Questions tagged [native-language]
The first or only language that a speaker acquires from birth.
30 questions
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How is the number of native Urdu/ Hindi speakers counted?
Urdu/ Hindi are often referred to in legal documents and common usage as distinct languages. But linguistically, they are said to be two registers of the Hindustani language, in fact, sometimes as two ...
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Technical term for terms never used naturally by native speakers?
Apparently, there are some terms that are never used naturally by native speakers. They may only appear under extremely peculiar circumstances (e.g. in some translations of foreign-language texts). A ...
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Native language rejection
I am looking for statistics/research/terminology about the native language rejection by immigrants. I mean by this partial or complete refusal to use one's mother-tongue in favor of the local language ...
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Can you have two first languages?
I was born in Germany but my mother is from Brazil. Therefore, I speak with her in Portuguese and everyone else in German. The thing is, I moved to Brazil when I was 13-14. I never had much difficulty ...
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is it possible to forget how to pronounce a phoneme that exists in ones native language?
now I know this might seem like a strange question (I'm not sure if I'm using the correct tags) but hear me out.
I'm a native speaker of the Georgian language(a Kartvelian Language) who's been living ...
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Are there national accents that are "perfect neutral" for English?
I am French and I spent my days speaking English with people from various nations for the last 25 years.
I heard English spoken in many different ways, some were easy to understand, and some difficult....
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Do Native Americans' names mean the same to Native Americans as to English (or other languages) speakers?
I was researching on the topic of representation of ethnic minorities in the dominant ethnic group's media, when this question came up. What I'm trying know more is whether and to what extent ...
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Corpus of English sentences written by non-native speakers?
I am working on a hobby project which tends to help the non-native speakers figure out if the sentences they write are good enough and sounds like written by English native speakers. Any relevant info ...
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Is there a word like father-tongue?
If a Telugu speaking woman married an English man and the children speak the two languages equally well and that is possible in the global context.
What will be the mother-...
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Do natively bilingual people have accents in one or both of their languages?
Do people who grew up speaking multiple languages typically have a discernible foreign accent in one or more of their primary languages?
Also do they tend to make the kinds of mistakes that non-...
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Educating people in their mother tongue
Not all nations provide education in the national tongue.
In India, being educated in English is generally preferred.
I am looking for any study with details about the situations in different ...
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Could it be a person without a native language?
I've seen on this site, one of the users who claims that he doesn't have a native language. Could it be? If it could, then how?
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I don't know what my L1 is and want to find out
I've been doing personal research in Second Language Acquisition by reading a book on the subject (Understanding Second Language Acquisition -- by Lourdes Ortega) and I've become convinced that the L1 ...
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Would I be considered a native English speaker?
I was born and raised in a non-English speaking country from the ages of 1-5 before moving to America to start kindergarten (in American English.) So while I didn't start learning English right after ...
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Are there any freely available tools for English Native Language Identification?
I know that native language identification is a current research topic in natural language processing. I have an English text whose author clearly is not a native English speaker (I am not, either), ...
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Analysing the notion of the native speaker
I am interested in the notions of the native, native-like, near native... speakers in linguistics. I have encountered several non-equivalent definitions/characterizations of these concepts. Right now, ...
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Do difficult native languages slow down early education?
Do students from countries that teach native languages considered to be quite difficult (e.g. Japanese) generally take longer to master that language? Or does the power of being surrounded by a ...
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Position of negation in an english sentence [closed]
This question is mainly aimed at native English speakers. Does the position of negation in a sentence matter? Does it have a feeling attached to it? Here is my point of view and an example:
I have no ...
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Why does inflection in any language sound so natural? [closed]
I saw this video and realised that all mentioned Old English plurals sound pretty natural for me, even though I'm native Czech speaker. Also in German I think inflection seems to follow some universal ...
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What is the substrate of Romanian language?
I mean what was the native language of Wlachs and Dacians before they adopted Latin?
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native speaker error rates
I am a native speaker of English, but I make (and notice others make) English mistakes all of the time; I change negative to positive and vice versa, I switch "he" and "she", I make spoonerisms, I ...
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Am I a native English speaker? (born I Hungary, lived in US from age 3)
I'm not sure if I'm going to get any answers, but I am trying to find out whether I can qualify as a native english speaker.
Here's my story:
born in Hungary
moved to US at age 3
spoke Hungarian ...
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Does native language influence intelligence quotient?
This is a sensitive question, but there should be enough evidence of the correlation, if any, between the language spoken in different regions and their average IQ.
Update:
If there is a correlation ...
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Is learning German easier for people who know Sanskrit, and vice versa?
I've heard many times that learning German is easier for those who speak Sanskrit, and vice versa. Is there any linguistic basis for this? What similarities exist between the two languages that may be ...
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Is it possible to become a native speaker of another language for someone that already has a mother tongue?
Are there any studies/researches on fields like neurolinguistics(or any other fields) to allow people (can be via drugs, psycho training..whatever) to become a native speaker of another language? Is ...
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Are there studies of difficulty to learn particular language depending on learner's native language?
Do you know if any studies were made to classify the difficulty to learn a particular language depending on learner's native language?
There are a lot of discussions about what is the easiest or the ...
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Determining my native language
The other day I was filling out a form where I had to state my native language and I simply couldn't seem to find an answer to that question. I guess it had never come across me, but I simply had ...
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What is a native speaker, and at what point does someone become a native speaker?
Most often I hear that only birth languages, those languages first learned, are native languages to the speaker. Seems like a pretty lazy way to define if a speaker is a native speaker, since to speak ...
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Is it possible to change your mother-tongue by thinking in another language?
Once I heard from someone that your mother tongue is the language you talk in your thoughts. I've asked many people to verify the correctness of this proposition and to me, inductively this seems to ...
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Distinction of vowels depends on native language
I have seen a computer experiment at a science museum that asked the user to distinguish very similar vowels by sound explaining that visitors with different native language can distinguish different ...
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