→First language
First language
(mother tongue): A person learns the first language from her/his childhood
through subconscious processes resulting in developing the mother tongue
without using grammatical rules. She/ he learns the language naturally; that
is, without using conscious effort. It is one’s native language; the language
learned by children and passed from one generation to next.
Sometimes a
person’s first language may not be their dominant language, the one they use
most or are most comfortable with. For example, the Canadian census defines
first language for its purposes as “ the first language learned in childhood
and still spoken”, recognizing that for some, the earliest language may be
lost, a process known as language attrition. This can happen when young
children move, with or without their family (because of immigration or
international adoption), to a new language environment.
→Second language
Second language
is any language learned after the first language or mother tongue. The
inhabitants of a bilingual or multilingual country sometimes need to learn a
language which is the state language of that country (for ex. Pakistan) but not
the mother tongue of them. This is called the second language for those
inhabitants. In our Bangladesh, there live some tribes like “Mogh”, “Sawtal”,
“Monipuri” etc. they have their own mother tongues. These are their first
languages. But they have to learn our state language Bangla for carrying out
their education, communication, doing jobs in different offices. So when they
learn Bangla, it is their second language. Similarly in India there are as many
as 16 major languages. But only Hindi is her state language. The inhabitants of
India, whose mother tongues are not Hindi, have to learn Hindi to carry out
different opportunities from the state. In the circumstances, Hindi would be
their second language. So, we can say second language to mean a language
consciously acquired or use by its speakers around the age of six or seven or
after puberty. In most cases, people never achieve the same level of fluency
and comprehension in their second languages as in their first language.
→Foreign
language
A foreign
language is a language not spoken by the people of a certain place. It is also
a language not spoken in the native country of the person referred to, i.e. an
English speaker living in Japan can say that Japanese is a foreign language to
her/him.
Some children
learn more than one language from birth or from a very young age: they are
bilingual or multilingual. These children can be said to have two, three or
more mother tongues: neither language is foreign to that child, even if one
language is a foreign language for the vast majority of people in the child’s
birth country. For example, a child learning English from her English mother
and Bangla at school in Bangladesh can speak both English and Bangla but
neither is a foreign language to her/him.
In other words,
the language which the inhabitants of a country do not use as either first or
second language is called a foreign language. For instance, English, French,
Chinese, Japanese etc. are our foreign languages. Because we Bangladeshis do
not speak in any one of the above languages.
