Can someone be a native speaker of more than one language?

David Webb wrote:



Many people are doubting here that anyone can be a native speaker of two languages, so it seems odd to ask this sort of question.

myrcarromero wrote:

There are some cases, very few, but they are, of people born, raised and literated in bilingual even trilingual communities. Switzerland, Belgium, North European Countries, and in Spain, Catalonia, Galicia, Basque Country. They learn two or three languages since they born, and feel the same confidence in both languages. With Gaelic and the languages spoken in Ireland, Scotland, I know that the local governments are trying to do the same, but I am not aware of the results so far.

Henry Hinds wrote:

This started off with the Irish language and then went into other areas but with some great debate and comments I think have been quite worthy.

Getting back to the original subject, it is surely the language spoken by many of my ancestors which I have never heard, not even in a dream.

Sad to hear it is in effect dying out.

David Webb wrote:

Henry, it won't go completely. Although a bit tokenistic, there is just enough government support to keep it going in some form. But the real areas where Irish is meant to be spoken - the Gaeltacht - with a population of 80,000+ have only 17,000 speaking Irish every day outside the school system according to the 2006 census. So even in the Irish-speaking areas, most people are never speaking Irish, or at least not on a daily basis.

Eventually, there may be no actual Irish-speaking areas left. But there is a network of schools teaching through Irish - and at least one in every county including Northern Ireland. 30,000 children attend primary school in Irish (not including children in the Gaeltacht) and 6,000 attend middle school in Irish (again, not including children in the Gaeltacht). So, although someone in Dublin will not be living in an Irish-speaking area, it is quite feasible for Irish to be his home language and for him to be attending an Irish-language school. These people probably will speak fluently but probably won't be full-blown native speakers as we have discussed.

Another "issue" with Irish is the government's mandating of an Official Standard Irish that is not spoken in any real Irish-speaking district, as it is a mixture of bits taken from different dialects. People who want to get jobs in Irish have to accept this standard, as it is the only language legislation is being produced in, and the Irish-language school system has led to the emergence of people who speak this artifical dialect fluently or even neo-natively. The genuine good Irish is spoken in County Cork, and was the basis of grammar textbooks published up until the 1940s (I have had to invest in a lot of antiquarian books) and also the basis of much of the revival literature. But when the numbers of native speakers in Cork began to decline, the government reoriented the standard away to a compromise between Cork and Galway and the very odd nod to County Donegal, producing the artificial compromise. The situation is much as if English declined in England, and the number of speakers who said "is not" fell quite low, but there was a larger population of people who spoke English and said "ain't" and so the government declared that "ain't" was standard English. Many learners refuse to learn standard Irish for this reason, owing to its highly dumbed-down quality. It has incorporated too many points from Galway, where a form of Irish that on historical grounds can be said to be completely ungrammatical is spoken.

David Webb wrote:

Yes, I know about Guth Mhúscraí. Actually I own a Yahoo Group called "Muskerry" and we are studying Irish - get this - using a book written in Polish, but we are lucky to have a Lithuanian on board who is helping us.

I'm surprised there is demand for Irish into English at all, but as you said the need for official laws etc in Irish makes an English into Irish job viable.

As far as the Aran Islands - be pushy. It's what they're getting their Gaeltacht grants for. If all else fails, tell them you are Latvian and can't speak English...

Within this context, I can say - without risk of being over-confident - that I'm able to express myself in Portuguese with the same fluency as in my (geographically speaking) native language.

Terry Richards wrote:

Another (rather interesting) example, I am currently taking a medication that has a side-effect that affects my use of language. This side effect has been fairly severe in my case but, rather oddly, only my English (my native language) is affected. Explain that one!

Kim Metzger wrote:


Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics

Native language: the language which a person acquires in early childhood because it is spoken in the family and/or it is the language of the country where he or she is living. The native language is often the first language a child acquires but there are exceptions. Children may, for instance, first acquire some knowledge of another language from a nurse or an older relative and only later on acquire a second one which they consider their native language. Sometimes, this term is used synonymously with FIRST LANGUAGE.

Native speaker: a person considered as a speaker of his or her native language. The intuition of a native speaker about the structure of his or her language is one basis for establishing or confirming the rules of the grammar. A native speaker is said to speak his or her native language "natively".

[Edited at 2007-05-27 18:27]

Kim Metzger wrote:

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Native speaker by itself means simply that a person (as a rule) grew up speaking the language from childhood. It doesn't tell clients much about translation skills. That's an entirely different kettle of fish.