I was born in Beijing, and moved to Canada when I was 4.5 years old. I was then immersed in English since kindergarten, and now my English skills are far, far better than my Chinese skills. I speak Chinese at home, and my pronounciation and basic grammar is about the same as a native Chinese speaker. However, my vocabulary is limited, and my writing skills even more so.
Which one would you consider to be my native language? If I were to take a survey or test on language skills, would it be disingenuous to say that English was my second language?
I would say your native language is the one you speak best and most comfortably. For most people it is their first language, but if most of your formative years were spend speaking English and you managed to only maintain Chinese while not being very comfortable with it, English is your native language. However, it is still your “second” language because Chinese was what you learned first. IMHO.
Quite so. AFAIK, “native” is not a precise term in linguistics. Your L1 is Chinese, and your L2 is English. So, you’re not lying if you call English your “second language”.
(If “native” were a precise term in linguistics, it might mean “the cry of a newborn baby”, or perhaps “Chomsky-esque universal grammar”, since “native” means “at birth”.)
My high-school French teacher was more enarly a true bi-lingual than anyone else I’ve ever met. He said some linguists actually studied him in college tot ry and figure out if one was mroe prevalent.
He said he thinks and dreams in both languages - sometimes alternately and sometimes within the same sentence. But the bottom line for him was that when he had to count something quickly, it was always in French, so if pushed he’d have picked that as his “primary” language. (He also took issue with the term “Native” language.)
I dream in both languages too. It largely depends on who I’m dreaming about - father, siblings and many friends will be in English, mother, in-laws and most co-workers will be in French. I can be having a real-life conversation with both my parents and I’ll just switch languages from sentence to sentence depending on who I’m looking at!
Survey-takers hate me, because I quite literally learned both languages at the same time; mom spoke to me only in French and dad only in English! In that sense, I don’t have a “first” language. Circumstances, however, led to me doing my schooling primarily in English in Québec, so it is the stronger language for me and that’s often what they write down, though I don’t feel it reflects who I am.
Then again, I think of myself as being bilingual. Francophones think of me as being anglophone. I’m a mess
Your native language is any language which you acquired to fluency in childhood (roughly before puberty). There is no reason you can’t have two native languages.
It sounds like your mother tongue is Chinese and you are a native speaker of Chinese, but not an educated native speaker.
English is your second language, but you are an educated native speaker of English.
“Are you a native speaker of English?” “Yes.”
“Are you a native speaker of Chinese?” “Yes.”
“What is your native language?” “I have two—English and Chinese.”
I took German in College. The Prof was born in Denmark but had lived in the States for decades. She could converse flawlessly (AFAIK) in at least Danish, German and English, but could only do math in Danish. Maybe that has more to do with when and where she learned 'rithmatic, but I’d vote for that to be her “native” language.
there’s an old expression “you count and you curse in your native language”.
For a simple test…take a list of numbers,reading from , say, a cash register tape, and add up the total…most people will whisper the numbers to them themselves. Every bilingual person I know does this in only one of the languages they know. That’s your native tongue.
And another example—catch somebody when they are walking casually and accidently stub their toe very painfully…the curse words that come out of their mouth instinctively will always be in their native tonge, no matter how many languages they know .
It’s not as simple as you make it out to be. People don’t always have one native language, and they don’t always revert to the same one in those situations. I know a woman whose counting language is Italian, but her swearing is just as likely to be in Croatian. mnemnosyne probably resists this easy characterization, too. I often swear in L2 when I’m not thinking about it, because I didn’t swear at all as a kid and so that’s what I learned first.
Also, not everyone counts and curses in their native language. My mother’s native language is unambiguously Spanish. She was born and raised in Costa Rica and had never even set foot in any other country until she came to the United States ate age 24. These days, many moons later, she’s been speaking, reading and writing in English for decades, and so she mainly thinks and dreams in English. And counts.
And I’m likely to swear in German, although I only know a very small smattering of German words and phrases. I’ve never, ever studied German, so the likelihood that I could carry on even the most cursory of conversations is vanishingly small.
As Anima doubtless knows, Canada census counts as your native language the earliest language that you learned and still speak. Even that might not be clearcut, but it is up to you to decide.
My colleague grew up in Germany till age 16, when he left (in 1939, so he is going on 88). He speaks English with an accent, not strong, but distinct. I was a bit surprised when I overheard him speaking English to a visitor from Germany and I asked him about it. Say this was ten years ago. He answered that his German was not educated and in over 60 years had deteriorated badly. So what is his native language? Incidentally his wife was Austrian, but they spoke only English at home.
I admit that I do count/do math in English, though I have 21 years of English-language schooling (which includes both a science and engineering degrees) to blame for that.
I curse in either language…quite literally. I let out a fucking tabarnak! when I dropped my iPod under the seat of a plane the other day! Circumstances and the best word to describe how I feel dictate what word I use!
As I said, the problem with “the earliest language you learned and still speak” is that both apply to me. I learned both at home from day one. I hate having to choose.
I usually curse in English, but sometimes when something startles me I’ll let out an exclamation in Korean. Like others here, I learned English and Korean almost at the same time (both before the age of 5).
English is definitely my stronger language, but depending on the context Korean seems more natural sometimes.
ISTR L2 refers to languages that are formally taught - you learn all the rules, etc, in order to learn it rather than picking it up from your environment. In other words, the OP, who learned English through an immersive environment when she was 4, has both English and Chinese as L1.
Choosing to count or do basic arithmetic in one language over another is extraordinarily common. Mostly because while it’s usually best to try to think in the language you are speaking, it, even among the well-practiced, is just easier to translate back and forth. This way, you don’t have to relearn your times tables in another language.
Cursing and dreaming, are I think much more variable than the counting, in my anecdotal experience. Even though English is without a doubt my L1, when I’m mad in “French mode,” I curse in French mode, whether I’m with actual people or yelling at the computer. I have been known to dream in French on occasion as well. (Oddly, when I’m conversing in my dreams in “French mode,” my French is what it always is, a bit overly formal [I almost never leave *ne*'s out] but otherwise excellent, while everyone else in the dream speaks French normally. I’ve often wondered if it were really the case that my brain can create authentic native French, but for some reason chooses not to.)
I don’t think that’s a good test. If I want speed, I count in Chinese until about ten thousand. However, I don’t think I prefer saying small numbers in a specific language. I curse in English, though.
I thought forms generally did that, but as I have never filled one out I did not specifically know that the census did that
