Mother tongue plus one (or more)

What can be said is that any person who is bilingual by one of these definitions is proficient to some degree, and uses in some way, a language other than his mother tongue, or native lan-guage, or first lanlan-guage, or dominant language– as you can see, even this basic term mother tongue is full of pitfalls when we move out of everyday language use and try to define it for purposes of study. What is your mother tongue? The language of your mother, almost cer-tainly. What, however, if the language spoken by your mother is not the language of your father? Or of the community you live in? What if you only speak your mother’s language to her, and speak another language at school, where you learn to read and write that language on a much higher level? What is then your mother tongue?

Borbála Richter

Kodolányi János University College Department of English Language and Literature

We can clarify the issue with the help of four criteria: origin, identification, competence and function (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1984)

Origin: the language/s learnt first, or in which the first long-lasting verbal contacts happened

Identification:

Internal: the language one identifies with (this is decided by the speaker) External: the language one is identified with (this is decided by other people) Competence: the best-known language

Function: the most-used language

16.2.1. The simplest case

For people who speak only one language (monolinguals), living in a community that speaks that same language, the four criteria are all met by the one language. This is probably true for most Hungarians, and it is traditionally considered true for Americans and even the British.

However, about half of the world grows up speaking more than one language. This number is a rough estimate, since you can imagine how difficult it would be to conduct a survey on this topic. It is clear that these naturally bilingual people can have more than one mother tongue, and that their mother tongue can change during their lifetime (except as regards origin).

16.2.2. The question of language rights

If we look at the fourth criterion, namely function, we can also see that the issue of mother tongue can be very political: many people in powerless situations are not able to choose which language they want to use most. An example of this is the Deaf person who may claim Sign language as a mother tongue in a society where deaf people are not thought to have a language at all, or where the hearing outsiders think that the deaf child’s mother tongue should be, or should become, the oral language the parents speak (or a coded form of this language).

This is linked to the issue of proficiency as well. Very often being bilingual is not a matter of choice. It is generally necessity or opportunity that decides which language will be spoken best.

Education is expensive and decisions about the language of instruction are usually made on gov-ernment level: the language of the home and the language of school may not be the same.

Allowing people to use their own language in official situations is even more expensive.

Think about the position of Hungarian in the European Union. Would it not be easier just to decide that all European Union citizens should speak just one language? If your instinctive response was to feel uncomfortable with that idea, then you have recognised that language and identity are closely linked. Despite our personal uniqueness, our personal characteristics develop in a social context, speaking a particular language means belonging in some way to a speech community. Membership in more than one speech community complicates an

al-ready complex pattern. Researching this dynamic interrelationship is an important area in studies of bilingualism.

Language choice reflects social patterning and shows how a bi- or multi-lingual society is structured and the functions of the languages used there. Fishman suggests that one way of investigating this is to answer the question ‘Who speaks which language to whom and when?

16.2.3. The question of labelling

Likewise, there can be conflict between the way people see themselves and others see them.

A particular person could claim a mother tongue even without being able to speak that lan-guage! For example, some people feel they belong to an ethnic group, but they may not learn their mother tongue in infancy. In cases where the political system is sympathetic to-wards their wishes, they, or their children, may be able to learn their mother tongue in school.

There are programmes designed to bring a language back to life, such as Welsh in Wales, or Gaelic in Ireland. Other programmes help groups maintain or reclaim their language while they live in a larger language community speaking another language. In Hungary this is true for the German minority, where, for many members of this group, German is a ‘grand-mother tongue’. The younger generation is being helped to relearn the language of their forefathers by making a place for this in the schooling system. The middle generation, on the other hand, was generally discouraged from learning German in their home or at school.

16.2.4. The consequences of choice

16.2.4. The consequences of choice

Taken to an extreme, official policies forbidding the use of certain languages can lead to a lan-guage being forgotten or not used. In the worst case, we can even speak of LANGUAGE DEATH

or LINGUICIDE.

Even when a language does not die, it may change, and the situations in which it is used may change. Bilinguals can often choose which language to use. Their choice may depend on many things, including language proficiency, the prestige of the language or of its users, the relationship between certain people in certain roles, and so on. Many minor decisions taken on a daily basis by many individuals can add up to a major trend in time. In this way the Hungarians of Felsőőr or Oberwart (these names refer to the same place, in Austria) have moved towards becoming speakers of German, a process called language shift. The two lan-guages, Hungarian and German, existed side by side and affected each other and each others’

speakers. In Europe, if you look at the areas alongside the national borders, you can fre-quently find areas where two, or even more, languages co-exist.

Language planning theory can be used to help save languages or reverse language shift. When a minority language is threatened, the situation can be analysed by placing it on a scale, where the one end urges the recording of the language for possible later reconstruction and moves through stages to the relatively unthreatened status of a minority language that is available in higher education, central government and the national media.