on the latin (paradigmatic) tradition with grammar and canonized (literary) texts. Instead the new Nature Methods focused on spoken language and real communication. Technically speaking teaching no longer aimed at linguistic competence but rather at communicative competence. Latin tradition and grammar was to quote a famous sentence from the period “a way to teach students to keep quiet in correct English”.
This shift in methodology caused the rise of a new paradigm in applied linguistics where acquisition rather than learning became the core of the science not least because modern psycholinguistics increasingly explicit rejected the belief that grammar-based learning naturally leads to real communicative competence. Genuine acquisition takes place via very different means namely via exposure to large amounts of comprehensible input from the target language. That is not via written pattern practice drills, translations and production training. In short, good acquisition of the target language starts with lots and lots of conscious listening and only occasional own production.
Please observe that this is exactly what we experience daily in Denmark and Greenland with the younger generations acquiring English in no time from pop-culture and the web.
This fundamental difference between learning and acquisition and the necessity of comprehensible input has for more than 50 years been the core in research and methodology development in the psycholinguistic paradigm of The Input Hypothesis. Among other things with the grammar concept recently being redefined from learning paradigms by heart to being an ad hoc tool for a deep understanding of exactly the word, the problem or the sentence that the student is struggling with in the real world this very minute. The strategy has been termed Integrated Focus on Forms, that is grammar as a helper in understanding exactly the problem a student face exactly now. Paradigms are considered of very limited use.
Internationally L2 almost exclusively starts in the acquisition spectrum. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Greenlandic L2. Here almost all courses, all compendia and primers base on a continuous learning-tradition unbroken since at least 1851 .. and the production of Greenlandic-speaking non-Greenlanders in self-govedned Greenland is steadily close to zero.
Greenlandic is typologically very different from other languages you have acquired the skill to master
The natural acquisition process does not start automatically in Greenlandic. For many reasons
It is generally supposed that the long words and the complex word formation in Greenlandic plays important parts in explaining why Danes so seldomly acquire Greenlandic. Words are, all right, long and the amount of derivational morphemes may seem overwhelming but we need to look elsewhere for the characteristica that more than anything else block the acquisition process even though they to a lesser degree immediately catch attention than do word formation and word length. Still, they are the real blocks for acquiring real Greenlandic so since our mission is to provide the tools for a bigger number of foreigners to acquire the ability of genuine communicative competence privately and professionally there is no way to surpass the real problems and do something about them. Even if it all is a bit technical and abstract.
A non-Greenlander embarking on Greenlandic L2 will always attempt to dechipher a Greenlandic utterance from left toward right having the subject as his starting point. Therefore Lene ilinniarpoq (Lene studies) is a sentence with few challenges both for perception and later production. Maliup Lene ilinniartippaa (Malik teaches Lene) holds a few problems but will after all unlikely pose insurmountable problems since the subject (Malik) matches our subject expectations so much that perception will come easily.
In the real world outside the L2 classroom one hears only few sentences with subject information in the far left end of the sentences. This is exactly where a learner in the initial stages runs into problems with perception. Examples like Lene ilinniartippat (You taught Lene), .. Lene ilinniartikkipput (.. that we have taught Lene) or Lene ilinniartikkanni pikkoreqaaq (Because I taught Lene she is skilled) need to be dechiphered from right toward left. We namely do not get information about the subjects in any of the sentences until we reach the last word (typically the main verb). Not until then we get information about who does what in the sentence and whether the sentence is an independent (main) clause or a dependent clause. Students without extensive exposure to comprehensible input therefore almost as a rule wrongly perceive all 3 sentences mentioned above à la “It is something about Lene teaching”. They normally never make it to the conjunctions and the subjects and objects burried in the very last inflectional ending.
In Greenlandic we have no personal pronouns (I, you, her, she etc.) in a way directly comparable to pronouns as we normally understand pronouns. And conjunctions like that, because, if etc. are for the most non-existing. Equivalences to pronouns and conjunctions bury themselves in the verbal inflections. So to perceive a Greenlandic utterance we need to learn to twist our perception 180 degrees and start understanding from right toward left. This is not a capacity that comes to a grown-up student for free. On the contrary the learner needs hundreds or thousands of successful dechipherings of real language before internalizing such skills safely enough for real communicative use.
Of course these thousands of potential training sentences exist in the real world in Greenland but for a beginner there is much too far between useable sentences. To be useable they need to be comprehensible or almost comprehensible. Otherwise they will not do as training data. There is unknown words, derivatives and inflectional morphemes in almost every sentence the beginner meets outside the L2 classroom. Accordingly the input he is exposed to is not comprehensible og therefore no acquisition will take place.
And here we made it to the most important reason why next to no Danes know how to communicate in Greenlandic. The necessary input students got almost automatically when they acquired English or French simply does not exist in Greenlandic for quite a period.
