[Lexicog] When Semantics Doesn't Matter

[Bill Poser]

With regard to the question of whether one can know a second
language better than one's mother tongue, in some circumstances
the answer is, I think, yes. One such circumstance is when the
scope of usage of the mother tongue is limited. For example, I have
a friend who was born and raised in Vancouver. She has no siblings and
her father died when she was very young, so she was raised by her
mother alone. Her mother never learned more than a few words of English,
not even a basic functional command. My friend's mother tongue is therefore
Cantonese and since it is the only language she spoke
for several decades with her mother, she is certainly a fluent speaker.

However, her education was entirely in English and she did not live
in Chinatown or otherwise have a lot of contact with other Chinese
speakers. For all intents and purposes, she spoke Chinese only with her
mother, who had limited education and worked menial jobs. She is
not literate in Chinese. As a result, her vocabulary is severely
limited. She can talk about the things she talked about with her
mother - cooking and cleaning and every day life - but has no
vocabulary for science, business, politics, etc. Since
she grew up poor, I have found that I sometimes know the names of
dishes in restaurants that she does not if they are things that her
mother would not have made at home. She is unable to understand
much of the content of Cantonese radio broadcasts, and once was turned
down for a job in a small business because her Chinese was inadequate.

It is true that she is a native speaker of English, having learned it
as a child, but it seems clear that Cantonese is her true "mother tongue".
Nonetheless, she is much more capable in English.

This is a somewhat extreme case, but I've encountered similar
cases in immigrant families, and I think that something similar is
often found with speakers of dying languages. As a language dies,
it often happens that the range of situations in which it is used
contracts until it is used exclusively in the home, perhaps only
with the mother or only with grandparents, which results in speakers
who are in a sense fluent but only control a certain portion of the
lexicon and a limited set of styles and registers.

Bill
 


 
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