2.1Mother tongue: which one it is?

Mother tongue: Which one is it?

It is cleared the previous topic (language acquisition) of this investigation, now, I am going to explain what is mother tongue.

The first language –also called as mother tongue or native language- is that a person has learned from birth inside a social group, when a person acquires and speaks more than one language becomes bilingual. (First language at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_language)

Example: If you were born in Brazil, so Portuguese is your mother tongue because it is the national language and the most used by people.

So, what happens in a multilingual country? It is possible for people communicating between them?

Example: In Switzerland, there are spoken four languages: German, French, Italian, and Romanche, according to the 2000 census, the first mentioned is the majority language (72.5%), it is followed by French (21%), Italian (4.3%), Romanche (0.6%), distributed over the country. (See la lengua y la legislación on Los cantones son los que más sufren el multilingüismo, 2007, p.13, forumfed.org)

The government assures to the population the free usage of any language, this could be enforced at the justice court or at the city hall, and it is done for an efficient public service. (Op. cit., p.13)

Generally, the Swiss people is bilingual or trilingual, they can communicate between them with the language what they decide to use; anyway the constitution protects the liberty of language. (Op. cit., p.13)

In the other hand, this multilingualism had created more territorial divisions, example: the canton (federal political division) of Jura was created from the canton of Bern, it was made because the usage of language (German is the majority, and French, minority). (Los territorios multilingüísticos frente al multilingüismo, p.14)

As we can see before, the people can be bilingual, trilingual, or multilingual as much as they can do, but how can separate the structure of each language to avoid confusions? We are going to study two theories about this topic.

Switching theory

Proposed by Wilder Penfield and Lamar Roberts in 1959. The hypothesis tells us about a kind of switch, it is a metaphorical representation of a brain process which it still inexplicable by neurologists. It works as follows: When a person is speaking a language, the other language is off. (Appel R., Muysken P, 1996, p.118)

This theory is considered very simple to establish that mechanism; the results of some experiments applied to a group of persons shown a mixing of languages: they had to say colors in one language but got distracted by the other language. (Op. cit., p.118)

The switching theory tests the capability of the human for speaking and listening in different languages.

Two switches theory

It tries to explain the brain has two hypothetic “switches”: one for input and the other for off. The speaker choices a specific language and controls the switching, but the Stroop bilingual test shows that theory is uncertain because has the same vagueness as the previous hypothesis. (Op. cit., p.118, p.119)

Really, we have not that so called “switch” in our brain, the language is a complex process, even the most experiment bilingual person could mixing up languages either grammar, pronunciation, spelling, etcetera.

Alternating languages

Some bilingual people combine the structure of each language for constructing the speech to communicate ideas. The study about this phenomenon has different points of view.

The alternation occurs when a person cannot find the correspondent word in a specific language due to a lack of knowledge about the structures or it is hard to express an idea in one language. (Appel R., Muysken P., 1996, p.177)

A bilingual person can alternate language codes for including or avoiding people in a conversation, this is a social issue. (Op. cit., p.178)