.. og hvad kan alt det her så bruges til i praksis?
Da jeg gik i gang med revisionen af Lær grønlandsk med Per Langgård i 2022 forstod jeg, at udfordringen ikke er at levere flere og bedre paradigmer og grammatiske forklaringer (dem har jeg selv og mange andre i årenes løb leveret i store mængder), men at tage fat på det virkelige problem, nemlig manglen på træningsdata i form af comprehensible input.
For første gang nogensinde er disse altafgørende træningsdata nu tilgængelige. På www.learngreenlandic.com findes nemlig en sætningsgenerator, der på ethvert tidspunkt i tilegnelsesforløbet danner sætninger i alle optænkelige kombinationer af alle de gloser, tilhæng og grammatik, som på det punkt i tilegnelsesprocessen er comprehensible for eleven. Og i et polysyntetisk sprog er det enorme datamængder, generatoren kan producere.
Som et eksempel kan nævnes, at eleverne efter nogle måneder vil have truffet ca. 80 stammer og tilhæng samt en lille snes endelser. Af dette materiale kan generatoren danne mere end 12.000 løbende ord af hvilke der kan genereres en næsten uendelighed af sætninger. Efter ca. et halvt års studier vil systemet generere mere end en halv million løbende ord og efter et års tid et tocifret millioantal. Eleverne løber helt enkelt aldrig tør for relevant træningsstof, som hele tiden presser dem til kanten af deres forståelsesevne selv om sætningerne aldrig indeholder andet og mere end kendt stof.
Dette er præcis vejen til det punkt, hvor grønlandskundervisningen for første gang nogensinde nærmer sig tilegnelsesprocessen som den kendes fra alle andre fremmedsprog. Når eleverne har hørt og forstået ord og kombinationer så mange gange, at de er i stand til at erkende det sprog, de faktisk behersker, midt i sumpen af endnu uforstået sprog, har de det fundament at stå på, der muliggør at de kan fokusere på nyt og ukendt stof og efterhånden stilladsere kompetencerne frem mod funktionel sprogbeherskelse.
Det er præcis sådan, vi nogenlunde ubesværet har lært de andre fremmedsprog, vi kan, og det er præcis sådan, vi også skal lære grønlandsk.
Og vi ved at det virker!
Per Langgård
1: Note in this connection an often seen flaw caused by bad teaching when well-meaning friends and teachers try to “help” the students by extraposing non-existing “subjects” and make them produce sentences like Uanga Perimik ateqarpunga where uanga is supposed to match the pronoun for 1. person singular (I). Only that this sentence does not mean unmarked “My name is Per” rather an utterance with a marked subject à la “It is I who am Per” ↩
Since the new constitution in 1953 hundreds of learners have every year enrolled in Greenlandic L2 classes but only a few dozens ever acquired the ability to communicate meaningfully. meaningful communication here meaning the learners’ ability to perceive normal private and professional language well enough to navigate safely in Greenlandic and the ability to express themselves fast enough and understandable enough for communication to be tolerable for all involved.
The subject of Greenlandic has subsequently had a low percentile success rate. It is incredibly unsatisfactory and a connotation that frequently has been discussed both in Inatsisartut and between people.
It does not necessarily have to be this way, as a path into the language exists, which my own and others children have found, and like all Good Language Learners that I have ever met, also have followed. The road to learning Greenlandic is through grasping the morass of complex and incomprehensible sounds and internalizing them one step at a time. When this first step is taken a new space is created for building more on top. This is the sole strategy of acquisition that we have both theoretic and practical evidence to show it works.
No one has learned Greenlandic by learning the grammar by heart or memorizing the Greenlandic dictionary or even by signing up for a course. These methods enhance the motivation and probably also aid the learning curve, if properly performed, however, without the real language in great amounts one will not acquire adequate use of the language.
Learn Greenlandic with Per Langgård has recently been revised so that the system helps you find the only real teacher you have, namely the language in it self with its long words and confusing numerous suffixes. With the help of new Greenlandic language technology, we are for the first time ever able to provide a comprehensible input in sufficient quantities for one to internalize the primary knowledge. Over time, this will standardize your abilities enough to reach the target of communicating in a meaningful way in the real Greenlandic world.
Greenlandic is a vital language that can be acquired like any other, however the polysynthetic nature of the language requires a certain concentration. There’s a jungle of “good advice” like “just say something” and “learn certain phrases by heart, then the rest will come”. These can effectively halt your learning because Greenlandic is not like English, where such tips may have helped. These strategies will block your further learning of the language. So choose your guru with care and remember that the acquisition of any new language is an individual process that you alone are in charge of.
Best of luck
Per Langgård
1: En dækket henvisning til en af de mest centrale studier i fremmedsprogsindlæring: Naiman, N. et al. The Good Language Learner. Ontario Instiute for Studies in Education. 1978 ↩
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