The Question of The Mother Tongue and The Native Speaker

The mother tongue and Bilingualism
The question of the mother tongue and the native speaker

Right from the outset, it appears crucial to distinguish two types of situations.
The child growing up in the province, say, in some mountain village, learns to speak in the local
dialect. In time, to be sure, this local dialect will take in more and more forms from the standard
language . . . The child, then, does not speak the standard language as his native tongue. It is only
after he reaches school, long after his speech-habits are formed, that he is taught the standard
language. No language is like the native language that one learned at ones mothers knee; no-one is
ever perfectly sure in a language afterwards acquired. Mistakes in language are simply dialect forms
carried into the standard language. (Bloomfield, 1927: 151)
Here, Bloomfield speaks about the same language learnt by a child. Yet, the variety spoken at
home differs from the one learnt at school although they are both varieties of the same
language. The situation is different when the language learnt at home is not the same as or a
variety of the one learnt at school. As an illustration, if a child learns a variety of Arabic
Dardja at home, and then learns the standard variety of Arabic at school, the childs mother
tongue is a variety of Arabic and the child is also a native-speaker of Arabic. If the child
learns a language such as Berber or Spanish, and then learns Arabic at school, the child is not
a native speaker of Arabic.
Another view suggests that the real question is: Does a native speaker of a language have a
different grammar from that of a non-native? ie: Do they have the same competence, and not
is the language acquired at home or at school!
Davies observes that socially, the issue is rather the extent to which being a native speaker is a
social construct, a choice of identity and a membership determined as much by attitude and
symbolically as by language ability and knowledge.
Language Contact and Bilingualism

Whenever there is contact between languages, there is some sort of bilingualism at play. As
happens with contacts between individuals, one language/individual often dominates the
other, and therefore its influence on the defeated language is more visible. But generally, the
influence is reciprocal to a different extent. Bilingualism is the manifestation of a
phenomenon linked to language use in society and therefore it falls within the scope of
sociolinguistic study. Romaine (1995) affirms that there are thirty times as many languages as
there are countries.
The term was used by Martinet in his preface to Weinreich's thesis Languages in
Contact (1953), where he went on to say (p. vii): There was a time when the progress of
research required that each community should be considered linguistically self-contained and
homogeneous Linguists will always have to revert at times to this pragmatic assumption.
But we shall now have to stress the fact that a linguistic community is never homogeneous
and hardly ever self-contained linguistic diversity begins next door, nay, at home, and
within one and the same man. It is not enough to point out that each individual is a
battleground for conflicting types and habits ..
Definitions and descriptions of bilingualism.

To Haugen (1953), bilingualism begins when the speaker of one language can produce
complete meaningful utterances in the other language, while Spolsky (1998) limits the
definition of a bilingual to a person who has some functional ability in a second language. He
specifies that this may vary from a limited ability in one or more domains, to very strong
command of both languages, which is sometimes called: balanced bilingualism. Romaine
(1995) has pointed out that to Martinet the term bilingual is usually applied within France,
only to persons who are able to handle two national languages. Mackey (1967) who considers
bilingualism as an alternate use of two or more languages suggests that there are four
questions which a description of bilingualism should address: degree, function, alternation,
and interference. The question of degree concerns proficiency. Function focuses on the uses a
bilingual speaker has for the languages, and the different roles they have in the individuals
total repertoire. Alternation treats the extent to which the individual alternates between the
languages. Interference has to do with the extent to which the individual manages to keep the
languages separate or whether they are fused, bearing in mind that these questions cannot be
treated separately.
Domains of language use

Fishman and cooper and Ma (1972) defined five areas in which either Spanish or English was
used in the Puerto Rican community in New York City: family, friendship, religion,
employment, and education, thus augmenting diglossia.
Code switching
Bilinguals often switch from one language to the other in their conversations. Gumperz (1982)defines
CS as the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to different
grammatical systems or sub-systems. Spolsky points out that the code-switches can take place
between or even within sentences, involving phrases or words, or even parts of words. The switching
of words is the beginning of borrowing which occurs when the new word becomes more or less
integrated into the second language.
Language borrowing
During language contacts encounters borrow linguistic items from the other language which can
involve pronunciation, lexis and grammar. As Mc Mahon (1994) notes, the most obvious motive for
lexical borrowing is sheer necessity; speakers may have to refer to some unfamiliar object or concept
for which they have no word in their own language. The second major motivation for borrowing is
essentially social, and depends on perceptions of prestige. In such linguistic relationships of unequal
prestige, borrowings generally move from the more to the less prestigious, and will be concentrated
in the semantic fields where the more prestigious speakers wield the greatest influence.

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The mother tongue and Bilingualism

The question of the mother tongue and the native speaker

Language Contact and Bilingualism

Definitions and descriptions of bilingualism.

Domains of language use

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