# wrong native language



## User With No Name

What do you do when people list their native language as X, but from their posts it's obvious that it's not their native language?


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## Cerros de Úbeda

Good question, 'User'. 

I often notice this, and I don't know how to mention the subject, as I think it may be taken as a personal comment.


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## Bevj

You should report the issue to the moderators of the forum in question, and they will investigate and take action  if necessary.


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## User With No Name

Bevj said:


> You should report the issue to the moderators of the forum in question, and they will investigate and take action if necessary.


Thanks.

Let me add that I don't necessarily think people who do this are all trying to mislead. I think some of them may just be confused about whether they are supposed to indicate their native language or the language they want help with. (And in the case of English, maybe they don't understand the instructions.)


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## Bevj

User With No Name said:


> Thanks.
> 
> Let me add that I don't necessarily think people who do this are all trying to mislead. I think some of them may just be confused about whether they are supposed to indicate their native language or the language they want help with. (And in the case of English, maybe they don't understand the instructions.)



Absolutely.  
Not every badly-stated native language constitutes an attempt to deceive.


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## L'irlandais

I agree, it is not necessarily an attempt to decieve.  But it is still confusing


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## Paulfromitaly

> *Rule 18 - Represent yourself honestly.*
> You may register with one user name only.
> _Do not pretend to be someone you are not: this includes gender, nationality and  *native language.*_
> You must provide your native language, including your country or the variety you speak (eg: "English - Ireland" or "Mexican Spanish") for languages with multiple regions. Who you are and where you are from is  very important to understanding any translations or other language information  that you provide.



We do enforce rule 18 when we believe a user's native language is not accurate, however it make take some time to figure it out, depending on how far-fetched their claim is.


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## User With No Name

Paulfromitaly said:


> rule 18


Oh, you mean there's a rule for that. What a surprise.

Note, that as more than one of have pointed out, that we don't necessarily think everyone who states their native language incorrectly is trying to be dishonest or to break Rule 18.


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## Cerros de Úbeda

In the Spanish-English Forum there are some users who quote their native language as 'Spanish', without further comment.

Obviously, that doesn't clarify whether the speaker uses 'European Spanish', or 'American Spanish' - neither does it indicate which country the latter may be, and even less so, the regional variety of those in the former region.


On the other hand, there are some cases where the post may include several basic mistakes, such as just to do with the agreement of gender between nouns and adjectives (eg, 'estos cosas') or syntactical ones such as the agreement of the right personal form of a verb with its subject (eg, 'ellos juego'), that lead you to think it's a second-language speaker who's writing...

However, it may not be the case; those errors may be rather due to cultural issues, such as literacy problems (of a native speaker), or other reasons, such as the speaker having the language indeed as his first, having learned it at home, with his/her family, but having then been educated in his second language (say, English, in the US), and therefore, being his/her second language the one where he/she is literate, or more confident writing, while in his first he may be much less confident - even, functionally illiterate - maybe to the point of being unable to identify sounds correctly in writing, and not transcribing them quite correctly.

There are situations where people have learned both languages in parallel, more or less at the same time, and where they themselves don't actually know which one is his/her first language, which is his/her second one.

In other situations, people may have been born in a country, then emigrated at, say, age 10, and then gone through education in their new country in their second language... In those cases, therefore, their first language might be Spanish, but it would be stuck in a level that would not correspond with what someone would identify as a first language; it would still stay at a basic level, and with the limited vocabulary and linguistic resources of a child. Its literacy level would also, therefore, be very low.

There are many possible different situations and cases, such as those described, that we speakers of a main language throughout all of our life may not realise, I imagine...


Also, another set of circumstances is that of us translators (linguists, or second-language speakers, such as teachers), who often live in our second language country for years...

We then have native-language level in our second-language, and may identify as such. However, there is always some difference in the fluency and confidence in the use of a second language (even if it may be at native speaker level), that is never quite that of the speaker's first language.


All of those factors and situations, I think, do play a part, and intervene in the considerations and decisions taken when stating one's native or main language, as well as our second. Even at the point of just 'thinking' about it for ourselves - just at the level of self-thought, when defining or identifying it for ourselves -, let alone, when stating it in public (where other issues, such as prestige of languages and social status may come into play).


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