Are the languages that can be fluently spoken only if you are descendent of a particular community/country ?
Are the languages that can be fluently spoken only if you are descendent of a particular community/country ?
I find it amazing that if a child is brought up in a community/country different from the origin of the child, the child is still able to pick up and speak their language fluently. Our ability, as humans, to imitate and communicate is incredibly complex regardless of where we are from.
So my question is, is there a language that cannot be spoken like this? One which only people with a certain genetic advantage can speak fluently during upbringing.
Of course anyone can learn a language by putting effort into it. My question is only for one learnt during upbringing (native language).
(Not sure why my responses are downvoted. I'm a non-native English speaker. Sorry if I didn't communicate something properly. It's just a scientific curiosity.)
Anyone can eventually speak any language fluently with enough practice.
There isn't really anything a human cannot learn simply because of where they grew up, its not limited to language only.
Sorry that is not what I'm asking. Of course anyone can learn skills. But there are certain mannerisms that are imprinted on us because we are from a certain community.
My question is if there exists a language that let's say among two children (one from the same country, but one from a different one) going through the same upbringing, but the non-native child cannot be as fluent as the native child ?
No. Kids work out language from exposure. Baby babbling is them working out how to make the sounds they hear. Sounds which don't exist in a first language are hard for adults to learn but any child brought up hearing those sounds will be able to make them and, if they were exposed for long enough in early childhood, they will know how they go together to produce meaningful speech.
Young children brought up with two or more languages will take a little longer to reach various speech milestones than their monolingual peers because they have a much more complicated puzzle to solve. But they'll end up sounding like a native speaker in both languages.
Outside of a physiological abnormality, there is zero reason any human would be incapable of being entirely and completely fluent in any particular language.
The only potential differences could be: accent or maybe sentence structure. However if both were raised from talking age in the same place where birth origins are different those differences would never exist. Those potential differences are only for those who may learn it later in life. Even then, only a maybe.
I'm getting some serious eugenics vibes from the OP
I did see some comments by OP, whether feigning ignorance or truly unaware, I wanted to make a comment that was unambiguous and very clear.
It seemed OP was unhappy with some of the other responses or felt like it wasn't entirely answered so this way hopefully there is no confusion that the concept they were asking about just does not exist. If it was ignorance, hopefully they learned and move on. If not, well that's a choice they made and there's nothing us internet people can do beside answer honestly and condemn poor viewpoints like eugenics.
You might get some personal variation based on cultural influences and the like too, but it isn't significant enough to affect fluency.
Like saying like a lot.
Although I am a little bit curious about how accents might work if someone's first language was something completely different to their second. If they spoke a click language, for example, would that carry over? Or the inverse.
If they spoke a click language, for example, would that carry over? Or the inverse.
Clicks are simply a category of consonants. They "carry over" as much as any other consonant. That is:
- if your L1 doesn't have clicks and your L2+ does, you'll probably have a hard time pronouncing them
- if your L1 has clicks and your L2+ doesn't have anything similar, you simply don't use them.
It would be theoretically possible that, if your L1 has clicks and your L2 has a consonant that your L1 doesn't, you end replacing some consonant there with a specific click. In practice I wouldn't count on that.
Are you trying to recreate the race theory ? There isn't enough difference among human ethnicity to have sounds that you can't do biologically.
However, as brain plasticity diminish with age, there is tons of sounds that non native can pronounce, look at French trying to speak english and struggling to get the th sound correctly Ze Ding is Tat or English speakers unable to get the french u sound properly Excousez moi. And this is for 2 countries which are pretty close geographically and culturally. I let you imagine what happen when an European try to learn an east-asian or sub saharian language, especially as an adult. IT's not about genetic, just about not being used to these sounds
No idea what race theory is. But what you say does makes sense. As an adult, yes it is mostly dependent on not being used to. But as another user pointed out, there are some languages with clicks in it that are difficult for someone outside the community to speak.
That's just another sound. Each language only uses a subset of the full range of sounds the human mouth is capable of making. For example, Japanese doesn't have an L sound, so people who learned Japanese as their mother tongue and then try to learn English as an adult will have trouble making the L sound. That's not to say they are incapable of making it, but they are not used to making that sound with the speed and ease needed to use it as a normal part of speech. This can be learned with practice, but it takes time.
I've read that languages making heavy use of clicks can be harder for people with certain facial structures.
Ah interesting
Managed to find where I read about it https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-click-speech-is-rare/
I honestly do not think that such a language exists, regardless of the moral implications of existing or not, and even taking into account spoken and signed languages.