First language

[3] Another impact of the first language is that it brings about the reflection and learning of successful social patterns of acting and speaking.

[5] On 17 November 1999, UNESCO designated 21 February as International Mother Language Day.

[6] The designation "native language", in its general usage, is thought to be imprecise and subject to various interpretations that are biased linguistically, especially with respect to bilingual children from ethnic minority groups.

In the context of population censuses conducted on the Canadian population, Statistics Canada defines the mother tongue as "the first language learned at home in childhood and still understood by the individual at the time of the census.

According to Ivan Illich, the term "mother tongue" was first used by Catholic monks to designate a particular language they used, instead of Latin, when they were "speaking from the pulpit".

The latter is the language one learns during early childhood, and one's true "native tongue" may be different, possibly determined by an inherited linguistic taste[citation needed] and may later in life be discovered by a strong emotional affinity to a specific dialect (Tolkien personally confessed to such an affinity to the Middle English of the West Midlands in particular).

published by the Asian EFL Journal[13] states that there are six general principles that relate to the definition of "native speaker".

The principles, according to the study, are typically accepted by language experts across the scientific field.