The importance of first and second languages in personal expression
To express emotions, we mostly rely on our native language

(Foreign) languages open up new worlds to us, but we generally feel most at home in our mother tongue. And yet, as Professor Thorsten Piske at Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen and Nuremburg explains in an interview, our native language isn’t always the language we speak best.

Is it ever possible to speak a foreign language as well as your native language?

Yes, under certain conditions. “Mother tongue” is what we usually call the language we learn first – which is why the term “first language” is often used as well in language acquisition research.

So we usually have a far better command of our mother tongue than of a foreign language. Then again, there are situations in which it’s the reverse or in which we have just as good a command of the foreign language.
Especially if you move to another country and that foreign language becomes your second language. Which is why we call it “second” language and not just “foreign” language: Second language means that, unlike a foreign language, this is the common language of your human environment, the language used in practically all everyday situations.

Meanwhile, if you aren’t using your native language as much anymore, it gets weaker, which researchers call “attrition”. You suddenly find yourself making grammatical mistakes, for example, or taking a long time to find the words you’re looking for.

There are various possibilities here, such as a significant disparity between oral and written proficiency. Children from immigrant families often speak their mother tongue fluently, but can’t write it very well, if at all.


But isn’t there much more to one’s mother tongue than just “use it or lose it”? Such as nursery rhymes in our mother tongue that we remember our whole lives long?

You’re touching on the subject of “emotions”, which is a key aspect. Even if we live abroad, we often express emotions in our mother tongue – when swearing, for example (laughs). But that, too, depends on the intensity of contact with the language and can change over time.

We are currently providing expert support for a pilot project at a “bilingual French” primary school in Bavaria and conducting a follow-up study to a previous pilot project at a “bilingual English” primary school. Subjects like mathematics and science are taught partly in a foreign language there. Our job is to assess the children’s English and French skills as well as their German skills. Many fear that intensive contact with a foreign language in early childhood will have a harmful effect on the German skills of children from immigrant families in particular. But this fear has not been borne out by our research on bilingual teaching. On the contrary, bilingual teaching does prove effective in promoting multilingualism.

To get back to emotions: Some teachers have reported that they consistently speak to the kids in the foreign language even outside of class, but switch to German when it comes to comforting a child – whereas other teachers stick to the foreign language and stress that, in consoling a child, the language used is less important than simply showing that you care.

Multilingualism has many positive effects on cognitive development | © Getty Images Can a foreign language have an impact on one’s mother tongue?

Yes, the fact that a foreign language is becoming dominant can be seen not only in our grammar, as mentioned earlier – for instance when we adopt English syntax in German. A foreign language can also “rub off” on pronunciation and intonation, which is also known as “speech melody”: we end up speaking our mother tongue more slowly than usual or adopting the intonation of another language. This is something you can hear – and show in detail using acoustic measurements.


If a foreign language becomes dominant so quickly, does that mean the speaker has a gift for languages?

I’d be delighted to confirm that one (laughs), but unfortunately not enough research has been done yet to back it up. We do know now that there actually is such a thing as a gift for language learning, but unfortunately we don’t know yet where it comes from, for example whether it’s innate.

It turns out that a talent for music can be an advantage in learning foreign languages, though especially, it seems, for so-called tonal languages: languages like Chinese in which changing a pitch or tone changes the meaning of a word too.

But here’s a small consolation for all the people who think they have no gift for languages because they’ve forgotten everything they learned in French class back at school: Once you’ve learned a foreign language, it can come back pretty fast if you get back into contact with the language. We call that “re-acquisition”.

Prof Dr. Thorsten Piske | © FAU/Giulia Iannicelli