Fluency is a Spook

The blog posts are beginning to back up, and I haven’t uploaded in a while. I’ve been busy. No I haven’t. But, as happens to all blogs, real life intervened. No it didn’t. But it certainly felt as though it did. Maybe this is the situation: I’ve been spending time with my mother; I’ve been reading; I’ve been practicing; I’ve been hanging out, killing time.

I’m not even sure where this very post is going, but I feel as though I ought to say something. I began this blog not knowing where it was going. I said at the time something like “when I have an interesting thought, I’ll write it here so that I many people can see it.” During pandemic, I got into the habit of sending long text messagesto my friends. <aside>There’s stream of consciousness, and then there’s thrashing.</aside>Some of them seemed to like what I sent, and that encouraged me to send more, of which they got sick.

BREAKING NEWS: I just entered a video chat of a group of toki pona speakers who’re playing a role-playing game together. We all look the same. As in all conlang get-togethers, as in all language classes, there is a range of comfort and ability. I dislike the word fluent, especially in the conlang context: who actually speaks these languages? As has been said, it is essentially impossible to do descriptive linguistics on Esperanto (and by extension, other conlangs) since there aren’t any speakers who are self-evidently competent. Esperanto is interesting because it has speakers who learned the language naturally from birth, but these speakers don’t live in a fully Esperanto context; they don’t go to work, to school, or to the shop in Esperanto. They invariably live in a place whose language or languages are not Esperanto. Indeed, there aren’t any monolingual Esperanto speakers.

In the toki pona community, members self-assign language proficiency grades: beginner, intermediate, advanced, fluent. Most users are beginners, a good number are intermediate, a few are advanced, and a tiny quantity are fluent. In practice, the real divide is this: can you read and write a full conversation in the language? And more importantly, can you participate in audio chats in the language?

At this game-session, one of the speakers is massively proficient, two of the speakers speak adequately, and one of them essentially cannot speak at all. It is this poor last soul’s turn I’m waiting for as I write this very post. Poor, unfortunate soul: I don’t know what they thought they were signing up for, but it’s difficult to play a role-playing game in a language you don’t understand. The poor Russian GM is getting impatient—I feel sorry for this person, but they’re holding up the game and we really don’t have a very long session. I feel bad, though: it’s a little like failing a language exam. At least the game play that we did have was good. I think that this, of course, has kinks, but it’s just getting started. One of the members of the party wasn’t here for god’s sake. If I knew steno, I could live caption the speaking of the GM—then we could all play. Or maybe this person could practice their spoken toki pona.

So maybe “fluency” isn’t a meaningful metric for conlangs, but there is such a thing as proficiency. Did I tell you about the time I went to the meeting of the Esperanto society in Bologna? Essentially nobody there actually spoke Esperanto, ironically enough. A few did, and well at that.