Not Speaking Native Language/Dialect?

[Salmoneus]

I don't actually know when my ancestors lost Irish as a native language, or how exactly that transition occurred. Certainly my grandparents were English monolinguals and spoke no Irish (well, obviously their English was more influenced by Irish than mine would be, but they couldn't speak Irish as a language) at all. I think my maternal grandfather's uncle could speak Irish (and as that part of the family are almost certainly from the Aran Islands, that's highly probable) but it died out then at the very latest, and it looks as though his sister-in-law (great-grandmother) spoke no Irish. On my father's side, I've no idea when Irish was lost.

What's vaguely interesting about that is that my grandfather spoke no Irish at all, but then coming to the next generation, my parents, were intensively taught Irish at school (not necessarily effectively), which leads to my maternal aunt and mother speaking Irish fluently and another maternal aunt did mental arithmetic in Irish all her life!

My maternal grandparents seemed to know a fair amount of Irish, but I think that's just because they were highly educated, and would have been expected to be able to quote poetry and songs and whatnot in Irish. They had a few books in Irish around the house, and sometimes they broke into sentences of Irish with their friends, but I don't know whether that was actual production or just literary reference. I'm not sure either of them spoke Irish in the actual fluent-conversation sense.

His family was from the North, and had been Protestant a few generations before, so I doubt there was much Irish on that side. Her family, though, was from the West, so it probably hadn't been many generations since it was lost on that side (then again, they were well-off in the west, which I guess didn't help).

Their children learned Irish in school, but my mother only knows pronunciation and a few words and phrases; my aunt can passively translate simple sentences still.

I've some "cousins" who speak Irish fluently, but they're not cousins in the family sense, only in the blood sense, if that makes sense - I've only spoken to them a couple of times. And obviously, their native language is English anyway.

[Terra]

Being the bitch she is, she didn't even tell me the actual name of her village, and said something which effectively means "Figure it out for yourself, you're the one who's good with languages".

Has it occurred to you that she might not remember, nor care?

Also, the title doesn't make sense. Just because one's ancestor's spoke a certain language doesn't make it one's native language.

[the duke of nuke]

My grandfather was a native speaker of German (and I believe also Czech). Sadly, though, he refused to speak German after the war, since he didn't want to have anything to do with Germany. (He was Jewish, of Czech-Polish descent, so I don't blame him.)

[Wattmann]

Being the bitch she is, she didn't even tell me the actual name of her village, and said something which effectively means "Figure it out for yourself, you're the one who's good with languages".

Has it occurred to you that she might not remember, nor care?

Also, the title doesn't make sense. Just because one's ancestor's spoke a certain language doesn't make it one's native language.

1) She's 39, and she's been here for some 20 years while constantly visiting her home town until six years ago, so I'd hardly call her out on forgetting.
2) Should I then name it "Not Speaking Ancestry Language/Dialect"? I mean, this definition of native language is the one I use...

[clawgrip]

I think "native language" is generally considered to be synonymous with first language or L1, not heritage language or ancestral language.

[Nortaneous]

My father's side of the family has been here since before the Revolution, so there's nothing there, but my mother's generation is the first on her side of the family where nobody speaks German, even though they'd been in America for a while before that.

I tried to learn it once, but I haven't had any chance to practice it in ages (I went to fucking Germany to take a German class and everyone just spoke English), so I've forgotten most of what I used to know. And I'll probably never get a chance to learn it, since I'll have to learn Russian or Persian or something if I ever want to be able to get a job.

[Mr. Z]

My grandparents on my mother's side are both fluent in Hungarian, and they say they sometimes speak it between themselves, though I've never heard them use it casually (without me asking them too). I've been trying to use various methods to learn as much as I can from them, but it's no use, partly because I'm not as interested in Hungarian as I am in some other languages. My grandfather says it's the most futile language in the world, and claims he would rather have grown as a Romanian speaker, because according to him, Romanian is the closest living language to Latin.

[linguoboy]

I think "native language" is generally considered to be synonymous with first language or L1, not heritage language or ancestral language.

Confusingly, however, the "ancestral language" definition prevails in Ireland. You regularly hear Irish who are Anglophones by birth talk of "regaining" their "native language" (i.e. Irish).

[clawgrip]

I think "native language" is generally considered to be synonymous with first language or L1, not heritage language or ancestral language.

Confusingly, however, the "ancestral language" definition prevails in Ireland. You regularly hear Irish who are Anglophones by birth talk of "regaining" their "native language" (i.e. Irish).

In Japan "native" is often maddeningly used as an abbreviation for "native English speaker." Ironically, I've been referred to as a "native teacher" when actually I was the only non-Japanese person in the room and thus in truth the only non-native teacher.

