First Language Defined
Your first language, also known as your mother tongue or native language (L1), is the language you learned naturally during early childhood. It's typically the language spoken in your home environment from birth.
Childhood Language Acquisition
The question states you were born and brought up in a village where everyone spoke Hindi. You started using Hindi without going to any school. This indicates that Hindi was the language you acquired naturally from your family and community during your earliest years.
- Environment: Village
- Dominant Language: Hindi
- Acquisition Method: Natural, from birth/early childhood
This process clearly establishes Hindi as your first language based on how and when it was learned.
Formal Schooling and Fluency
Later, you attended school and studied multiple languages, including English, Sanskrit, and Urdu. You also developed fluency in English. However, learning these languages in school represents formal education and secondary language acquisition (L2, L3, etc.).
Achieving fluency in a language like English later in life, while impressive, doesn't change the language you learned first during childhood. Your ability to speak English very fluently is a result of study and practice, not natural acquisition from birth.
Identifying Your Native Tongue
Based on the information provided:
- Hindi was the language of your home and village environment from birth.
- You learned and used Hindi naturally before formal schooling.
- English, Sanskrit, and Urdu were learned later through schooling.
Therefore, your first language is Hindi.
Important Questions from Language - Teaching
- A teacher asks her learners to write a paragraph on ‘water'. Then the learners start discussing what they have been taught in science and social science classes. Then they begin to write a paragraph on water. This is an example of :
- You are a Hindi speaking teacher, but you get posted in a primary school which is in the area of Punjab. Since you do not know the local language of that area, you should :
- When we say ‘Language is arbitrary', we mean to say that :
- What is 'systemic competence' in language learning ?
- Here is text or some statements. Find out which language register does this text represent ?
The Indian Constitution recognises every person as equal. This means that every individual in the country, including male and female, person from all castes, religions, tribes, educational and economic background are recognised as equal. This is not to say that inequity ceases to exist. It doesn't. But at least, in democratic India, the principle of the equality of all persons is recognised.
