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How native is native? | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5145 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 32 27 April 2010 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Many years ago I had a pupil who was the son of two Norwegians, but was raised in the US. He came to Norway at the age of 17, and although there was no trace of accent, I soon came to realize that Norwegian was not his native languge, English was.
I drew that conclusion after having a lot of people coming to me commenting on how incredibly stupid he was, because sometimes he could not grasp the simplest of concepts. I soon realized, that he was actually a very bright kid (and he now is a star photographer), but he simply did not understand Norwegian as well as the others. We didn't understand that at first because of his heritage and perfect pronunciation. I also have a friend who had a Norwegian father, a mother from Ecuador, who was raised in the US and spoke English with her siblings. I once asked her which one was her native language (because she was absolutely fluent in all three) and she just looked at me and said: "I don't have any". She was extremely bright, and was fluent in French in addition to her three "native" languages, but there was no language where she knew all the concepts that a native would. My question is therefore: What is actually the test of having a native language? Is it to speak fluently without a trace of an accent, and to converse on a wide range of topics with ease, or is it to have that thourough grasp of all concepts, including technical issues and knowledge of old fashioned terms that true natives have? And the next question of course is, if you consider yourself to have several, would not one of these be your true native language? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6250 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 32 27 April 2010 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I find this is a topic which becomes more confusing the longer you look at it.
I don't think accent is a marker; too many people speak their native languages with foreign accents (ie, after time abroad) and too many people speak with seemingly flawless accents in languages they do not grasp well. Conversing on a wide range of topics with ease isn't it either - who hasn't met people who can have deep discussions seemingly with ease, but mangle grammar horribly? (This is more common in clearly non-native speakers, but some monoglots do this as well - and no, I don't mean regional differences or anything prescriptive, some people are just far outside the norms of their speech communities in bizarre ways). Going for depth of cultural knowledge or range and clarity of expression then quickly turn into socio-political morasses. If a criteria for 'native speaker' excludes most of the monolingual population of a language, it's clearly broken. Speaking a language from birth also doesn't seem to be a good criteria - if someone is adopted into another culture as a toddler and forgets his/her first language entirely, calling that first language his/her native language seems perverse. The second language may or may not be native - but I'm not sure whether this label actually sheds any light on the matter. This raises the question of when a language changes from being native to non-native for someone, which is yet another can of worms. My answer: There is no test. A native language is a fuzzy concept, of limited utility, and an approximation. Trying to delimit it sharply leads to perverse results. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5241 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 3 of 32 27 April 2010 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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This is a great topic, albeit a very complex one, as Volte has so rightly pointed out. But it goes to the very heart of an obsession of many people here in this forum: how to speak like a native. Although I agree totally with the observations of Volte, I'm going to vote for accent as a marker of a native speaker. I know fully well that etymologically, a native speaker is one who is born into a language. However, accent is what is most visible and what we associate with native mastery. Native speakers can be stupid, dull, uneducated, deranged, etc. but they are still native.
There have been some threads here about non-native looking individuals who speak like natives, i.e. Africans speaking Chinese, Westerners speaking Japanese, etc. There is an element of surprise here, but it only makes sense that people born or raised in a language will speak like natives. I'm sure that there are children of African descent who speak just like other Norwegian children. In today's world all sorts of combinations are possible. Following the devastating earthquake in Haiti last January, hundreds of children have been adopted around the world. In 15 years, there will be a whole generation of black Europeans speaking a variety of languages like natives. Perhaps we should make the distinction between native-like speaker of a language and native of a country. Does that make sense? Edited by s_allard on 27 April 2010 at 7:38pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5577 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 32 27 April 2010 at 5:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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You can't just compare a non-native speaker with any native speaker. If you have to compare, find the best-matching peers - otherwise your results are worthless.
Of course, the best-matching peers probably wouldn't be monolingual. I personally believe that there is no true 'balanced' bilingualism, as one language or the other always will dominate some aspects of one's life. For some people, these are the community language/family intern sociolect/secular language/professional argot/slang of social subculture/..., which are the more or less the same as the languages and dialects spoken by any family in the same region. In this case, many of the words and concepts might be transferred between different areas in one's life and therefor will be part of one 'language'. Some people speak entirely different languages in some of these areas, and often when people emigrate, they will need to learn a new language for some areas but not for the others (because they still have their family, because they form an immigrant subculture, because their profession in the new country changes and they never learn all the words for their old job etc.) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6250 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 32 27 April 2010 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I met a 19 year old on the train on Saturday, who'd moved to German-speaking Switzerland at 12, from the USA. I first thought he was a German who was trying to speak English with a UK accent through a thick German accent; his accent bounced all over the place throughout our conversation. I'd still consider him a native English speaker, though - he sounded entirely fluent, made no errors, and it was his primary language during his childhood... By this criteria, I may or may not be a native English speaker. I lost most of my Canadian accent in my teens, and speak a somewhat continental-European influenced general North American at this point, aside from a few Canadian vowels (my 'about' still cracks people from the US up). When I lost my native accent, I'd been reading and writing at a university level for years already, and was generally an educated native speaker. I only spoke English - my other languages weren't even intermediate, by any stretch of the imagination. People sometimes think I'm a native speaker, and at other times are surprised. I have to say I'm fundamentally uncomfortable with definitions of 'native speaker' which leave me with no native language.
