Texte Style wrote:
Jane Proctor wrote:
My youngest has now spent more time here than in the UK and I suspect her French is better than her English.. French constantly interferes with her spoken English, faux amis abound and she is forever muddling up her syntax... And yet, technically, English is and will always be her first language/mother tongue or whatever you want to call it.
My children could fit in the same category as yours, Jane, with an English mother but living in France. They have a perfect accent but get simple things wrong in English. ... They could perhaps have produced text along the lines of the original post.
What you're saying is true also of my 11-year old son, who lived in South Africa until he was about six years old. His Afrikaans accent is perfect, and he can comfortably switch between Dutch and Afrikaans vocabulary, but he uses Dutchisms in his Afrikaans that would have triggered any non-nativeness test for Afrikaans.
Whatever, the question here is whether Giulipalla's English is good enough to claim native English status, and I am categorically in with Charlie, Samuel and Ty on that. The writing in the original post is not what I would expect from a native speaker ... As a teacher of English as a foreign language I would have marked that piece of writing pretty severely.
Yes, in this thread the OP clearly stated that English was not her "first" language or the language that she grew up with before she went to school, so this is not a case of a child losing his ability to speak perfectly, like a native speaker, but rather a case of a good foreign-language speaker who is no longer in an environment that fosters that language or protects it.
I was fascinated by that thread, yet found myself not bothering to read certain posts quite simply because they were hard to follow, and when I looked a bit closer I realised that it was the non-natives I was skipping, simply because the prose didn't flow as well...
Well I hope you read this post at least, since it quotes you.