FIRST LANGUAGE AND MOTHER TONGUE

Godswill Dave

FIRST LANGUAGE AND MOTHER TONGUE

Godswill Dave

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This paper explores the concept of language, including its structure, the diversity of human languages, and their evolution over time. It discusses the distinctions between natural languages and dialects, the role of classical languages in education, and examines the relationship between language and culture. Furthermore, it investigates historical perspectives on the origins of language, the evolution of languages, and highlights key figures in the field of linguistics.

INTRODUCTION Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning. Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, writing, whistling, signing, or braille. In other words, human language is modality-independent, but written or signed language is the way to inscribe or encode the natural human speech or gestures. Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral, manual and tactile languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances. FIRST LANGUAGE A first language (L1), is the first language or dialect 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 or dialect of one's ethnic group rather than one's first 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.[clarification needed 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. 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". MOTHER TOGUE Mother tongue is the in-born language, which a baby has already familiarized even in the gestation of mother before it was born. The first language is the language which a child acquires either through schooling or socialization, such as family. Mother tongue refers to the first language learned at home in childhood and still understood by the person at the time the data was collected. If the person no longer understands the first language learned, the mother tongue is the second language learned. For a person who learned more than one language at the same time in early childhood, the mother tongue is the language this person spoke most often at home before starting school. The person has more than one mother tongue only if they learned these languages at the same time, and still understands them. For a child who has not yet learned to speak, the mother tongue is the language spoken most often to this child at home. A child who has not yet learned to speak has more than one mother tongue only if these languages are spoken to them equally often so that the child learns these languages at the same time. Person refers to an individual and is the unit of analysis for most social statistics programs. Mother tongue' may be analyzed using the 'List of languages'. Here, if the person reported two or more languages, they are classified using the appropriate 'multiple responses' category. Using this approach, the sum of the count of all categories is equal to the size of the total population. The category, 'none', is not used. 'Mother tongue' may also be analyzed by looking at each language separately. Here, the 'List of languages, total responses' should be referred to. This approach is used to look at all responses of a specific language, regardless of whether or not another language was also reported by the same person. In this second approach, counts are based on the number of times a language was reported, that is, each instance provided for each mother tongue. Given that a person could have reported more than one mother tongue, the counts for the specific languages cannot be meaningfully combined, as individuals could be included in the count for more than one language. Hence, the sum of the count of all languages could be greater than the total population. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FIRST LANGUAGE AND MOTHER TONGUE Mother tongue is the in-born language, which a baby has already familiarized even in the gestation of mother before it was born. The first language is the language which a child acquires either through schooling or socialization, such as family. Native tongue- Place where you are, have been living; irrespective of the place of your birth & the language spoken by the parents. Native 'of' the place. The first language- It may be either of two, or a completely different, a 'third' language, learning which you grew up (usually in the school) FOREIGN LANGUAGE A foreign language is a language that is not an official language of, nor typically spoken in, a given country, and that native speakers from that country must usually acquire through conscious learning - be this through language lessons at school, self-teaching or attendance of language courses, for example. A foreign language may be learnt as a second language, but there is a distinction between the terms, as a second language may be used to describe a language that plays a significant role in the region where the speaker lives, whether for communication, education, business or governance, and therefore a second language is not necessarily a foreign language. Children who learn more than one language from birth or from a very young age are considered bilingual or multilingual. These children can be said to have two, three or more mother tongues, and so again these languages would not be considered foreign to these children, even if one language is a foreign language for the vast majority of people in the child's birth country. For example, a child learning English from his English father and Irish at school in Ireland can speak both English and Irish, but neither is a foreign language to them. This is common in countries such as India, South Africa, or Canada due to these countries having multiple official languages. In general, it is believed that children have advantage to learning a foreign language over adults. However, studies have shown that pre-existing knowledge of language and grammar rules, and a superior ability to memorise vocabulary may benefit adults when learning foreign languages. CLASSICAL LANGUAGE A classical language is any language with an independent literary tradition and a large and ancient body of written literature. Classical languages are typically dead languages, or show a high degree of diglossia, as the spoken varieties of the language diverge further away from the classical written language over time. A Classical Language is one no longer regularly spoken (at least in its Classical form) and the study of which is mostly focused on reading texts. Even in these languages, it is often didactically useful to use all three communicative modes, but in the end the focus will be on interpretive reading. A prestigious, often ancient language, such as LATIN or SANSKRIT, or a variety of a language, such as classical GREEK. Such a language is usually learned formally, is often a yardstick against which other languages are measured, and may be a norm in terms of which they are described. CONCLUSION The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Critical examinations of languages, such as philosophy of language, the relationships between language and thought, how words represent experience, etc., have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greek civilization. Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) have argued that language originated from emotions, while others like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) have argued that languages originated from rational and logical thought. Twentieth century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 –1951) argued that philosophy is really the study of language itself. Major figures in contemporary linguistics of these times include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky. Language is thought to have gradually diverged from earlier primate communication systems when early hominins acquired the ability to form a theory of mind and shared intentionality. This development is sometimes thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of language as having evolved to serve specific communicative and social functions. Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently by approximately three years old. Language and culture are codependent. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language has social uses such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as use for social grooming and entertainment. Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family; in contrast, a language that has been demonstrated to not have any living or non-living relationship with another language is called a language isolate. REFERENCE Devitt, Michael; Sterelny, Kim (1999). Language and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. Boston: MIT Press. Dixon, Robert M.W. (1972). The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-08510-6. Duranti, Alessandro (2003). "Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms". Current Anthropology. 44 (3): 323–48. doi:10.1086/368118. S2CID 148075449. Evans, Nicholas; Levinson, Stephen C. (2009). "The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 32 (5): 429–92. doi:10.1017/s0140525x0999094x. PMID 19857320. "First Impressions: We start to pick up words, food preferences and hand-eye coordination long before being born". Scientific American. Vol. 313, no. 1. July 2015. p. 24. Fisher, Simon E.; Lai, Cecilia S.L.; Monaco, Anthony P. (2003). "Deciphering the Genetic Basis of Speech and Language Disorders". Annual Review of Neuroscience. 26: 57–80. doi:10.1146/annurev.neuro.26.041002.131144. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0012-CB7D-6. PMID 12524432. Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2010). The Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foley, William A. (1997). Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduction. Blackwell. 7

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