The monument for the mother tongue ("Ana dili") in Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan
A first language, native language or mother/father/parent tongue (also known as arterial language or L1), is a language that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term native language or mother tongue refers to the language of one's ethnic group rather than one's first language.
Sometimes, the term "mother tongue" or "mother language"(or "father tongue" / "father language")
is used for the language that a person learned as a child (usually from
their parents). Children growing up in bilingual homes can, according
to this definition, have more than one mother tongue or native language.
The first language of a child is part of that child's personal, social and cultural identity.
Another impact of the first language is that it brings about the
reflection and learning of successful social patterns of acting and
speaking. It is basically responsible for differentiating the linguistic competence of acting. While some argue that there is no such thing as a "native speaker" or a "mother tongue", it is important
to understand the key terms as well as to understand what it means to
be a "non-native" speaker, and the implications that can have on one's
life. Research suggests that while a non-native speaker may develop
fluency in a targeted language after about two years of immersion, it
can take between five and seven years for that child to be on the same
working level as their native speaking counterparts.
On 17 November 1999, UNESCO designated 21 February as International Mother Language Day.
Definitions
One
of the more widely accepted definitions of native speakers is that they
were born in a particular country (and) raised to speak the language of
that country during the critical period of their development.
The person qualifies as a "native speaker" of a language by being born
and immersed in the language during youth, in a family in which the
adults shared a similar language experience to the child.
Native speakers are considered to be an authority on their given
language because of their natural acquisition process regarding the
language, as opposed to having learned the language later in life. That
is achieved by personal interaction with the language and speakers of
the language. Native speakers will not necessarily be knowledgeable
about every grammatical rule of the language, but they will have good
"intuition" of the rules through their experience with the language.
The designation "native language", in its general usage, is
thought to be imprecise and subject to various interpretations that are
biased linguistically, especially with respect to bilingual children
from ethnic minority groups. Many scholars
have given definitions of 'native language' based on common usage, the
emotional relation of the speaker towards the language, and even its
dominance in relation to the environment. However, all three criteria
lack precision. For many children whose home language differs from the
language of the environment (the 'official' language), it is debatable
which language is their "native language".
Defining "native language"
- Based on origin: the language(s) one learned first (the language(s) in which one has established the first long-lasting verbal contacts).
- Based on internal identification: the language(s) one identifies with/as a speaker of;
- Based on external identification: the language(s) one is identified with/as a speaker of, by others.
- Based on competence: the language(s) one knows best.
- Based on function: the language(s) one uses most.
In some countries, such as Kenya, India,
and various East Asian and Central Asian countries, "mother language"
or "native language" is used to indicate the language of one's ethnic group
in both common and journalistic parlance ("I have no apologies for not
learning my mother tongue"), rather than one's first language. Also, in Singapore, "mother tongue" refers to the language of one's ethnic group regardless of actual proficiency, and the "first language" refers to English, which was established on the island under the British Empire, and is the lingua franca
for most post-independence Singaporeans because of its use as the
language of instruction in government schools and as a working language.
In the context of population censuses conducted on the Canadian population, Statistics Canada defines mother tongue as "the first language learned at home in childhood and still understood by the individual at the time of the census."
It is quite possible that the first language learned is no longer a
speaker's dominant language. That includes young immigrant children
whose families have moved to a new linguistic environment as well as
people who learned their mother tongue as a young child at home (rather
than the language of the majority of the community), who may have lost,
in part or in totality, the language they first acquired. According to Ivan Illich, the term "mother tongue" was first used by Catholic monks to designate a particular language they used, instead of Latin,
when they were "speaking from the pulpit". That is, the "holy mother
the Church" introduced this term and colonies inherited it from
Christianity as a part of colonialism. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his 1955 lecture "English and Welsh",
distinguishes the "native tongue" from the "cradle tongue". The latter
is the language one learns during early childhood, and one's true
"native tongue" may be different, possibly determined by an inherited
linguistic taste
and may later in life be discovered by a strong emotional affinity to a
specific dialect (Tolkien personally confessed to such an affinity to
the Middle English of the West Midlands in particular).
Children brought up speaking more than one language can have more than one native language, and be bilingual or multilingual. By contrast, a second language is any language that one speaks other than one's first language.
Bilingualism
International Mother Language Day Monument in Sydney, Australia, unveiling ceremony, 19 February 2006
A
related concept is bilingualism. One definition is that a person is
bilingual if they are equally proficient in two languages. Someone who
grows up speaking Spanish and then learns English for four years is
bilingual only if they speak the two languages with equal fluency. Pearl
and Lambert were the first to test only "balanced" bilinguals—that is, a
child who is completely fluent in two languages and feels that neither
is their "native" language because they grasp both so perfectly. This
study found that
- balanced bilinguals perform significantly better in tasks that require flexibility (they constantly shift between the two known languages depending on the situation),
- they are more aware of the arbitrary nature of language,
- they choose word associations based on logical rather than phonetic preferences.
Multilingualism
One can have two or more native languages, thus being a native bilingual or indeed multilingual.
The order in which these languages are learned is not necessarily the
order of proficiency. For instance, if a French-speaking couple have a
child who learned French first but then grew up in an English-speaking
country, the child would likely be most proficient in English. Other
examples are India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Africa, where most people speak more than one language.
Defining "native speaker"
Defining
what constitutes a native speaker is difficult, and there is no test
which can identify one. It is not known whether native speakers are a
defined group of people, or if the concept should be thought of as a
perfect prototype to which actual speakers may or may not conform.
An article titled "The Native Speaker: An Achievable Model?" published by the Asian EFL Journal
states that there are six general principles that relate to the
definition of "native speaker". The principles, according to the study,
are typically accepted by language experts across the scientific field. A
native speaker is defined according to the following guidelines:
- The individual acquired the language in early childhood and maintains the use of the language.
- The individual has intuitive knowledge of the language.
- The individual is able to produce fluent, spontaneous discourse.
- The individual is communicatively competent in different social contexts.
- The individual identifies with or is identified by a language community.
- The individual does not have a foreign accent.