[Yng]

Some of my great-to-the-umpteenth ancestors spoke pre-Celtic languages but tragically decided not to teach them to their children after they were absorbed into the great mass of Celtic speakers.

[Moanaka]

Apparently my dad spoke Quebec French as a young whippersnapper but wasn't raised to continue speaking it. So I don't either.

[Declan]

Hey, Declan, might you have any living relative *that you know* that still has some knowledge of Irish?

Not as a native language.

As I say, my mother and aunt speak Irish fluently (in my mother's case, she's very rusty, mixes up French and Irish these days), but it's learned, and in my older aunt's case, nearly all of her schooling was in Irish, and my own Irish is my most fluent language (or at least was at the time of my Leaving Cert., I'd need a bit of practice now), but that's learned as well.

On the native vs ancestral language, my parents generation would have a heart-attack if I called Irish a foreign language (in the sense that the vast majority of Irish people now learn it as an L2), but they would all call English their native language. Then again, it's often those who don't speak Irish at all that are most dogmatic about this.

[Wattmann]

Some of my great-to-the-umpteenth ancestors spoke pre-Celtic languages but tragically decided not to teach them to their children after they were absorbed into the great mass of Celtic speakers.

Didn't they all...

Except mine were pre-Germanics (and, if the alternate Saami hypothesis is to be believed, pre-Uralics)...
Someone's were pre-Semites, someone's were pre-Latins, someone's were pre-historic...

[Xephyr]

Some of my great-to-the-umpteenth ancestors spoke pre-Celtic languages but tragically decided not to teach them to their children after they were absorbed into the great mass of Celtic speakers.

You spelled "mercilessly slaughtered" wrong.

[Yng]

Some of my great-to-the-umpteenth ancestors spoke pre-Celtic languages but tragically decided not to teach them to their children after they were absorbed into the great mass of Celtic speakers.

You spelled "mercilessly slaughtered" wrong.

Look man there's no proof of that shit

Back off

[richard1631978]

My family isn't too interesting beause my Mum's side is all English as far as I know & my Dad's Welsh family spoke English as a first language for quite a few generations.

My Girlfriend's family is a bit more interesting, with her Mum's family originating from a part of Germany that is now in Poland.

Her Dad spoke Bengali as well as English, & might have known Hindi other Indian languages.

[Left]

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[sirdanilot]

My mother (native Brazilian Portuguese) stopped speaking her native language to me when I was quite young, meaning I don't know it very well. I can express most things and I can understand most things, but my speech is clearly non-native and ungrammatical at times.

From my father's side: my grandparents spoke a dialect of Dutch (Zeeuws), but my father was raised not to speak it. He also grew up outside of the area in which it is spoken (Zeeland), meaning he can't really speak it anymore. I cannot speak the variety of Zeeuws that my grandparents did, but as we moved back to a Zeeuws-speaking area, I can speak the variety of where we live now, though I learned it outside the family.

[Sevly]

I do want to, however, use this thread for a quick rant. I have met many people who speak of their grandparents as native speakers of a language and I certainly believe them, but then these people (my generation) claim, well when I was young I could understand everything my grandparents said, I was fluent, but now I've lost it. I ask them to say one thing in the language and they trip, not even able to properly pronounce things nor in fact understand spoken language which is what they claimed to be able to do as a child. It just makes me wonder two things, whether you really can learn to comprehend a language as a child and completely forget it, or why these people feel it is necessary to stretch the truth (and if they even realise they're doing it).

Shut up, Viktor.

On a less hostile note, yes, you really can learn to comprehend a language as a child and completely forget it. Of course, by "comprehend" we mean be as fluent as your typical kindergartener would be, which is still some ways away from keeping up with (the spoken equivalent of) the discussion on this board. Anyways, I already posted about this in the your native language thread, so I won't go into details here, but rather let Wikipedia do my work for me.

The strongest indication that an L1 can be extremely vulnerable to attrition if exposure ceases before puberty, on the other hand, comes from a study of Korean adoptees in France reported by Pallier (2007). This investigation could find no trace of L1 knowledge in speakers (who had been between 3 and 10 years old when they were adopted by French-speaking families) on a range of speech identification and recognition tasks, nor did an fMRI study reveal any differences in brain activation when exposing these speakers to Korean as opposed to unknown languages (Japanese or Polish).

The emphasis is mine, and the point is that first-language competency gained before puberty most definitely can dissapear completely.

[Torco]

I don't even speak proper spanish anymore, I keep badly importing anglicisms, both translated and not.

construí una motherfucking puerta
me encanta ella, es... como se dice kind en castellano?
eres una brisa de aire fresco
*perplexed stares follow*
which means I don't have a native language anymore, cause I don't even speak English all that awesomely. xD