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What does "native language" mean to you?
I usually consider that "the native language" means the first language which you know how to write,speak,listen,and read.
I don't consider that the dialect which I may not know how to write is my native language. How do you think?
Guest Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:47 am GMT
I think it's the first language that you learn to speak. I don't think so. I think it's the first language you learn to speak,write,listen and read.
I tend to think of it as one's first language, the mother tongue. I was looking at a text in language X. The author claimed to speak language X, French and English natively, but the author didn't start to speak English until he was ten!
I wanted to write back and tell him what I thought "native" meant, but why bother?
IMO, it's the first language you learn to use properly. Because literacy is like 99,99% in the western world your dialect becomes overlapped by the general language.
People who cannot write have their "native language" very still. And what about Schwyzerdütsch? These people write German, talk Schwyzerdütsch, Germans often don't understand them unless they switch to German. Your theory has some holes.
How about Taiwanese?
Taiwanese ppl usually write and speak Mandarin, but only speak Taiwanese. So does it mean that all Taiwanese ppl's mother tongue is Mandarin?
Quote from my Swedish mate's saying:
Dialect is not language. Language means the tongue which has its own writing style. If this tongue hasn't had writing style, it shall be dialect,not language. So, Taiwanese or Cantonese is a dialect, not language!
"mother" tongue doesn't mean your "mother", but means "first".
Your tongue which you know to require every skills of it on speaking,writing,reading,listening and even thinking is your first tongue.
>>So, Taiwanese or Cantonese is a dialect, not language!
Every single netizen on Hong Kong forums would disagree. Rather than being stigmatized or suppressed, thanks to the freedom of speech, everyone writes colloquially on the net, and, so, often in ads as well. Newspaper language also proves to be at times difficult to read for outsiders.
>>Quote from my Swedish mate's saying:
Dialect is not language. Language means the tongue which has its own writing style. If this tongue hasn't had writing style, it shall be dialect,not language. So, Taiwanese or Cantonese is a dialect, not language!<< Taiwanese (that is, Min Nan) and Cantonese are dialects of Chinese just as French and Spanish are dialects of Latin.
> I usually consider that "the native language" means the first language which you know how to write, speak, listen, and read.
Mother Tongue = the first language of a single person Native Language = the language of a nationality or an ethnicity (ancestors' language)
Travis Tue Oct 07, 2008 2:37 pm GMT
<<Taiwanese (that is, Min Nan) and Cantonese are dialects of Chinese just as French and Spanish are dialects of Latin.>> Latin has long been dead! The so-called Taiwanese is not even a dialect. Min Nan Hua is never the same as Taiwanese. Min Nan Hua is spoken in Fujian Province of China as well. You consider Cantonese as a language? Ask the Chinese people first!
Xie Tue Oct 07, 2008 8:38 am GMT
>>So, Taiwanese or Cantonese is a dialect, not language! <<Every single netizen on Hong Kong forums would disagree. Rather than being stigmatized or suppressed, thanks to the freedom of speech, everyone writes colloquially on the net, and, so, often in ads as well. Newspaper language also proves to be at times difficult to read for outsiders.>> You mean Cantonese is not a dialect of Chinese?
Guest Tue Oct 07, 2008 3:02 am GMT
<<How about Taiwanese? Taiwanese ppl usually write and speak Mandarin, but only speak Taiwanese. So does it mean that all Taiwanese ppl's mother tongue is Mandarin?>> Not all of them. Some of the ethinic monorities there speak their ethinic languages.
>>The so-called Taiwanese is not even a dialect.
Min Nan Hua is never the same as Taiwanese. Min Nan Hua is spoken in Fujian Province of China as well.<< Taiwanese is a set of dialects of Min Nan, which, yes, I know perfectly well are spoken in Fujian. Properly speaking it should be spoken of just as "Min Nan", but many people refer to it as "Taiwanese" for whatever reason. >> You consider Cantonese as a language? Ask the Chinese people first!<< The average person honestly knows nothing about linguistics, and what may happen to be popularly thought about languages has practically no bearing upon actual linguistic matters. They may think of such as being a "dialect" of Chinese, but that really means nothing in this regard. Of course, mind you that a lot of this has to do with a particular word fāngyán which is generally translated in English to "dialect" but which really has a meaning in English more akin to "regional language". It is broadly applied in Chinese languages to just about anything which "shares a writing system with something else", whereas the term "dialect" in English strongly implies that at least some degree of mutual intelligibility is present (even when it really isn't). Hence while Chinese languages are very broadly referred to as fāngyán by Chinese people, the translation in English of them being "dialects" really just does not fit (as the distance between them is more akin to that between the Romance languages than that between, say, dialects of English or even German). |