I frankly don't know what the question means.
On Quora, someone posed it, and I was tagged, but probably not the only one.
Joseph Foster considered the question strange, as he grew up with two different dialects of English and had a teacher who grew up from early childhood in English and French.
Rolf Willers stated "it would have to be the mother tongue" ... and in a sense, that is correct. In a sense that only by learning to speak in the right slot of years (with one or more mother tongues) does one get access to learning more languages. It doesn't mean the mother tongue contains all the words you ever learn to use or things like that, it means that whatever language learning you do later is based on having learned that first. Note, you can forget your first language if you never practise it, but only if you are using another one. It also doesn't mean everyone has only one mother tongue.
But suggesting only one mother tongue is everyone's fare or reminding of the fact that no one learns a second language without having a mother tongue first seems an odd question to pose on Quora. In fact, that wasn't my initial interpretation of the question.
So, here is what I thought. Someone thinks, what I write about language must be wrong, so, thinks my linguistic source is outdated or has sectarian bias, and I don't have any other or better one, and in a offhand manner, like I would answer without thinking, or he were hoping so, asks what that is. He hopes to identify it, identify its fault and the point me to better sources. More modern. Less sectarian.
Here is my reply to that. I have studied linguistics in one way or another since I was a child. My early readings in this area involve:
- an essay or two in Junior Woodchuckers' Handbook (Disney concern), probably not written by the usual comic book staff, though illustrated with Disney style illustrations;
- an essay by Tolkien on English and Welsh, which among other things tell us that Rotomagus, while it became Rouen in French, would have become Rhoddfa in Welsh;
- a book about linguistics which featured examples in Germanic and Finno-Ugrian to examplify language family differences and different language typology (it taught me the difference between Isolating, Agglutinative, Flective, Polysynthetic), no longer on the Malmö library's catalogue*;
- a book about Medieval languages of Europe that suggested the development of definite article in both Romance and Germanic (absent from Latin and Gothic!) was a Sprachbund phenomenon, dependent on influence from Greek Hebrew, Arabic (it also said a thing or two about the process of how English and French and I think German too were standardised), no longer on the Malmö Library's catalogue;
- Languages of the British Isles past and present — I fortunately recall the title, so don't need the Malmö library catalogue to identify it, and I find it is from 1975;
- Der kleine Stowasser, which was a Latin lexicon my mother used before her Latin exam prior to entry into Med school in Vienna. It has lots of the words given with etymological equivalents in Germanic or Greek. Though, to be fair, Menge-Güthling has more of those. Also true of the Greek version of Menge Güthling. It says in a undertitle "mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Etymologie";
- Die Fähre, a school book of German literary history, involving some language history, bought in Berlin during a visit — it could be from a series of school books by Dr. W. Urbanek, but I don't think it was Bd. 10. = Oberstufe. Weiter Horizont; it began with Our Father in Greek, Latin, Gothic, then Old High German, Middle High German and early Modern German from Luther's Bible, it ended with Opitz and Simplicissimus and had good portions from Niebelungenlied and I also think Gûdrûn, both Middle High German and Modern German translation;
- a similar book for Swedish, I think it was "Svensk litteraturhistoria" ...
- observation of typological differences between Germanic languages, German having four cases, Swedish, Danish, to some extent English, two, Dutch like Romance consistently replaces Genitive with "van" ... English has "of" with common nouns, Genitive with proper names.
By "early" I mean, before I started learning Latin in school, in 11th grade.
Thanks to both Stowasser, Woodchuckers' Handbook, and item three, I was familiar with the theory of Indo-European languages coming from a common prior language. My earliest vision of an alternative was when dismissing my Greek professor's reference to Trubetskoy, which he took up in the interest of Pyrrhonism (yes, his favourite Greek school of philosophy was Pyrrhon), and only much later did I connect back to that when someone said "your timeline from the Bible doesn't line up with Proto-Indo-European being spoken 3000 BC" ... while I don't think glottochronology is an exact science, I think the argument holds. I looked up Trubetskoy and found he was the founder of Balkan linguistics, plus I recalled the Sprachbund arguments in item four on my list.
