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Would you change your native language | ||
Tags: Native Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6035 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes  5 sounds | Message 9 of 100 10 September 2010 at 2:19pm | IP Logged |
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I'm very happy with Bulgarian as my native language, regardless of its status as a "small", offbeat and sometimes "exotic" language. It is a good starting point for learning many other languages. I suspect most people would say something on these lines, because love for the native language tends to outweigh any practicalities.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 10 of 100 10 September 2010 at 2:36pm | IP Logged |
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No way, Jose! Switching my native tongue would be switching my culture, which would be switching my identity.
At any rate, Swedish is a pretty awesome mother tongue. You get English cheaply, but it's still not your mother tongue. This means when people in other countries want to speak English with you, you can say "Look, English isn't my mother tongue and it isn't yours. It makes no sense for us to use it when talking to each other." Moreover, Swedish is phonetically a descent language to start with. You've got the retroflex 'rt' like in Hindi, you've got long and short vowels, variable stress and even some tones, which I'm sure is part of the reason for my facility compared to other westerners for learning tonal languages (Americans pronouncing Mandarin usually sounds absolutely ghastly, and the only foreigner I ever heard with good Cantonese pronunciation is … Norwegian). In addition to that, if I didn't live in Sweden, I'd want to move there, as it's my favorite country in the world (though Australia is a close second). Okay, so I'm living in China, but that's a temporary situation. The way I see it, English is so ubiquitous in the world and on the web that no matter what your mother tongue, you'll end up getting advanced fluency in English anyway if you have an aptitude for and an interest in languages. Since you'll end up using it often, it's essentially an upkeep-free language, too. These benefits apply automatically to English and to your native tongue, so having English as your native tongue isn't "getting one free", but rather the opposite! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5282 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 12 of 100 10 September 2010 at 3:49pm | IP Logged |
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Yeah, I'm kinda of the same opinion as well. English for free is definitely the biggest linguistic blessing I could have received. However, I would also like to have been in some immersion program like a lot of the other here. It would probably have been French, which I'm not terribly fond of, but I'd like to have that to draw upon too. Still, I probably wouldn't have discovered Finnish if something that major had been different, so in the end, I'm OK with my language path. If I were being particularly wishful, I'd want my native language to be Finnish, to grow up in Finland, and learn that and Swedish by immersion. But then I wouldn't have the fun of learning Finnish, so even then, I'm not too thrilled with that idea either. I like where I'm at with languages, so I don't think I'd change anything at all.
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| jtdotto Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5230 days ago 73 posts - 172 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, German | Message 13 of 100 10 September 2010 at 4:51pm | IP Logged |
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I agree with what one person said, that English is so ubiquitous that most educated people end up learning it well
enough to engage in serious communication anyways. Though that's not to say that I'm not glad that both my parents are educated Americans, granting me the ability to write nearly error-free in English with little mental effort... But having been born an X-American would have been great, or to be honest an Asian-European would have been even better. Chinese, Japanese, Korean - any of these I would have been satisfied with. To be able to switch coding so fluidly from an Asian language to a European one, it's just not something the majority of people on Earth can, or will ever achieve. And those who do through language study are true heavyweights of language. That aside, what it comes down to is making do with what you were given in life. Heres to learning a few languages along the way, and mastering at least one. Cheers! Edited by jtdotto on 10 September 2010 at 4:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| seive Newbie England Joined 5247 days ago 3 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 14 of 100 10 September 2010 at 7:24pm | IP Logged |
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I wouldn't change my mother-tongue or nationality for anything, I'm immensely proud of my country and language. Even if we we hadn't spread it all over the world, and it was only spoken here in England, I still wouldn't change it. I find it funny that the americans reasons for being happy with it is just because of its the most dominate.
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| arturs Triglot Senior Member Latvia Joined 5272 days ago 278 posts - 408 votes Speaks: Latvian*, Russian, English | Message 15 of 100 10 September 2010 at 7:27pm | IP Logged |
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I think I would never change my native language, but if I had to, then French, Dutch or Swedish would be one of my choices.
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| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6126 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 16 of 100 10 September 2010 at 7:33pm | IP Logged |
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Yeah, the thing about being a native English speaker, for me at least, I don't feel like English is 'my language' the way that other people are attached to their native languages. It's just this thing I speak, you know, whatever. Like Japanese people are always saying "We say blah blah blah" whereas I would never say "we English speakers say blah blah blah" -- I don't think there is a 'we' for English speakers. It's a global culture -- but that means it's not an identity so much.
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