Absolutely, which is why criteria based on competence are fundamentally flawed.
Looks are absolutely irrelevant to whether someone is native (as opposed to perceived as native by natives at a glance).
It does, but it also only makes things even blurrier. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| WANNABEAFREAK Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong cantonese.hk Joined 6638 days ago 144 posts - 185 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, Cantonese Studies: French | Message 6 of 32 27 April 2010 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I've seen tons of Hong Kong born Chinese kids who have so-called "native English" because their broken-English parents keep talking it to them in only English. The kids don't speak any Chinese.
This is called native ENGRISH right? 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5367 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 7 of 32 27 April 2010 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Although the word "native" originates from the Latin "nativus" (meaning "born"), when you look up this adjective in most good dictionaries, the concept does seem to be very fuzzy, as Volte rightly points out. It doesn't appear to fall neatly into a simple definition that refers to where you were born, nor does it pertain wholly to where you resided or the language spoken by your parents.
For example, my sister was born in Germany. However, she knows little beyond what she learned in school, so German is certainly not her native language. Our mother is Irish and our father part Welsh, but neither of these languages could be called her native language either. If she were to move to Paris and live there with her family for the rest of her life, she might fully adopt the culture, customs, and French way of life, and end up obtaining a level of "near-native" or even what some people call "native" fluency. But would French actually become her "native language"? This seems uncertain too. Possibly your native language refers to the initial language(s) with which you first learned to internalise and comprehend the world around you, and which you later used to externalise your thoughts and feelings. Those remaining underlying marks of the surrounding linguistic tools in your earliest playing environments, that became somehow ingrained into your subconscious, just as the earliest brush strokes and sketches of the artist remain hidden beneath successive layers upon layers in a progressive canvas. These could be the language(s) that you "first grew up with" and that remained, and that you at least once felt an innate sense of belonging to as a young child. Indeed, this is a very difficult concept to pin down exactly, and a great discussion. A few questions amongst many come to mind here. Firstly, at what age do you have to start learning a language for it to be considered "native"? From birth (as the term implies), during those first initial few years (a kind of birth and development of "first contact"), or perhaps even during those first 7 years and beyond (during childhood or as part of these further stages of growing up)? Secondly, I know of at least one guy who was fluent in Egyptian Arabic as a child, and has now forgotten it almost completely. If you forget or lose touch with a native language, and then relearn it later in life as a second language, at which point does it regain or lose its status as a "native language", if indeed it does at all? Finally, to what degree do you need to learn a language as a child to have the right to label it a "native language"? For example, I'm told my father spoke a bit of Cantonese in his youth, as he grew up as a young child in Hong Kong, but he never learned it to any level beyond basic-intermediate proficiency. I too lived in Germany from the age of two and half till five (that's 2.5 of my formative language learning years), as my father was in the British Army and stationed in Berlin and Bonn. Yet being largely surrounded by English speakers most of the time, and brought up by English speaking parents, I recall no German from this period at all, and everything I know I learned either in school in UK much later or during my current stay here in Germany. I did however grow up in Germany all the same, had some German friends from the block (apparently I had a little German girlfriend called Joanna, so I'm told, but you know how mums can sometimes distort the truth a bit here and get romantically creative in retrospect), and I used to be looked after from time to time by a lovely elderly German neighbour called Frau Hess (who was a bit like a grandmother figure really). Should I put down German as a native language too, even though my level is only high intermediate at best so far (it would be so cool if I could :) )? It's all very confusing really. Edited by Teango on 27 April 2010 at 11:08pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5246 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 8 of 32 27 April 2010 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It is confusing because you're all trying to find an objective criterion. From a subjective point of view it seems quite clear what a native language level looks like: it is the level of proficiency that someone perceives as possible. A person who has an above-average command of his or her first language will have a different frame of reference with respect to other languages than someone who is satisfied with casual conversation. It is certainly true that a higher level of skills with your first language increases the chances of becoming proficient with other languages, but I think that it also increases the gap between what you know to be possible and what you can really achieve in anything else but your native language. When you try to serialise a web of thoughts into a stream of written symbols or uttered sounds you may have to struggle even when using your native language. You will know that you have no native level skills if you attribute this struggle to the particular language instead of your lack of comprehension of the subject. Others might not be able to tell whether the language you're using is your native one, but you'll know it yourself. The presence or absence of an accent is completely irrelevant to your production skills. Which point of view you estimate higher -- your own perception of your skills or the judgement of others based on accent -- is probably a question of whether you're an introverted or an extroverted personality. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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