First Fluent Language?

[Hopeless]

He can add Dutch and leave Afrikaans there, distinct language. That is practically postulating that we should name most languages Latin as it branched into two branches, one leading to French/Spanish/Italian while the other went Dutch/German/English. Romantic and Germanic languages and all that.

lolno

Latin is a Romance language, and the Germanic languages are in a different branch of the Indo-European language family.

The morphology is distinct but not the lexicon

[Arumdaum]

Russian.


Uhh, what? The Germanic languages evolved from a completely different language. Unless that's what you're saying, in which case I didn't get that.

Latin branched into two main lines, those led eventually to Germanic and Romantic languages, it is a very extensive example, but after 350 years and a geographic difference of a few thousand kilometres with influences from sources like the British, Portuguese and Malaysian slaves the language changed quite a bit, i will however not get into the masses of spelling differences and expression differences, reading and writing is still relatively understandable, speaking it is the main divide in Afrikaans and Dutch

No, Latin didn't do that.

Latin was part of the Italic branch after a divergence.

[Hopeless]

Russian.


Uhh, what? The Germanic languages evolved from a completely different language. Unless that's what you're saying, in which case I didn't get that.

ehhhh

Romance and Germanic both evolved from proto-Indo-European

I will agree that i did not accurately state that and am incorrect in that regard, the debate topic however was more the split in Afrikaans and Dutch

[Hopeless]

Latin branched into two main lines, those led eventually to Germanic and Romantic languages, it is a very extensive example, but after 350 years and a geographic difference of a few thousand kilometres with influences from sources like the British, Portuguese and Malaysian slaves the language changed quite a bit, i will however not get into the masses of spelling differences and expression differences, reading and writing is still relatively understandable, speaking it is the main divide in Afrikaans and Dutch

No, Latin didn't do that.

Latin was part of the Italic branch after a divergence.

Most of that explanation was of Afrikaans and Dutch not Latin lol

[Iuronia]

Russian.


Uhh, what? The Germanic languages evolved from a completely different language. Unless that's what you're saying, in which case I didn't get that.

ehhhh

Romance and Germanic both evolved from proto-Indo-European

Romance languages belong to the greater Italic line, while Germanic is a line of its own. Also, Hindi, Persian, or even Hittite also developed from PIE. That doesn't mean they're similar.

Russian.


Uhh, what? The Germanic languages evolved from a completely different language. Unless that's what you're saying, in which case I didn't get that.

Latin branched into two main lines, those led eventually to Germanic and Romantic languages,

No. Just no. Latin branched into the various Romance languages. See here.

[Lillitania]

Spanish. I'm surprised that's not an option, seeing as how that's one of the top 5 most spoken language.

[Hopeless]

Spanish. I'm surprised that's not an option, seeing as how that's one of the top 5 most spoken language.

I agree with you there, same as Dutch should be added.

[Arumdaum]

ehhhh

Romance and Germanic both evolved from proto-Indo-European

Romance languages belong to the greater Italic line, while Germanic is a line of its own. Also, Hindi, Persian, or even Hittite also developed from PIE. That doesn't mean they're similar.

*points to "evolved from a completely different language"*

Proto-Indo-European isn't completely different from itself.

[Gujiristan]

I grew up learning both Cantonese and English in my kindergarten. Since I moved on to an international school afterwards I steadily (and intuitively, since I grasped the alphabet and phonetics far more easily than most in Hong Kong) gained in my ability to speak English and became a native speaker. It would appear that I managed to glean some Cantonese from watching television, however, as many of my peers weren't Cantonese speakers yet I managed to learn and speak native Cantonese (my parents didn't teach me or send me to any language tutors). Cantonese I rarely used except for communicating with my parents and every now and then more distant relatives, while English was (is) the language I dominantly used, including between me and my brothers.

When I reached Primary school (Elementary school to you Americans) I also began to learn Putonghua (Mandarin) at school, and since then I've been able to use it to communicate but still far from a native level. I've practically never used it though, except during a (school organized) trip to Tianjin.

Cantonese is by far the dominant language in Hong Kong, with English somewhat further behind (I'm pretty sure you've heard of 'Chinglish'. It originated here). Putonghua has made some strides in Hong Kong in recent years due to the return of Hong Kong to China by the British and following that the immigration of many mainlanders south across the border.

[Iuronia]

Romance languages belong to the greater Italic line, while Germanic is a line of its own. Also, Hindi, Persian, or even Hittite also developed from PIE. That doesn't mean they're similar.

*points to "evolved from a completely different language"*

Proto-Indo-European isn't completely different from itself.

