The mother tongue/first language argument

Hi again. Today, I shall take another look at a topic that has confounded me for many years - what is one's mother tongue and is that the same as one's first language? Well, in case you're not familiar with my blog, allow me to start off with a piece of vital information: I'm British-Chinese. That means that the language I am most fluent in is English but when people take one look at my East Asian facial features, they make certain assumptions about what my mother tongue and first language is. To be fair, that usually happens with people who barely know me or whom I have only just met - most of the time, people get past that issue quite quickly as they get to know me as a unique individual.

I am not fluent in my mother tongue despite being a polyglot. Go figure.

The most basic definition of the term 'mother tongue' according to Google is "the language which a person has grown up speaking from early childhood." Now that seems pretty straightforward, right? Not actually. This doesn't take into account a few factors: the cultural norm is that most people assume that you not only speak your mother tongue, but that you are fluent in it and that you actually have a preference to use it over other languages you may have subsequently. Allow me to use my personal experience to tell you why this definition doesn't describe my experience.

The language which I had learnt in my early childhood is Hokkien - now we're talking about the period from when I was a baby, learning how to talk to the period of me completing kindergarten - so roughly the first six years of my life. My parents both worked long hours and it was my grandmother who took care of me - she cooked for me, she played with me, we spent so many hours together everyday then. Back then, I was extremely close to my grandmother. My grandmother spoke one language only with me: Hokkien, which was her mother tongue and the only language she was fluent in. She spoke some Malay as a second language, but that was it for her: Hokkien and Malay. However, I did not use either language in my formal education: I was first educated in English and Mandarin and later in French.

My grandmother broke her leg when I was eight and stopped taking care of me because she could not longer move around freely with a bad leg. So at that point, I stopped using Hokkien everyday for a few hours and only used it when I saw my grandmother on weekends for a few hours. Instead of interacting with my grandmother in Hokkien, I watched a lot of American TV programmes instead and my preferred language - the language I became most fluent in - rapidly switched from Hokkien to English. I had to learn Mandarin at school, so my Mandarin rapidly became better than my Hokkien and the quality of my Hokkien has deteriorated since the time I was around six. And now after having spent half my life in Europe, my Hokkien is rusty at best. My Hokkien vocabulary has shrunk over the years due to lack of usage and I don't personally know any Hokkien speakers in London. I would struggle to construct a sentence in Hokkien - I would need to use a few Mandarin or English loanwords to express more complex ideas. In fact, in order of fluency: Hokkien is my seventh language today after English, French, Mandarin, Welsh, Spanish and Italian.

Yet I would still consider Hokkien my mother tongue, regardless of how rusty it may be today. Why? Because it is a part of my identity, it is a part of my childhood, I have fond memories of speaking Hokkien with my late grandmother. She may have died many years ago, but she did give me the gift of her beautiful, expressive language, her mother tongue - and whilst I no longer speak it fluently today, it does fit the definition of what my mother tongue should be and I gladly identify Hokkien as my mother tongue. But here's where the problem arises: when I tell people that Hokkien is my mother tongue, they often assume that I am more fluent in Hokkien than say, in English - which is clearly not the case. I guess many people make very simplistic assumptions about people and what their mother tongues should be: Ingrid is from Sweden, her mother tongue is Swedish. Helena is from Greece, her mother tongue is Greek. Celine is from France, her mother tongue is French, Josef is from the Czech Republic, his mother tongue is Czech, you get the idea. Yeah, so how do I explain to these people that my mother tongue may be Hokkien but it is far from fluent today?

Can I use the term 'first language' then - would that help avoid any confusion? I did some research and it doesn't actually help. According to Google, one's first language is "a person's native language." Great - so there's still no recognition of the fact that English is the language I am most fluent in and the term 'native' language almost implies that it is defined by my ancestry, rather than my education. I find this especially troubling, because whilst my parents have passed on their East Asian facial features to me through their DNA, they have not passed their languages to me. My father didn't bother teaching me his mother tongue - Hakka - it is a minority language spoken by about 30 million people. My father chose instead to teach me Mandarin, spoken by over a billion people worldwide; and furthermore, like many of my readers, I had to do Mandarin at school in Singapore, Hakka wasn't even on the syllabus. My mother actually made little effort to impart her knowledge of Hokkien to me for the same reason as my father: she just didn't consider it useful enough to bother with. She thought that becoming fluent in Mandarin and English was far more important in the long run than learning Hokkien and Hakka.

None of my grandparents spoke a word of English or Mandarin at all, they spoke Hakka, Hokkien and Malay. So after the age of eight (remember, that was when my grandmother broke her leg), the home environment was dominated by these two foreign languages: English and Mandarin. So whilst my Mandarin may be fluent, it is not my mother tongue - it is in fact, just another foreign language that I have mastered to a high standard. So this mismatch of labels has frustrated me for a long time and I did find some definitions on Wikipedia which did address the issue. The fact that there are quite a few definitions means that there is still no real consensus on the issue, but here they are:

Defining native language

• Based on origin: the language(s) one learned first (the language(s) in which one has established the first long-lasting verbal contacts).
• Based on internal identification: the language(s) one identifies with/as a speaker of;
• Based on external identification: the language(s) one is identified with/as a speaker of, by others.
• Based on competence: the language(s) one knows best.
• Based on function: the language(s) one uses most.

