Natural speed please. :-)
Having watched many great videos on YouTube featuring quite a few people amazingly speaking so many languages, I began thinking about how many languages I could learn to speak myself, with the aim of someday posting similar videos on YouTube. At present, I may say that I can get by in four and a half languages: Catalan, Spanish, English, French and Italian, even though I do not feel I have the same level of proficiency in all of them. But let's start at the beginning...
My name is Albert Subirats, and I am from Barcelona, Catalonia, in the north-east of Spain. I am a privileged person because I was born in an area that has its own language (Catalan) and culture alongside the Spanish one, so I have grown up using two languages or interchangeably—in other words—as a perfectly bilingual person.
In Catalonia around 47% of the population speaks Catalan, but everyone also speaks Spanish. Among those who have Spanish as their main language, some of them also speak Catalan, while others understand it but cannot speak it. A smaller percentage neither speak nor understand it.
Usually, in a bilingual environment one language prevails over the other; that is, you can effortlessly speak both languages, but you feel more comfortable with one of them. In my case, I may say that I think more often in Catalan than in Spanish, but at any rate I consider myself a perfect bilingual because I have always spoken Spanish with my mother and Catalan with others. Thus, I feel equally comfortable in using both languages.
When you live in a bilingual environment, there is always a lot of contact between both languages, and there is some inevitable vocabulary transfer. In other words, because Catalan and Spanish are quite similar languages (both are Romance languages), most of the grammar or spelling mistakes we make are due to the influence of the other language. Is this too confusing or does it imply that we make more mistakes than, say, a monolingual Spanish speaker? No, not necessarily. It is just that the kind of mistakes we make are mainly because of the influence of the other language. I utterly understand that people tend to defend their own language, but I do not understand why some people prefer to be monolingual instead of bilingual or multilingual. As I said, I consider myself to be privileged and I am very proud of being bilingual.
Thank you very much for your recording Thomas!! :)