The Strange Persistence of First Languages (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Strange Persistence of First Languages (2015)

nautil.us

49 pointsrutenspitz14 comments

> But between then and now, research has shown the depth of the relationship all of us have with our native tongues—and how traumatic it can be when that relationship is ruptured.

I wondered what these research were.

From the additional readings section I see these two that could be related:

> Hallett, D., Chandler, M.J., & Lalonde, C.E. Aboriginal language knowledge and youth suicide. Cognitive Development 22, 392-399

> Wang, Q., Shao, Y., & Li, Y.J. “My way or mom’s way?” The bilingual and bicultural self in Hong Kong Chinese children and adolescents. Child Development 81, 555-567 (2010).

It seems that these studies were done in environments where language has a very strong cultural connotation and strongly binds to an identity.

Not discrediting it, but I wouldn’t expect the same to be true for a Belgian couple speaking NL first and French second but moves to France and switch to French only.

Put another way, I think the whole arguments need disassociation with contextual factors if the goal is to focus on language. Otherwise language is just a part of the whole picture, and we should talk about first cultures perhaps, and not first languages.

Identity is a big confound in the relearning experiments involving foreign adoptees. There are quite a few studies looking at Korean children adopted by French or North American families. These children seem to completely lose their first language (no neural response in fMRI), even though some were adopted as late as 9 years old. However, when they enroll in introductory Korean classes in college, they seem to pick up the phonology more quickly than their classmates.

The confound is that it's not clear if they are "reactivating" some long forgotten part of their brains that maintained Korean phonology, or if they are simply more apt learners due to identifying as Korean. In other words, one of the challenges in learning to pronounce a new language is the ability to overcome "sounding funny" to your peers/yourself, but these Korean adoptees may not have that holding them back since they feel that they are reacquiring a lost part of their identity.

We’d have to look closer to the study, but there is a lot of research reaching the conclusion that learning languages has lasting effect on the brain, in particular in bi-lingual children ([0] for instance)

In that respect, picking back a language they once developed the “hardware” to fully master would be faster for them than people starting from scratch, even if presumably they’ve completely forgotten it.

I’d also expect children having learned language with the same structure to learn Korean faster, just as fully bi-lingual people learn tjeir third or fourth language faster in general.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6124684/

Long after they’ve mastered its syntax and vocabulary, a lifelong accent may mark them as latecomers to the language. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the star of many American movies and the governor of the country’s biggest state, but his Austrian accent is a constant reminder that he could never run for president.

Unfortunate Daily Mail source[1], but Mr Schwarzenegger says he can speak unaccented English, but he keeps his accent deliberately because it's what people expect of him.

And the popular claim is that he uses a vocal coach to help him keep it, after using a vocal coach to lose it early in his career. Can't quickly find any source for this claim, but it's plausible enough that it's part of his brand and image and worth a lot, that it doesn't seem a good idea to use him as an example in this article. Doubly so when he did run for Gov. of California, the largest economy of the individual states, and his accent didn't stop his success there.

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3141778/Arnold...

It’s not about whether the electorate would vote for him. It’s that the Constitution of the United States of America forbids anyone other than natural-born citizens from becoming President.

In theory, you can have natural-born citizens with other first languages; Bruce Lee would have been eligible to run for president if he had lived long enough; but the author was being rhetorical.

There actually has been a natural-born US President whose first language wasn't English. Martin Van Buren, the 8th President of the US, was from the Dutch minority of New York and spoke only Dutch as a child.

It's a pretty common thing among non-native speakers who have nonetheless interacted or lived in the English-speaking world for virtually all their lives. I know a bunch of people who are in the same situation (although, clearly, not as famous :) ).

My slight Irish accent is an endless source of fun when I'm abroad -- I'm not a native speaker and wasn't born anywhere near Ireland, or anywhere near the English-speaking world for that matter. I haven't even lived in the English-speaking world. The longest time I've spent is an English-speaking country was two weeks, which I spent in Scotland during my honeymoon. When I tell people where I'm from, no one believes me. They're skeptical even after I show them my ID card.

But I've been reading, writing and speaking English, during work and leisure hours, for God knows how many years now, so I can read, write and speak it pretty well. The accent was an accident -- I have an ear for this sort of stuff but I didn't really try to develop one, I just acquired it because I ran into The Dubliners and Christy Moore at a time when I was very interested in this type of music and for some reason I ended up borrowing some of the sound. Frankly, it's a little embarrassing at times -- for example, I do my best to hide it when I'm speaking to someone who is actually from Ireland, because I'm always afraid it might sound like I'm mocking them or trying to hard.

But other than that, it's been one my biggest assets. I've spent some time in $bigcorp world, and I've met a lot of people who were smarter and more experienced than me but nonetheless didn't get as much credit or attention as I got, partly because their thick Eastern-European accents and improper use of English idioms made it hard for them to communicate and painted them in a stereotypical light.

> but Mr Schwarzenegger says he can speak unaccented English, but he keeps his accent deliberately because it's what people expect of him.

Could well be boasting, unless there are sound recordings of him speaking without a German/Austrian accent.

The Arnold Schwarzenegger example has always struck me as an example of how unforgiving people can be about accent. His English accent - the one he uses in public; I've no idea how he speaks off camera - is phenomenal. The vowels aren't located quite where you'd expect for someone who speaks a well groomed American "cable TV news" accent, but it has everything necessary to be perfectly comprehensible to virtually any fluent North American English speaker. Which is a heck of an accomplishment for any non-native speaker. And yet people still consider him "marked", somehow.

Also, the very idea of "unaccented English" bothers me. In any language that has more than one regional or socioeconomic accent, that's a loaded concept.

It's hard to say if he is playing for the camera, but it doesn't sound like he is trying to sound stereotypically Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it is obvious that he is speaking with a German accent in this interview video with mens health, which appears to be the newest video of him, on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFk-L7Wcg0g

The entire article seems to be a refutation of its own title. It goes on and on about how easily first languages slip away and are replaced by the commonly spoken language of the region.

I think that the point that the article is making, even if it is not really expressed by its title, is that the mental significance of our first language hangs on even if we lose it by no longer being able to speak or think in it.

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