I agree. I’d like to bring in my personal experience. I was born and raised in Italy from egyptian parents and I grew up basically speaking just arabic at home and italian at school and outside with friends .My mother tongue is of course italian, and now that I’m 24, i can say I speak fluent arabic (though i cannot read nor write arabic and sometimes switch to italian in home conversations too) with a fair pronunciation.

I feel though that in terms of vocabulary my arabic is much more limited than my english (which I have been studying for 15 years at school first and then at university) and even than my chinese. I’ve been studying chinese for the last 5 years at university and, although I cannot say my spoken chinese is better than my spoken arabic, chinese is catching up fast (and at least I can read/write).

That is to say, my arabic is good, but still far from native fluency (especially about vocabulary) and it just came to the point that it cannot have any further improvement, although I speak it everyday at home.
I think this is mainly due to the fact that I basically talk about things belonging to the same “lexical domain” with my parents, (I rarely talk with them of mechanincs or gardening for example) and the arabic I know is mainly made of colloquial and everyday expressions and I never really use the language in other fields and never studied it.
Then, as far as my personal experience is concerned, I would say that anyone with no knowledge of arabic at all could get a higher level of fluency in arabic than me with some study. As I might be considered an egyptian “huaqiao”, the same would apply to chinese huaqiao as well: they might have an advantage in learning chinese IF they study it, but final outcome can vary and it’s not a foregone conclusion that every huaqiao person will be willing/will have the chance to do that.

This whole discussion is especially interesting to me because I was personally hoping that if I ever have kids that I might be able to speak to them exclusively in Mandarin. If so completely lost interest in my native English that I often find myself not adding points to otherwise interesting conversations with family members and friends just BECAUSE the medium of English by which I would have to convey the information is so utterly unfascinating to me. I *have* heard nightmare stories of well-intentioned Mexican immigrants causing permanent damage to their children’s native language acquisition, but at the same time I read a book written by an Australian linguist who raised his children in German and documented the entire experiment in copious detail. There certainly *IS* a level of sufficient proficiency at which a non-native speaker can function so well that raising a child in that language would not have detrimental effects. I had a professor who was native in Japanese but raised his children exclusively in English. I wish I knew how one could be sure of whether or not his level was sufficient… (whatever level it may be, I’m certainly not there yet — but may have time to make it)

No, I am genuinely talking about people who do not speak any language to native standard. An example would be a former colleague of mine who was born and raised between Hong Kong and San Diego in the US by a non-English-speaking Hong Kong father and a non-Cantonese-speaking ABC mother (arranged marriage). That he could not speak Cantonese to native standard was vouched for by a HK friend of mine, in English he spoke with a heavy accent, made simple grammar mistakes and lacked a full vocabulary.

@Carius – But then all you’re doing is redefining ‘native language’ to mean ‘whatever was spoken at home’, rather than the language of a wider community (like ebonics is) presuming there was any actual common language spoken at home.

I have to disagree with Ben and many others in the comments about children having no native language. In the example given by Ben, could we consider the possibility that the pidgin English is the girl’s native language? She may not be able to speak the standard Midwestern American English but that doesn’t mean she has no native language. If you based a language just on their accent and grammar, what about all the children who were raised in the household that were speaking Southern Twang/Drawl or Ebonics. Do we have to labeled them as having no native language? The only tragedy I see is that she is so unique. If everyone were to speak English with her accent, then we won’t even have this discussion.

I really have a problem with people labeling a person with no native language. Language is intrinsically what make a person, a human being instead of an animal. In my mind, if you think a person has no native language than she or he is somewhat less than human. I want to EMPHASIZE
I’m NOT accusing anyone of harboring this extreme view. It is just my opinion. For me, language is just a mean of communication. If that communication occurred then we have a language. All these discussions about accent and grammar while useful, shouldn’t be use to judge whether a person could speak a language.

If we step back a bit and think about where the Standard Language came from, We ( or at least I) discovered typically the group with biggest gun have benefit of declared their spoken language the standard. For example, how come, Beijing dialect is national language of China instead of Nanjing dialect as argued by some Chinese scholars. Well, Beijing just happened to be capital of China. How come Standard French is based on French that was spoken around Paris? Same reason. How come Standard American English is Midwestern instead of Southern English, which is linguistically closer to Elizabethan English? I don’t know What I’m trying to say is the standard language itself is artificial and arbitrary.

Nevertheless, standard exist. I agreed with Ben, a person with accent will be at competitive disadvantage. But at same time the post made it abundantly clear, language is just one of many repository of skills a person could possess. If language is a weak point, focus on acquiring other skills that will make it non-issue. I haven’t been back to China for awhile but I’m sure others will be able to tell us about expats who couldn’t speak any Chinese if their life depend on it. Those expats must possess skills that made their language handicap a non-issue in their career. Concentrate on becoming like them, so even if you have a accent, others will HAVE TO understand you.

There have been many discussions about “critical period”. Looked like I missed it. Please kindly send any grammatical errors to my throwaway email retardedlegions AT gmail.com Thanks!

I’ve previously cited my neighbors at my parents’ house in Kansas City multiple times, because I have experienced their language policy work first hand as I’ve watched their children grow. The parents were both born in China, moved to the US after college, and speak decent, albeit heavily accented and often grammatically incorrect English. All four of their children were born in the United States, and throughout their lives the parents have retained a strict policy of only speaking Chinese in the house, to the point that they will scold their kids for using English at home. This may seem harsh, but the result has been that their childrens’ Mandarin is virtually indistinguishable from youngsters who have grown up in China. As for English, they simply threw their kids into regular American public schools, starting at kindergarten, and within a few months, poof, native English came. Now, talking to them on the phone (the oldest is probably in sixth grade or so) you could never detect that English was technically their second language.

The root of the problem is that parents often underestimate the abilities of children to learn languages which exists before the critical period (roughly the time of puberty). This ignorance has been endemic for generations, but seems to be reversing in the US as immigrants are increasingly encouraged to be proud of their heritages rather than abandoning them.

I’ve never discussed it with him cause it doesn’t really serve any purpose and would most likely make him feel bad — but he has told me that English is far and away his best language. His English would be grossly in adequate for any professional use or translation where basic errors are unacceptable.