#especially where multilingualism is concerned you need to draw a line somewhere

[pathsofoak]

Gonna preface this by saying I'm a BA (undergrad) student specializing in linguistics, specifically language acquisition, so I'm not like a specialist or anything, but I think I can still offer some valuable thoughts.

Adding a second bit saying that whether or not you consider something your first, second, or third language (or even a language that you speak to begin with), is entirely up to you. I'm just

I'd say they're both your first language, and, I would argue (personally!) that even if you weren't equally comfortable in both languages, they would probably still be.

In studies of multilingual children, it's actually pretty important that when a child learns both languages simultaneously, they're both recognized as a first language, mostly because otherwise, it would be very hard to set up a system to decide which language is the "true first language" or something like that because there's no real metric for that. You could say "whichever you're better at" but if, for example, one language was spoken inside the house and the other inside and outside, you heard one more than the other and would have been slightly better at it, statistically speaking. Whichever language is most dominant in your environment wins out in that case, but that doesn't mean you weren't acquiring both at the same time.

As a child, the way you learned your languages would have been different from monolingual children as well. In general, the more speech a child hears, the better and faster they learn a language. But, if you're raised bilingually, then that speech is split over two languages. This means that you acquire both languages slightly more slowly (this actually is a big issue in language disorder diagnoses because not all tests are properly designed to account for this, so multilingual children get over-diagnosed with DLD, but multilingual children catch up, whereas children with DLD do not). At the same time, there are specific aspects of language you might have learned faster (such as that one thing can be referred to with more than one word).

Also, fun little fact if you learned both these languages from birth or early infanthood, then, as a baby, you learned not one, but two sets of sounds! One English, one Hindi. Children can learn to differentiate sounds before they even learn to speak. Sounds are very difficult to master (it's why pronunciation in any foreign language is hard to learn), but you were likely learning both while your brain was still developing your ability to tell one sound from another and recognize them as different. It's a bit like learning two scripts at the same time, but like, sound.

When you learn a language (or more) as a child, and then much later in life learn an additional language, you have to learn all those new sounds with it, including even hearing the difference. For example, English has the vowels in bad and bed, but Dutch doesn't have the vowel in bad, so Dutch speakers don't often hear the difference, and pronounce both words as bed (because we hear it that way too). But children who acquire both languages simultaneously don't have this issue between those two languages, because they're learning to separate those sounds at the same time.

If you were a participant in a language acquisition study as a kid, I would have jotted both down as your first language, since both are relevant (very general and non-specific example). But your life isn't a linguistic experiment, words are arbitrary, and labels are always going to be somewhat constrained and complicated.

So your personal feelings here definitely matter more. In my community, a local language (Nethersaxon) is losing speakers, mostly because while many older people speak it and raised their children with it, classism being what it is, especially women were encouraged to speak "proper Dutch" (Nethersaxon was considered a dialect at the time, not a language), so even though they heard it from birth, they rarely spoke it at a later age, and cannot properly and comfortably speak it anymore today because they stopped using it for so long. They were all multilingual kids, in fact they likely heard more Nethersaxon than Dutch as infants, but even if they still speak some of the language, I don't think I've heard a lot of people consider themselves bilinguals, even though technically, both Nethersaxon and Dutch are their first language.

Similarly, there are people who learn a language much later in childhood or even early adulthood who feel a stronger connection with it than with the language they were raised with (I can imagine there are people re-learning dying languages or heritage languages might feel like this, especially because such processes are often related to specific political and cultural contexts).

I could go on a longer rant or go more in depth on the science part (I left a lot out about how things work and put some things down slightly more simplified) but I'd have to pull up studies and everything and it's late, so:

TLDR: scientifically, they're usually both considered your first language because you acquired them at the same time, which also had specific effects on your process of language acquisition as a whole, which makes it very different from learning one language and then learning another after that, but it's up to you whether you consider both languages your first language, as in the end, your personal relationship with your languages and your personal history are of much greater importance.

hi! i've recently gotten interested in linguistics (i watched a vsauce video and got sucked into a rabbit hole lmao) and i had a question about bilingualism- if you know 2+ languages, can you only call one language your mother tongue?

e.g. i grew up speaking both english and hindi at home, and am equally comfortable with both but whenever someone asks me what my first language is, i blank.

i'm very much not an expert on this, either academically or experientially, but there's no reason you should have to designate only one as a "first language" or "mother tongue" (outside of paperwork, i guess).

this is a complicated topic and very politically driven because of the role of language in colonialism! a "first language" seems very straightforward. it's the first language you learned, right? but that gets squirrelly in cases like yours, where you learn multiple languages simultaneously.

it's even more complex when you get to the concept of "mother tongue." that could just be your first language(s), but many people who learn their heritage languages later in life—especially languages that have been intentionally repressed—feel that it is more important to claim that cultural connection than to be strictly accurate about learning order. speakers of mayan languages in guatemala, for example, may claim one of those as their "mother tongue" even if they had to learn spanish as a first language for reasons of political violence.

it can get really messy really fast depending on the context of the question. in the end, though, how you label your languages comes down to personal choice, so you're perfectly allowed to call both english and hindi your first language!