Ah, my bad. I meant that they evolved from some proto-Germanic language, while the Romance languages evolved from Latin which comes from proto-Italic, I guess. Even in that state they are completely different.

[Viinborg]

You have Afrikaans, but not Dutch? That's like having 'Australian', but not English. As much as they want to be special, Afrikaners just speak a dialect of Dutch.
Dutch being my first fluent language.

Thank you.

[Hopeless]

You have Afrikaans, but not Dutch? That's like having 'Australian', but not English. As much as they want to be special, Afrikaners just speak a dialect of Dutch.
Dutch being my first fluent language.

Thank you.

For being incorrect?

[Vandelstein]

English. Then a couple of swear words here and there from other languages. Ugh.

[Fralinia]

Romance languages belong to the greater Italic line, while Germanic is a line of its own. Also, Hindi, Persian, or even Hittite also developed from PIE. That doesn't mean they're similar.

*points to "evolved from a completely different language"*

Proto-Indo-European isn't completely different from itself.

No Englishman who hasn't studied is going to be able to catch a word out of a conversation in Arabic, Polish, or Icelandic. But those are all sprouted from PIE.

I personally am a native speaker of English, although I'm making some pretty serious efforts to learn German and Swedish.

[Hopeless]

My first language was Dutch,

also OP could you add that language instead of Afrikaans? Dutch would actually make more sense since Afrikaans is technically Dutch

The influence on Afrikaans is complex and i think a lesson is in order on the differences, when Cape Town was founded as a waystation by the Dutch East India Company, the majority of the employees, were not Dutch, but German. There were also, Swedish Danish, employees and a few Portuguese.

The company brought slaves from the East, Malaysia and Sri-Lanka today, and the Governor of the company that created Stellenbosch, Simon van der Stel was Javanese himself. Most coloureds – the majority of inhabitants of the Cape – are their descendants and they speak Afrikaans. More than 24% of Afrikaners were in fact French Huguenots who arrived around 1700.

The first guy to call himself an Afrikaner was Hendrik Biebouw. His father was German and his sister a coloured. I wont go into our dislike for the Dutch king with regards to the aid requested from Britain during to Napoleanic War to protect the interests here.

The Dutch had very little contact and cultural exchange with Afrikaners from 1806 – when the British took over completely – until today with renewed interest in music and poetry.

Very few towns founded by Afrikaners, especially significant ones, had any link with Dutch ones, quite unlike towns in Spanish, British and Portuguese colonies. They had by and large home grown names and indicative of the cultural disconnect.

Its negation is based on French, the so-called dubbel nie. Afrikaans verbs don’t conjugate like Dutch ones and is much simplified. Afrikaans also contains much by way of Malaysian words like baie.

The Dutch mangle their words with a nasal twang which sometimes makes even understandable words incomprehensible to Afrikaans speakers. Funnily enough the first written Afrikaans was a religious tract. Arabic script was used to produce the phonetics/pronounciation of words identifiably Afrikaans., a lot of Muslims here were credited in influencing the language in its early stages.

At the end of the day Afrikaners, whether white or coloured have a whole tapestry of ancestors.
A certain ‘Villiers’ could have inherited his French Hugenot name from his paternal line but through his maternal line he would have a whole host of German, Flemings/Dutch, Scots, Scandinavian, Malay, Khoi San, Black West African and God knows who else (some odd Portuguese sailor maybe?) who docked in the Cape Town harbour and passed on his DNA too.
The ‘Van Tonder’ surname is a name that starts with ‘van’, but which only indicated that whoever the guy was who came to Cape Town was from(van) Tonder( an area in Denmark).
That doesn’t mean he was Dutch.
The linguistic similarities shows a definite connection between Afrikaans and Dutch; however, Afrikaans has it’s own grammatical rules which differ and even a difference of 10 percent in vocabulary added to that grammatical difference which includes different spelling rules would then hold Afrikaans as a different language.

The fact that Afrikaans was formed in its essence in the Cape region is reflected in the many references to Southern African weather patterns and animal and plant life can only mean that it is a cousin to Dutch in terms of vocabulary, but definitely a homegrown language from Southern Africa.

One must also remember the differences in cuisine. Dutch don’t have such things as biltong, koeksisters, melk taart, Bobootjie, Boerwors, etc..

Afrikaners( and that includes Cape coloureds here too) definitely are a bit far removed to be considered Dutch, yet my Dutch friends say that when they are visiting the Cape they feel a certain connection yet a certain disconnection with Afrikaans the latter being that at the end of the day Afrikaans literature and language deals with African, particularly Southern Africa.
Afrikaans is van die Kaap. Een taal bruin en wit.

[Arumdaum]

*points to "evolved from a completely different language"*

Proto-Indo-European isn't completely different from itself.

