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These criteria usually coincide in speakers of big languages (usually languages of [former] empires), so it's relatively easy to say who is a native speaker of Russian or English. There are a lot of people who fulfill all the criteria at once.
But they rarely coincide for speakers of smaller languages (usually colonised people). When most people are bilingual, it's often harder to say who is a native speaker of Ukrainian or Belarusian. Most people fulfill some criteria but not all of them.
So, the term "native speaker" is not neutral and not very useful.
I eventually managed to separate the languages proper but I clearly see how the languages are are not a discrete classification.
Like, lithuanian polish and lithuanian russian are similar, but polish polish is further away phonetically.
Lithuanian has weird phonetics but the underlying grammar is very close to slavic languages.
English is much further away on the spectrum but why are sentence intonations (irony , question, etc) are still strangely compatible with languages from other branches of the language tree..?
Conclusion: strict language separation is a political construct not a natural thing.
I prefer mother tongue.
You can't "politically charge" a term that has always been political. The concept of "native language" is 100% political, always.
As for "mother tongue", it has the same problems and more. "Mother tongue" brings in an implicit idea of 'less prestigious ethnic language', "mother tongue" as opposed to "father tongue" (even in ex-USSR: e.g. you would say that Belarusian is "матчына мова", but you'd never say that Russian is someone's "матчына мова" even when speaking about ethnic Russians — because Russian carries higher prestige, so can't be "mother's" language)
We should not try to replace "native language" with a different term, we should avoid it in serious discussions. Instead, we can speak of proficiency, parents passing language to children, the role of education, the ethnic language, the national language, etc.
And if we do so, we see that there's nothing wrong or unusual about Ukrainian.
If anything, it's huge languages like Russian or English that are unusual. They're different from 99% languages of the world. After all, bilinguals are more common than monolinguals. It's Russian that is a weird outlier, not Ukrainian.
>>Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian
>This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.
The language debate about whether Ukraine is third behind Russian and Polish does not get heated till somebody here proposes a Slavic language that would have more speakers than Ukrainian does.
Here you go, stats, you see that Ukraine has a 7m larger population than Poland, but it's already conceded that not everybody there speaks Ukrainian, putting Ukrainian into 3rd place. Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian which would put Czechia in 3rd place with 10 million speakers?
Put up or shut up.
Russia 143,500,000
Ukraine 45,490,000
Poland 38,530,000
Czechia 10,200,000
Belarus 9,498,700
Bulgaria 7,265,000
Serbia 7,164,000
Slovakia 5,414,000
Croatia 4,253,000
Bosnia and 3,829,000
Herzegovina
Slovenia 2,060,000
Montenegro 621,383
What Slavic languages are spoken by more people than Ukrainian?
Wikipedia says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine (with a dozen other languages under 1% each) top two:
Ukrainian 32,577,468 67.53%
Russian 14,273,670 29.59%
32 million Ukrainian as 1st language
6.9 million Ukrainian as 2nd language
Basically this but not exactly.
Number are up for debate because none of the sane estimates put the count of Ukrainians at 45m. It's closer to 37m or even <30m if we discount those who left Ukraine.
But yeah, the vast majority of urban population thinks in Russian.
Also see an adjacent comment in this thread: if we sum up the predominantly ukrainian-speaking urban centers' population we get to a bit over 11m people which is basically the same figure as Czech language.
Thus putting Ukrainian language to the second place even by conservative estimate.
Which makes my original point incorrect.