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Members' Native and Acquired Languages - fChk - 07-03-2021
I recently interacted with this thread and, while doing so, I remembered one of my classic topics that I used to open every time I land in a public forum and start to get used to its members' usernames (at least the more active ones !..). The thread, like this one, asks folks for their native and acquired languages.. The goal being to get to know each others cultural background and how far each one of us went in extending that native horizon of his.. So please, you simply need to format your response like mine :
Native language: Berber/Arabic (a strange mix: read blow for more)
Acquired languages: fluent(+++) Arabic, fluent(+++) French, fluent(+) English.
I used to just write Arabic as my native language to cut back on explaining the complication of my own case. But as this forum should be my last public forum where I will be participating, I'll dig deeper to do justice to my own (now lost) native language for once and, by the same token, show how natural languages are lost to the more dominant ones (in my case: Arabic dominating Berber language.)
The fact that I grew up in a largely tri-lingual household (Arabic dominant, French constantly lurking in the background and Berber which is the mother tongue) and where parents conscientiously avoid talking to their children in their mother tongue in favor to the more sophisticated Arabic language which is also the language of Prayer (which defiantly tilt the balance in its favor) had/has the obvious result of the siblings being incapacitated vis-a-vis of their mother tongue for ever. I confess that I can understand it to a certain point when I'm spoken to with it but that I have a hard time lining up a complete sentence without being laughed at. This being said, I should also confess that it was also my fault to have lost it completely -unlike my brothers and sisters- given the fact that I was more interested in the Sciences and the key languages that can help me get them... The rest is history...
The major up-side to this whole story is that being multilingual helps a lot when it comes to breadth of cultural outreach one has access to.. away from the cultural confinement the native language -whatever it is- imposes on us all.
P.S. : Language is a (100%) acquired human feature.. and the distinction we make here is between the native one, the one that is spoken by people around us and that we get spontaneously, without any formal education, at a very early stage of our lives and the acquired ones the one(s) that we get a bit later, 6 y.o. and above, generally with the help of a formal education...