Thread by @WateverWA

A recent "hot topic" today is how we should maintain the identity of our mother tongue when speaking a 2nd and/or foreign language.

When highlighting this topic, the whole East vs West POV came into the picture, more specifically, of using English as 2nd language.

Understanding people's grievances (read: the colonized) towards the language of the colonizer, some, if not many of our parents anf grandparents still loathe the Japanese and the Britons, to name a few.

At the same time, from the earlier days, many of them also took up learning these colonizers' languages seriously, to the point of traveling there to complete their studies and to immerse themselves in the cultural aspect of the language.

These 2 languages are also the ones I have been interested in learning as 3rd and 2nd language, chronologically speaking from the earlier points above.

In learning the language, specifically the 2nd language that I studied for a mere 4 years in college, a concept was introduced.

That concept is called the language identity.

That, coupled with code-switching, opened our horizon into embracing the fact that as a bilingual speaker, our minds will subconsciously switch to the different identity (or persona if you will) when speaking that language.

The above phenomenon can also be observed in religious teachers and devotees who whether consciously or unconsciously, speak that 2nd, 3rd or foreign language by removing the intonation from their own mother tongue.

Coming back to the identity concern above, does speaking Japanese or Arabic or French in native or near-native fluency cost the speaker their native identity of their mother tongue?

Even if we are not learning the language in-depth, each language has its own phonetic symbols to guide any learners how to properly pronounce the word.

In the context of English, through dictionary, we are exposed to different stress on words esp with more than 1 syllable.

This word stress in itself is more simple than tonal languages like Mandarin and Tamil, and technically, the former was my first 2nd language learnt also back in college.

Thus, to speak properly a foreign language is to show our respect to the language and its rich history, notwithstanding the colonization and the dark periods in history.

Otherwise, ticking the language proficiency box on the form is just a mere facade due to our strong national-

ization.

To sum it up,

1) Learning a 2nd language (might) leads up to an identity formation towards the language (and not the said country)
2) Each language has its proper way of pronouncing their words
3) To claim ourselves as bilingual should require the effort for (2) above.

Any other arguments would just be based on the fact that we have been learning the 2nd and/or foreign language out of being forced and not by necessity, and in doing so, creates a mental block to allow for the language assimilation and integration.

Which, to this day, comes as no surprise to see fellow English graduates and oversea graduates not taking advantage of the said processes above, resulting in the word pronunciation to mirror the way we pronounce the words in our mother tongue.

At the end of the day, whether we choose to speak the (words in the) language properly or not, we have made a conscious decision on our side; as such, the other side should be free to exercise their decision on how to react to our (lack of) efforts.

Before you start emanating the nationalization energy, think of this beyond English as the medium of communication.

After all, the reason I'm posting this in English is that 1)I intend to reach larger, international audience, and 2)I cannot write in the 3rd language.

Peace n ♥️