I found this in the wikipedia, I just throw it in the ring. Maybe it helps:
Defining "native language"Edit
- Based on origin: the language(s) one learned first (the language(s) in which one has established the first long-lasting verbal contacts).
- Based on internal identification: the language(s) one identifies with/as a speaker of;
- Based on external identification: the language(s) one is identified with/as a speaker of, by others.
- Based on competence: the language(s) one knows best.
- Based on function: the language(s) one uses most.
In some countries, such as
Kenya,
India, and various East Asian and Central Asian countries, "mother language" or "native language" is used to indicate the language of one's
ethnic group in both common and journalistic parlance ("I have no apologies for not learning my mother tongue"), rather than one's first language. Also, in
Singapore, "mother tongue" refers to the language of one's
ethnic group regardless of actual proficiency, and the "first language" refers to English, which was established on the island under the
British Empire, and is the
lingua franca for most post-independence Singaporeans because of its use as the language of instruction in government schools and as a working language.
In the context of population censuses conducted on the Canadian population,
Statistics Canada defines
mother tongue as "the first language learned at home in childhood and still understood by the individual at the time of the census."
[7] It is quite possible that the first language learned is no longer a speaker's dominant language. That includes young immigrant children whose families have moved to a new linguistic environment as well as people who learned their mother tongue as a young child at home (rather than the language of the majority of the community), who may have lost, in part or in totality, the language they first
acquired (see
language attrition). According to
Ivan Illich, the term "mother tongue" was first used by
Catholic monks to designate a particular language they used, instead of
Latin, when they were "speaking from the pulpit". That is, the "holy mother the Church" introduced this term and colonies inherited it from Christianity as a part of colonialism.
[8][9] J. R. R. Tolkien, in his 1955 lecture "
English and Welsh", distinguishes the "native tongue" from the "cradle tongue". The latter is the language one learns during early childhood, and one's true "native tongue" may be different, possibly determined by an inherited linguistic taste[
citation needed] and may later in life be discovered by a strong emotional affinity to a specific dialect (Tolkien personally confessed to such an affinity to the
Middle English of the
West Midlands in particular).
Children brought up speaking more than one language can have more than one native language, and be
bilingual or
multilingual. By contrast, a
second language is any language that one speaks other than one's first language