Language Interference
«An educated person is different from an uneducated person that he continues to consider his education unfinished.»
- Konstantin Simonov
After the publication of Uriel Weinreich’s work “Language in Contacts” in 1953, the term ‘linguistic interference’ received wide scientific distribution. According to Weinreich’s views, language contact is a condition for interference to occur. Uriel Weinreich defines interference as a deviation from the language norms that arise in bilingual speech as a result of the fact that they speak foreign languages.
In linguistics, interference is a consequence of the influence of one language on another.
Interference is the interaction of language systems in conditions of bilingualism or polylingualism, which is caused by their structural differences and manifests itself in deviation from the codified norms of speech of the contacting languages.
Interference is possible at all levels of the language system — phonemic, morphemic, lexical and syntactic, but it is especially noticeable in phonetics.
Bilingualism and language contact are thus a prerequisite for intervention. The place of linguistic interference is the person himself. A person communicates in a foreign language or performs a translation from one language to another when trying to compensate some elements, phenomena and functions of one language system, elements, phenomena and functions from another. This can lead to accent, literalism, distortion of meaning or various deviations from the original, but can also help with communication and translation in some cases.
The manifestation of interference at different levels of the language system is due to structural-typological correspondence or inconsistencies of the contacting languages.
Simply put, when a person knows two or more languages, their influence is visible in his speech. First of all, it is a foreign accent — a pronunciation that does not conform to the standard of the language. Therefore, if you want to improve your pronunciation and get rid of the accent, you need to spend a lot of time doing phonetic base exercises. You can get rid of any accent if you follow the daily sound exercises.
The next manifestation of interference is wrong grammatical constructions. The way to solve the problem is to develop grammar to automatism.
Literalism — translation of a phrase from your native language literally. This applies to cases of literal translation of phraseology. For example, we will not be told anything about the meaning of phraseology translated literally from English as “white elephant.” ‘White elephant’ is a English idiom, means some property that the owner is forced to maintain, but in return does not receive any benefit from it. During political meetings with the U.S. authorities in 1959, no one understood the literal translation of the expression of the head of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev: “I shall show you Kuzkin’s mother!” The meaning of the phrase was completely incomprehensible and it made the threat completely ominous. Subsequently, the expression “Kuzkin’s mother” was also used to describe the atomic bombs of the USSR. “To show Kuzka’s mother to someone” is a Russian idiomatic rough and simple or jokingly ironic expression meaning “to threaten someone with punishment, massacre.”
It is necessary to replenish your vocabulary and constantly teach phraseologists.
Living in a foreign language community, you need to improve not only a foreign language, but also your native language. Being abroad for a long time and not using the skills of their native language, they are erased. Of course, it takes time to practice for knowledge to recover, but still there is an accent, students cannot use words in their speech because they have moved from active to passive stock.
To improve your foreign and native languages, you need to constantly improve your education. It is no secret that the more educated a person is, the more literate his speech is, whatever language he speaks. The best way to improve your intelligence, culture and language skills is to read books. In particular, fiction very effectively immerse your consciousness in the language environment. Love books!
More useful information about language learning in the book “Polyglot Notes. Practical Tips for Learning Foreign Language”.
