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Would you change your native language | ||
Tags: Native Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Desacrator48 Groupie United States Joined 5105 days ago 93 posts - 127 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 41 of 100 13 September 2010 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | ||
I imagine you English feel a different sense of pride in YOUR language because it is in fact yours and something that defines you. I or we as Americans don't take any special pride in speaking English..it's just the language we speak. The only pride we would have is like you said, because it's the most dominant in the world and we had something to do with that. I think our different attitude to the language boils down to the fact that we know it is not our own, it is borrowed from your country. Maybe it's because English is just our language and not also our national identity in the way the word has two meanings for you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Desacrator48 Groupie United States Joined 5105 days ago 93 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 42 of 100 13 September 2010 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree here too. You have here the English as the Official Language movement not out of a true love for the language as say the French have with French, but because many Americans are more concerned with assimilation and unity than anything else. They see a nation of many divergent languages as being detrimental and also too alien. In general they are not saying don't speak another language at home, but are saying you must know English and should speak it in the public sphere. Again I think the perception here is the choice of English as one of necessity rather than one out of deep love and personal pride. If you here any Americans talking about speaking English with pride though, that's probably all tied into the fact that Americans think anything we do must be the best of all worlds, so it's not necessarily about the language itself, haha. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arti Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 6809 days ago 130 posts - 165 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: French, Czech | Message 43 of 100 13 September 2010 at 7:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, If I had had a choice before my birth and enough information about the countries and languages, I guess I would have chosen living in Switzerland and becoming bilingual in French and German.
Switzerland is one of the "best" countries in the world for living, it has four state languages, a paradise for language geeks :) But Russian is not so bad as well, at least I understand at some point all other Slavic languages without ever learning them ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5245 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 44 of 100 13 September 2010 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Never, and it has nothing to do with national pride or identity :). I'm a great poetry lover (in fact, poetry was the main reason for me to get into languages, before my
language adventure got a life of it's own) and I realized few times that if Serbian haven't been my native, some of my all time favourite poems would be completely inaccessible to me. For example B. Miljkovic's work, totally untranslatable (hard even for Serbs to read :), but fantastic) or J. J. Zmaj's "Đulići i đulići uveoci", full of archaic language and construction for which it would take me probably decades of learning Serbian before I could fully understand them... So, no, I would never change my native language, but thinking about it makes me realize how much I must be missing :( (who knows how many "Miljkovics" are there in the literature of other small, insignificant languages...). If I were bilingual, then there are two possible scenarios I would go for: practical: I would choose Serbian/English, so I could earn some money and travel opportunities by teaching my native language. 'exotic': some combination like Serbian/Chinese or Serbian/Arabic. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Nature Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5034 days ago 63 posts - 80 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 45 of 100 14 September 2010 at 12:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I guess I'd keep English as my native language because as others have said, it's like winning the lottery. However, because I'm of Italian decent, I have such an accent that people think Italian is my mother tongue when that's not the case at all :(
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fazla Hexaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6059 days ago 166 posts - 255 votes Speaks: Italian, Serbo-Croatian*, English, Russian, Portuguese, French Studies: Arabic (classical), German, Turkish, Mandarin | Message 46 of 100 14 September 2010 at 9:25am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm quite happy about my personal language situation. Born in Bosnia, raised in Bosnian by my parents but had to start speaking in Italian at an early age as we moved to Italy, than started to learn English as it is THE language.
With Italian I got Portuguese, Spanish and French almost for free With Bosnian I got Russian almost for free and many, many words for Turkish and to a lesser extent, for Arabic. With English I get a fair discount on German. The only thing I regret is that I didn't start to learn a 4th language before I was 19th. Oh and I am also extremely happy of not having been raised in English, as many pointed out, for anyone with a slight interest in languages it's a must, and you end up learning it anyways. Edited by Fazla on 14 September 2010 at 9:25am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5579 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 47 of 100 14 September 2010 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes.
I'd rather my native language be something obscure but cool like Frisian- then I'd learn Dutch and English rather easily anyway as a kid and have 3 languages for free and be much better placed to learn more. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| skeeterses Senior Member United States angelfire.com/games5Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6415 days ago 302 posts - 356 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Spanish | Message 48 of 100 15 September 2010 at 4:04am | IP Logged | ||
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One time I suggested that being a native speaker of Chinese and Arabic would be quite lucrative since they're
highly in demand. But apart from merely making money in business or the Government, there are some other languages that would be quite cool to be a native speaker of. Hebrew, Arabic, Greek -- Arabic right now is the big language with the War on Terror going on. But these three languages are the original languages in which the Abrahamic scriptures were written in and it would be cool to be able to understand those original texts as a native speaker. Japanese -- I studied computer science from 1999 to 2003 and did a few homemade video games with the hope of making it big someday. Being a native speaker of Japanese would definitely be quite useful for getting a job in the video gaming industry since its easier to learn computer programming than to learn a difficult language. I've always been a fan of the old nintendo games and being able to play the original japanese versions would be quite cool. Hindi -- Also as a computer science major, knowing Hindi or another Indian language would have been quite useful for getting connections into the computer programming business, since a lot of computer work is done in India nowadays. If I could go back to my college days, I would have studied Japanese or Hindi and then try to find computer work in Japan or India upon graduation. Edited by skeeterses on 15 September 2010 at 5:31am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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