Submitted 11 months ago by ERROR_100_000_100@infosec.pub to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
You are bilangual. I have one cousin who was born in France to Portuguese parents, his mother and mine are sisters, so I started by speaking Portuguese and then when he started school in 1st grade of course he started to speak more French, and since he never left France he kept French as his native language, he speaks Portuguese fluently but with heavy French accent
I’d personally go with the meaning of the word native. Meaning natural to you; from the environment you were born into, the culture you were born into, the language your parents and family speak. So probably Cantonese. But that doesn’t mean it has to be your primary language or even something you are good at now that you have moved into a different culture and language.
Do you still have native-level pronunciation and grammar skills in Cantonese? Forgetting words is one thing, that happens, and words can be relearned. I’ve lived abroad for 5 years now in my 20s, and even I’ve lost some vocabulary in my native language.
If you no longer know the grammar or the pronunciation well, then it’s a more legitimate question if it is your native language anymore.
Either way, you are some sort of bilingual. In fact, some people grow up like that where I come from: with two native languages, one of which is oftentimes stronger / more eloquent due to education, social life, etc.
I think Thore words are not adequate to describe your or my situation.
My main language is English right now because that is what I mostly use. It's my 4th language. I was 11 when I emigrated for the first time and between then and now I had two other main languages.
The solution is to learn a new language. Then, whatever accent you have in that new language, that is your first language. I’ve noticed this with Canadians a few times. They’d speak English like you’d never think it was anything but their first language, but when they spoke German, they had a French accent.
A friend learned English from an Italian teacher, she had an Italian accent when speaking English. She doesn’t speak a single word of Italian or ever studied Italian. Pronunciation has nothing magical to it, and accents are very flexible. I can speak in almost any accent I want (thanks to linguistic training), but I tend to naturally and unconsciously gravitate towards the accent of the person I’m talking with. It makes others uncomfortable sometimes (those who have learned many languages and thus notice it), but most people don’t notice and think they actually like me because I talk like them. On my own, the most natural would be Austin, Texas English pronunciation. But it’s because of my heavy consumption of YouTube and Twitch content from that area during my teenage years, I’ve never been in the US. In Spanish I have like three or four different accents depending on the topic and context, code-switching is very common.
It’s the kind of thing that goes unnoticed when you don’t learn any new language or only speak a single second language. If you never interact with anyone who speak differently than you, then you don’t notice that the way you speak is not universal and you probably have a “heavy accent” in front of others who speak your same language.
This may have more to do with the instructor of your second language, because pronunciation is taught. If your German teacher is French (or French Canadian) or learned German from someone who otherwise accented it in such a way, then that’s how you’re most likely to accent it. Only about one in five Canadians learn French as their first language, so outside of Quebec, they’re really not secret French speakers masquerading as English speakers.
With French as Canada’s second official language, though, it would not be surprising if the majority of Canada’s foreign language teachers spoke French either first or second (but I say this without research or evidence, so it’s just an irresponsible hypothesis.)
I think it’s semantics, the first language you learned to speak, doesn’t have to be your primary language. Generally people assume your primary is also your first learned language. For myself, I learned multiple languages from birth, it’s hard to say which is my first. My primary, though is English, unless I am with either one of my parents families, then after a few days, as the other poster asked, I dream in said language. Sometimes I dream multilingual.
Tl;dr it’s the difference between the first language you learned and the language you use primarily. Most people assume it’s the same.
This! We had a very cool unit in Linguistics on this back in college, it seems the academic consensus is that the first language you learn - i.e, your native language, can stop being the primary language that you use and hence, in time, it can be forgotten.
Our professor gave us an interesting example as to why the term “native” language is no longer as relevant: her daughter, whose primary language was Romanian, had moved to Germany and met her husband there, whose primary language was German. They later lived in the US for a while, both using English as their primary language for close to a decade and then moving to Japan, where they have had their son. In essence, the kid doesn’t really have a “native” language - at home, they speak English, when they visit Europe they speak Romanian or German, and everywhere else in his life he uses Japanese - which is also his primary language, as that is the one he uses most often and is most proficient in.
In which language do you dream?
The sub-conscious processes of our brain tend to not use any language. Dreams and thoughts may be translated into some regular language for some people but not everyone and when it does the language picked might have more to do with the content of what is being shown than the person’s proficiency in the language.
Um…
Not sure
I dream in some monster-land because most of them are nightmares.
Monster language? 🤷♂️
do you think in a language?
Pika@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
In my eyes your native language is the language that you’re from birth because it’s the one that you started. It doesn’t have to be the one that you’re the most proficient but it usually is. The definition is
Your primary language is the language you use the most which in your case sounds like it’s English