Ambitious organizations such as the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church made sure that their members, whatever their mother tongue, learned a second, common language.
An especially powerful influence is the relatively infrequent occurrence of intermarriages, thus preventing dialectal mixture at the point where it is most effective namely, in the mother tongue learned by the child at home.
In order to collect the data, two questionnaires have been adapted, through which more demographic information has been collected (gender, age, mother tongue, language learning experience with online experience with courses, other issues related to language learning).
As a child I had always been embarrassed by last name and its inability to roll off the tongue, but learning bits and pieces of Polish from my grandma I felt a sense of pride about my background.
My real country is the Czech language, which is the tongue I learned from my mother".
President Lee Teng-hui, for example, spoke Taiwanese as his mother tongue and learned Japanese before he learned Mandarin Chinese (schoolchildren all had to learn Japanese), and he still sometimes speaks Japanese with his wife.
As Davis wrote: "A nation without a language of its own [is] only half a nation.… To lose your native tongue, and learn that of an alien, is the worst badge of conquest".
Even though the Communist Party, in theory, unified China under Mandarin, a northern dialect, most Chinese do not speak it as a mother tongue, but learn it in schools or from television broadcasts.
Living in Sweden, Bosnia, and Italy allowed me to engage with locals in their native tongue and learn the subtleties of their language through practice and repetition.
Students for whom the language of instruction is not their native tongue may learn at a slower speed.
