Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Examples of the difference between “first learned language” and “operative language” can be found almost anywhere. I can find several in my own family. My father learned to speak in Yiddish, the language of his mother and of his environment in London’s East End some ninety years ago. Once he started going to school, he acquired English. There is no question that he could soon do far more with it than he ever could with his mother tongue. Similarly, the mother of my children spoke Hungarian as an infant but acquired French when she moved to France at the age of five. Neither of these cases involved the loss of the mother tongue. Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz also remained everyday speakers of their “native languages,” respectively, French, English, and German.

In many modern cases, the mother tongue that is supplanted by a learned language for higher-level activities remains only “mother’s tongue,” used exclusively for interaction with the older generation. Yiddish and Hungarian remained for my two relatives the way they spoke with their mothers and served almost no other purpose in adult life. That is fairly typical of first-generation immigrants in countries such as France, Britain, and the United States, many of whom possess a mother tongue that is stuck at the state of sophistication achieved around the age of five. But that was certainly not true of Descartes or Newton, who also wrote in French and English, respectively; it may well not be true of many millions of other bilingual speakers in the world today.

Throughout our lives we retain more or less strong emotions about the language in which we first learned songs, nursery rhymes, games, and playgroup or family rituals. These are foundational experiences, and the language in which they were experienced must surely be forever lit by the warm glow of our earliest reminiscences. But it does not automatically follow that the language of our earliest memories has any special importance as a language for what we may go on to become, or for what we take to be our personal identity.

When the first-learned language is overlaid by a language of education, it ceases to be at the forefront of an individual’s development. What is learned in the second but increasingly firstlike language are the foundational techniques of writing and counting, as well as all-important systems like the rules of baseball, alongside song lyrics and the bruising business of social interaction outside the family circle. All this sudden learning can of course be translated back into a first language, especially if the family environment supports parallel development and parents or siblings take the time to teach the child how to express all these new things in the family idiom; but without such support, few children would bother to do something so manifestly pointless (pointless, because unrelated to the social and personal uses of the newly acquired skills).

One problem with using the expression “mother tongue” to name the language in which an adult operates most comfortably is that it confuses the history of an individual’s acquisition of linguistic skills with the mystery of what we mean by the “possession” of a language. But it also does something more insidious: it acts as a suggestion that our preferred language is not just the language spoken to us by a mother but is, in some almost mystical sense, the mother of our selfhood—the tongue that made us what we are. It is not a neutral term: it is burdened with a complex set of ideas about the relationship between language and selfhood, and it unloads that burden on us as long as we take the term to be a natural, unproblematic way of naming our linguistic home.

We may all be born with the potential to acquire a language and a need to do so—with what some linguists have called a “language-acquisition device”—hardwired in our brains. But in practice, we are not born into any particular language at all: all babies are languageless at the start of life. Yet we use the term native speaker as if the contrary were true—as if the form of language acquired by natural but fairly strenuous effort from our infant environment were a birthright, an inheritance, and the definitive, unalterable location of our linguistic identity. But knowing French or English or Tagalog is not a right of birth, even less an inheritance: it is a personal acquisition. To speak of “native” command of a language is to be just as approximate, and, to a degree, just as misleading as to speak of having a “mother tongue.”