TY - JOUR
AU - ROMAINE, SUZANNE
AB - Semilingualism: A Half-Baked Theory of Communicative Competence MARILYN MARTIN-JONES SUZANNE ROMAINE University of Lancaster Merton College, Oxford HansegSrd (1968) originally used the term 'halvsprSkighet' to describe what he believed to be the less than complete linguistic skills of Finnish-Swedish bilingual Finns in Tornedal. He characterized their knowledge in the following way: 'ett halvt beharskande av svenskan och ett halvt beharskande av modersmUet' (1972: 128). Although Hanseglrd is credited with the first attempt to define the term, the notion behind it is implicit in Bloomfield's characterization of the language of a Menomini Indian, White Thunder. He writes: White Thunder, a man around 40, speaks less English than Menomini, and that is a strong indictment, for his Menomini is atrocious. His vocabulary is small, his inflections are often barbarous, he constructs sentences of a few thread- bare models. He may be said to speak no language tolerably. (1927: 395) It is not clear by what yardstick Bloomfield was measuring White Thunder's Menomini, a language increasingly under threat since coming into contact with English in North America. Presumably, he was comparing it to the conservative Menomini of older generations, which preserved a greater amount of morphological complexity. Similarly, it is not clear 
TI - Semilingualism: A Half-Baked Theory of Communicative Competence
JF - Applied Linguistics
DO - 10.1093/applin/7.1.26
DA - 1986-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/semilingualism-a-half-baked-theory-of-communicative-competence-D9S7PYFV08
SP - 26
EP - 38
VL - 7
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -