First language

A first language (also native language, mother tongue, arterial language, or L1) is the language or are the languages a person has learned from birth or within the critical period, or that a person speaks the best and so is often the basis for sociolinguistic identity . In some countries, the terms native language or mother tongue refer to the language of one's ethnic group rather than one's first language. Children brought up speaking more than one language can have more than one native language, and be bilingual.

By contrast, a second language is any language that one speaks other than one's first language.

Terminology

One of the more widely accepted definitions of a native speaker is someone who was born in a particular country and was raised to speak the language of that country during the critical period of their development, The journal or qualifies as a "native speaker" of a language if they were born and immersed in the language during youth, in a family where the adults shared a similar language experience as the child. Native speakers are considered to be an authority on their given language due to their natural acquisition process regarding the language, versus having learned the language later in life. This is achieved through personal interaction with the language and speakers of the language. Native speakers will not necessarily be knowledgeable about every grammatical rule of the language, but will have good "intuition" of the rules through their experience with the language.

First Language (journal)

First Language is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers three times a year in the field of Language. The journal's editor is Kevin Durkin (University of Strathclyde). It has been in publication since 1980 and is currently published by SAGE Publications.

Scope

First Language focuses on original research in child language acquisition. The journal is multidisciplinary, containing research from diverse theoretical and methodological origins. First Language contains papers from a range of disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology and neuroscience.

Abstracting and indexing

First Language is abstracted and indexed in the following databases:

External links