A few days ago my daughter proudly came back from school stating how she did a spelling test that was meant for Year 6s (she is a Year 5) and got 24/24. The very best the other pupils (Years 5 and 6) got was 9/24. My daughter practices her English at school, like everyone else, and at home, with ME.

Now, I am a complicated case, when asked what my native language is. Many, many people, even people who know me and my history very well, are extremely lazy, look at my Italian passport (born in Rome, Italy), while others who do not know me look at my Italian name, and happily declare that of course, my native language is Italian.


(Lovely) photo from https://www.flickr.com/photos/migliosa/3435613770

I used to be proud of hearing that: having learnt Italian when I was 12, at an Italo-American school in Caracas, Venezuela, and having perfected it enough during my teens to want to start a club to promote properly spoken Italian at my Italian University, I was very proud of my achievement of being able to call myself a native Italian speaker.


When we look at what linguists use to define being native in a language, you will hear a general tendency towards saying that “nobody is truly bilingual”.

Some, bigger and more important agencies, are a little more enlightened. The snippet below came to me after my own enquiry, in reference to a spoken language task. I had to ask because from my professional point of view, what they were actually seeking mattered. Were they seeking for their engine to recognise, say, a tight Yorkshire accent? In that case, I couldn’t help them. Were they seeking a NATURAL English speaker? Well, that would be me!

We are going to have Italian, English GB and English New Zealand projects. Native accent in some of these projects might be very important.

I suggest you to register for the language(s) you are native speakers of.

Where have you studied? Elementary school, high school, university?

I believe you might register for all your languages but the voice recording tasks could be done only for the “really” native language(s)

My reply:

From birth (my family went from Australia,  where they lived, to Rome where I was born, then moved back to New Zealand with me as an infant) to secondary school I was in New Zealand, so English was the first language I spoke. I pick up that accent whenever I am surrounded by kiwis or my sister. I didn’t speak any Italian.

I learnt Italian at school in South America, so I had an accentless Italian when I moved to Italy, at age 12, but my preferred spoken language at that point had become South American Spanish.

My English lost its NZ accent and gained an American one when I moved to the Philippines, at age 15, where I studied as a teenager. Then I returned to Italy and gained a slightly northern Italian accent as I lived in the north of Italy.