So, my knowledge of language studies is not based on just one source of linguistic scholarship.
But back to the answer of Rolf Willers. Someone may have meant another kind of snyde remark against me. Swedish is not French, not even English. As none of these two is my native language he may imagine "I'll never be fluent" ... that's wrong. Now, in the last two weeks, I've twice made embarrassing gender mistakes in French in contexts where Swedish wouldn't necessarily gender the nouns. I have also admitted to my Swedish perception of the phoneme [e] overlapping to some degree with the French perception of the phoneme [i] (Swedish has the series [i — e — ε — æ — a] in the space where French has the series [i — e — ε — a], so French has more space of variation allotted to [i] than Swedish has — item three taught me about vowel triangles or vowel diagrams). I also regularly confuse in words I have not fully learned yet whether the syllable has an e or an é in spelling, since to my ear "böcker" with -ər and with -εr sound the same, it's the same word, just regional variation. Yes, the very finest points about French phonetics are filtered from my experience of Swedish.
However, I do not propose to become a conférencier in French. As to my capacity of writing in French, that's the kind of thing I can check before publishing, and often do. When a "bésoin de debut" (instead of "besoin de début") slips by, I actually authorise the correction of it.
An even worse kind of snyde remark would be if someone thought I had some mental trouble about my language capacity in Swedish, because I write "vi ha elfva timmar qvar" instead of "vi har elva timmar kvar" ... the use of plural verbs was standard Swedish up to 1950, and is very unlike the proposal of corresponding to English "thou art" from Shakespear, one needs to be really uneducated to make that connection, it's far closer to "nous arrivâmes en moins des onze heures qui nous restaient" instead of "nous sommes arrivés etc" ... and "elfva" and "qvar" is like using a "colour labelled axe" in English spelling rather than a "color labeled ax" in American spelling. Both the US and Sweden had reforms in 1906. So, no, nothing like a language incapacitating mental symptom in my most basic, i e native language, just a use of my actual capacity of Swedish to make a polemic point in a consistent, but low key way. The point being I hate modernity and not least modern administrative tyranny, whether directed against language (Frans G. Bengtsson was against the spelling reform) or against family (see Sweden Doesn't Have Communism for Everyone, Just Selective Communism Where it Hurts).
No, my Swedish is fine, just not to everyone's taste, and so are my later learned languages English and French. Well, French is languishing somewhat from lack of practise. When a whole neighbourhood agrees to overwhelm me with lots of "bonjour" and "comment allez-vous" and nearly nothing else, that's not conversational practise. But not to the degree that anyone has to take into account I could have "meant something else" since French is not my first language. If someone says "Fascist" in French means "Nazi or at least very close", sorry, that's not a feature of French, that's a feature of a political climate I try to change.**
Another possibility is, someone has had "the mother tongue is the sole linguistic source one bases language learning on" in the homework and wanted to check if the homework actually made sense. And it doesn't.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Turibius of Mogrovejo
23.III.2026
Limae, in Peruvia, sancti Turibii Episcopi, cujus virtute fides et disciplina ecclesiastica per Americam diffusae sunt.
PS. There is a question which some classify as "linguistics" and I don't, where I also had an early source. For evolutionary linguistics, the kind of thing that Jean Aitchison is trying in The Seeds of Speech: Language Origin and Evolution (Canto), I did have a loaned and later given book on anthropology which pretended the first phoneme and word was the sound "φφφ" as per blowing on a fire, it was a pretty racist one, but the thing is, later works (I've seen samples) seem to retreat from even that question. However, I'd not classify that as linguistics, but as one of the more problematic problems in the Theory of Evolution. The problem should be apparent from my essay doublet (from two quora questions) All Human Languages are Human, None are "Primitive"./HGL
* It also involved the concept of phonetic change. I thought "fagus" meant "book", which is actually "liber", since "book" in Swedish is "bok" but that also means "beechtree" which is the real meaning of "fagus" .... ** It has two different meanings, applicable either to Italian Fascism only or to all of the Fascisms many of which were even less like National Socialism than Italian Fascism was. I use it in the latter sense.