No Englishman who hasn't studied is going to be able to catch a word out of a conversation in Arabic, Polish, or Icelandic. But those are all sprouted from PIE.

I personally am a native speaker of English, although I'm making some pretty serious efforts to learn German and Swedish.

And? What are you trying to say?

Arabic didn't sprout from PIE btw, you're thinking of Farsi.

[Exxosia]

What is the first language you learned fluently?

English

Did you learn from from your family or elsewhere (school, neighborhood, etc.)?

I mostly learned from schooling and friends as my family felt it was beneath them to teach me what should have been almost instinctive in their view.

Is this language you grew up speaking? If not, what was?
I grew up predominantly speaking English with a huge number of loan words from Japanese, Polish, Hebrew, some Yiddish, Spanish, and German.

Is your language the dominant/official language of the nation or area you live in? If you grew up learning more than one main language, is that something to be expected of kids where you live?

It's about 50/50 Spanish/English here.

Also, if there are a number of dialects of the language you speak, what one do speak (or grew up with in the area you live in)?

My dialect would probably be some form of Southern Californian English as it has a great deal of California-specific English and Spanish terms in it.

[Fralinia]

No Englishman who hasn't studied is going to be able to catch a word out of a conversation in Arabic, Polish, or Icelandic. But those are all sprouted from PIE.

I personally am a native speaker of English, although I'm making some pretty serious efforts to learn German and Swedish.

And? What are you trying to say?

Arabic didn't sprout from PIE btw, you're thinking of Farsi.

Yes, that was a dumb for me.

But the point here is, the descendants of PIE are often very different from one another and have little to nothing in common, not inflection or tensing or grammar or even capitalization rules and a writing system. Polish and German are right next to each other geographically, and are both PIE languages, but they are thousands of miles apart linguistically.

[Arumdaum]

And? What are you trying to say?

Arabic didn't sprout from PIE btw, you're thinking of Farsi.

Yes, that was a dumb for me.

But the point here is, the descendants of PIE are often very different from one another and have little to nothing in common, not inflection or tensing or grammar or even capitalization rules and a writing system. Polish and German are right next to each other geographically, and are both PIE languages, but they are thousands of miles apart linguistically.

When did I say that the descendants are all that similar?

And tbh they're not thousands of miles apart linguistically.

[Slobozhanshchyna]

Russian. Fluent in English since 3.

[Esternial]

Dutch, I guess.

Though I'm sorta tied with English, because I have moments where I know a word in English but can't recall the Dutch translation.

[Fralinia]

Yes, that was a dumb for me.

But the point here is, the descendants of PIE are often very different from one another and have little to nothing in common, not inflection or tensing or grammar or even capitalization rules and a writing system. Polish and German are right next to each other geographically, and are both PIE languages, but they are thousands of miles apart linguistically.

When did I say that the descendants are all that similar?

And tbh they're not thousands of miles apart linguistically.

Romance languages belong to the greater Italic line, while Germanic is a line of its own. Also, Hindi, Persian, or even Hittite also developed from PIE. That doesn't mean they're similar.

*points to "evolved from a completely different language"*

Proto-Indo-European isn't completely different from itself.

Here you have it folks.

Also, Polish and German are completely different. Here's a short little blurb in German.

Gutenmorgen, mein nom ist Ken, und ich komme aus Amerika. Ich vershtehe ein bisschen Deutsche.

And Polish:
Dzień dobry, nazywam się Ken, i pochodzą z Ameryki. Rozumiem trochę po polsku.

[Iuronia]

Here you have it folks.

Also, Polish and German are completely different. Here's a short little blurb in German.

Gutenmorgen, mein nom ist Ken, und ich komme aus Amerika. Ich vershtehe ein bisschen Deutsche.

And Polish:
Dzień dobry, nazywam się Ken, i pochodzą z Ameryki. Rozumiem trochę po polsku.

But he said that PIE isn't different from itself, just like Polish isn't different from Polish. And of course these languages will be different, they're separated by thousands of years of different development. But the fact is that they belong to the same general language family (Indo-European).

[Quintium]

You have Afrikaans, but not Dutch? That's like having 'Australian', but not English. As much as they want to be special, Afrikaners just speak a dialect of Dutch.
Dutch being my first fluent language.

And its not a dialect, after 350 years our language is different, and far more expressive and fluid than guttural Dutch lol

It's difficult for me to distinguish between it and rural Dutch dialects, though.
And I can understand both written and spoken Afrikaans better than I can most of those dialects.

[Cerillium]

Okinawan (traditional older generations' influence and insistence) and standard Japanese. (I suppose you can group Uchinaa Yamatuguchi in there as well.)