Now in my case: if you are basing it on origin, then Hokkien is my mother tongue and in terms of internal and external identification, then I certainly do identify Hokkien as my mother tongue. But in terms of competence and usage/function, Hokkien is way down the list for me today. I would have more claim to be Spanish or Italian in terms of competence and usage/function. I have Spanish and Italian friends in London whom I regularly practice my Spanish and Italian with - I can't say the same with my Hokkien. In terms of competence and function: then clearly English is my first language, followed closely by French I may be very fond of Hokkien, but I am far from competent in it!

Defining "native speaker"

The article titled “The Native Speaker: An Achievable Model?” published by the Asian EFL Journal states that there are six general principles that relate to the definition of "native speaker". These principles, according to the study, are typically accepted by language experts across the scientific field. A native speaker is defined according to the guidelines that:

1. The individual acquired the language in early childhood
2. The individual has intuitive knowledge of the language
3. The individual is able to produce fluent, spontaneous discourse
4. The individual is competent in communication
5. The individual identifies with or is identified by a language community
6. The individual does have a dialect accent (include official dialect)

And as for whether I am a native speaker of Hokkien, I certainly did acquire Hokkien very early in my childhood and I was fluent in Hokkien as a young child. Do I have an intiutive knowledge of the language? Yes actually. I remember when I was in Singapore in 2015, I stumbled upon two older ladies speaking to each other in Hokkien and I intuitively understood them well enough to follow the conversation: they used words that I didn't know off the top of my head, but somehow I was able to tap into something pretty deep at the back of my brain, some information archived from my childhood to make sense of those words. I won't be able to do the same say with Italian or Spanish - if someone used a word I didn't know, I simply don't have this native-language archive to access. However, am I able to produce fluent, spontaneous discourse in Hokkien? No. I would struggle, my vocabulary in Hokkien has shrunk so much over the years due to lack of usage. Yet I can still understand it pretty well, so that is at least one half of communication. And yes, I certainly identify with the Hokkien-speaking community and my Hokkien is clearly of the Singaporean variety.

I have to admit thought, that trying to identify Hokkien as my mother tongue does feel like trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole at times. Given the fact English it is the language I am most fluent in (and that I am writing this blog in English and not say, in Chinese, French, Spanish or Welsh), then clearly, English is my mother tongue and my first language. Yet I stubbornly choose to identify Hokkien as my mother tongue, rather than English for personal, sentimental reasons. If English is indeed my mother tongue, then is there a suitable term I can use to describe my emotional relationship with Hokkien then?  I just wish there was a less ambiguous term to describe "the language one is most fluent" in apart from "mother tongue" or "first language".

Am I unique? Hardly. My friend Lisa is British-Chinese, but unlike me, she was born in England and grew up here - so naturally speak speaks English as a mother tongue and first language. She has learnt a little Cantonese and Mandarin along the way, but as her family uses English at home, she has not really had the opportunity to improve her Cantonese and Mandarin. There are plenty of ethnic minorities in the UK like my friend Lisa who speak English as a first language instead of their parents' or grandparents' mother tongue. Likewise, I have friends whose parent speak different languages: my friend Lauren has a Finnish mother and a Nigerian father. She grew up in Finland and speaks Finnish, English and Swedish today - so despite having a very Nigerian sounding surname, she does not speak a word of Yoruba, her father's mother tongue. "When I go visit Nigeria, I just use English to speak to the locals - my father thought that teaching me Yoruba would be a waste of time, so he never tried to teach me." My mother-in-law told me that her Irish parents spoke Irish fluently, but simply never bothered to pass the language on to her as they had moved from Ireland to Yorkshire in England when she was a young girl and thus Irish was considered a useless language.

What is your mother tongue?

So as you can see, my situation is quite comparable to children of immigrants who have settled in a new country, but in my case, I didn't move to the UK until the age of 21 and it was my grandmother's fall that precipitated the change of my first language. Mind you, given that education is conducted in English in Singapore, I would have eventually adopted English as a first language along the way - but the circumstances that reduced the contact I had with my grandmother as a child simply sped up that process. Add to that my parents who felt that English and Mandarin were more important than Hokkien and Hakka, it felt inevitable that I would land myself in this situation. But in an increasingly globalized world where everyone is defaulting to English, well, I guess it is going to matter less and less in the future, in a world where your message is more important than the language you express it in.

So that's it from me on this topic. Are you just as troubled by the labels of 'mother tongue' and 'first language'? What in your opinion is a 'native speaker' of a language then? What is your mother tongue then? Many thanks for reading.