Is English your first language?

[optimisticnad]

I'm from Asia so I can speak two languages but I was born and brought up in England so I'm not sure if it is my first language or not! All I know is Im grateful that I didnt have to learn it!

[thuraiya]

guess what my first language is ?
my language is arabic..
it is my second year in learning enlish ..*_^
i learning it just 2 understand the west ..(religion ," political ,social realationships" )

[Dorian Gray]

I'm Dutch so English is my second language. I'm a student English teacher though so I'm fluent. I speak German as well and a bit of Spanish and French.

[maxb]

Hi! It's my first post. My name is Maximiliano, but is too large, so my friends call me Max.
I speak spanish in my daily life.

[MissMandylion]

No, it isn't. My mother tongue is portuguese. I started learning english when I was still in primary school - didn't learn in the school itself, though. I'm basically a self taught english speaker, because one day my parents bought a computer, and got internet (oh, the old days with 56kb!). At the age of 7/8, I was this little girl running through thousands of websites dedicated to kids (you know the type..those with all sorts of silly games) - most of them in english.
Sometimes I was really annoying, asking almost uninterruptedly my parents and sister the meaning of a certain word or whole sentence.

I guess only a couple of years later I realized how playing online games and communicating with other kids in chats was important - in my school life I've always had excellent grades in English subject .


(Recently I've tried to do the same with French, but it didn't work. I'm not smart anymore .)

[Laurette]

It's interesting to see that the majority of people aren't mother tongue speakers. I'm not one either - my mother tongue is Afrikaans, but living in South Africa means that my English is ok. I love the language for its history and its concise and elegant way of saying things.

[tamta]

I'm from Georgia, so my first language is Georgian. I speak English (I've been studying it since I was 7 ). Right now I'm studing Russian and Spanish

I love Spanish

[pinkmoon]

My mother language is Arabic...
I like it very much, but I study English language and literature
and I like English too. And I hope to learn some Spanish toooo.

[Ceinwyn]

My mother tongue is Portuguese. I don't use English in my everyday life. It's useful to comunicate with people from all over the world, but I don't do it very often. I hardly ever speak the language. I've never talked to a native speaker, for instance.

I didn't expect to find so many people from different language backgrounds. I thought most of them here would be from English-speaking countries, and I would be an exception. I think I was wrong.

[brunosr]

I'm not a native speaker either and, as ceinwyn, I thought I would be an exception, hehehe.Anyway, my mother tongue is Portuguese.Ah, I do speak spanish too.

[aabbcc]

It is hard for me to think of English as of "foreign" language. Even though I have never been schooled in English, nor have I ever visited any anglophone country - let alone lived in an area where English was spoken - nor have I grown up speaking it at home as heritage language, and despite the fact I do not get to actually speak English a lot, over the years it has crept into me so profoundly that I never quite considered it "foreign". I have been studying it since I was 4 years old, and I early began to use English as medium for reading [I have been reading books in English since I was 7-8], even as medium for thinking, and I always end up a bit shaken and surprised when I remember that it was actually not my native language.

My native languages were Croatian and/or Serbian* [* for cultural and personal reasons I do view them as separated languages, despite them being mutually intelligible] and Russian. The latter one is a complex issue, as I grew up outside of Russia I never quite reached a native-like command of it [I would even go as far to claim to be more comfortable with English than with Russian, to my great shame] and in my childhood Russian has always been that neglected "secondary" native language, something reserved for relatively small circle of people and something of sporadic use, something I de facto knew, but hardly ever used. In the recent years [at the moment of writing I am 17 years old] I have been using it more intensively [mainly through reading, as I have got perfect comprehension of written Russian], but I am yet to use it flawlessly myself.

Apart from these languages, I can also speak Italian reasonably well [years of formal education, and extensive reading in it and usage outside of the class].
Due to the beauties of solid old-fashioned classical education I am also taught Latin and Ancient Greek. I also study French and Modern Greek, but these two are the languages I would not dare to claim any command of [yet].

[kiz_paws]

I am a dog whisperer...

just kiddin.

English is my primary language, but I have a reasonable background in French (if people don't mind communicating a bit slower, than I'd be ok, methinks...) and a wee bit of Icelandic. I tried to learn German and I tried to teach myself Spanish with books (which turned out to be a disaster, though I did make friends with a super Venezuelan who speaks English very well)...

This place is awesome, full of such a wide variety of cultures. Yup, we rock!

[bazarov]

My native languages were Croatian and/or Serbian* [* for cultural and personal reasons I do view them as separated languages, despite them being mutually intelligible]

AND

I had to wait until 2006. to get Zhivago on Croatian, I just didn't want to read it on Serbian; they are similar but in the essence and the sound they are so so different!

[whatsername]

I'm not sure what my first language was, my mom told me that I used to speak a bit of Serbian(since I was born in Serbia) when I was little like at the age of one or something but I seriously can't remember at all.So to me my first langauge is English(because later in my life I moved to Canada) and it's the language I speak most of the day.

[scotpgot]

Wow. I'm really impressed that so many people have English as a second (or third or fourth) language. Not only to post intelligably (sp?) but to also read, understand, and discuss English-language classics (that are sometimes not that easy to understand even for native speakers.

I speak English as a native language, and also conversational (but not quite fluent) Spanish.