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(15)First language vs. second- language acquisition: does our native language interfere with the acquisition of a second language?“To have another language is to possess another soul” Charlemagne Second- language acquisition is a fascinating interdisciplinary area that is very relevant in our rapidly evolving globalized world. It is hard nowadays to come by a person who wouldn't speak, to one degree or another, a second language, so it is important to look into this area from different scientific perspectives in order to fully understand how a second language is learnt, and how the first language influences this process. The fact that learning a second language differs from learning the first language and that not a lot of people achieve absolute fluency for their second language is very interesting. Might it be that the patterns of the first language interfere with the acquisition of a second? The idea of the language transfer explains why it is hard for native Russian speakers to understand, for example, the correct use of the articles in english, or other aspects of a foreign language that don't have a direct correlation in their first language. The concept of Interlanguage- an intricate linguistic reality a lot of people live in nowadays, creates a vast field of research and is very interesting to look into.The concept of Interlanguage posits that there is a ‘psychological structure latent in the brain' (Selinker) activated when one attempts to learn a second language. Different behavioral measures can be conducted to study this. For instance, Selinker noted that in a given situation the same meaning would be expressed differently by learners of a second language and by native speakers. It implies that learners of a second language borrow patterns from the mother tongue or somehow extend patterns of the target language. It is commonly agreed that 3 different processes take part in the creation of interlanguages: Language transfer. Second language learners rely on their native tongue to create a new system; Overgeneralization, when second language learners generalize certain rules in an attempt to create a more or less comprehensible system; Simplification. Learners first use a simplified version of the language similar to that of children. Interlanguage is not a defective language, it is just a natural process people go through in order to acquire a second language. Having learnt (and still learning) several foreign languages, I am in a position that allows me to compare the science of language acquisition to my personal experience. I can agree that our first language has a significant influence on the language we learn later on. In case we learn several foreign languages, they somehow affect and complement each other as well. There is no way they would create isolated autonomous systems. It is a natural human need to classify things, so learning several languages forces us to think in terms of their similarities, not differences. It is obvious that there are certain regularities within the same language family, but there seems to be some higher logic that often goes beyond language groups. It is true that a lot of languages share certain properties, but can we really talk about the existence of the Universal Grammar, as described by Noam Chomsky? The answer to the question would clarify a lot of things about the second-language acquisition, but it remains ambiguous, and it would be a topic for a whole different article. To sum up, we can agree that different language systems are interconnected and that the first language influences how we perceive and acquire a second language, but, going back to Charlemagne's quote, it is fair to say that a foreign language enriches us in completely new and unique ways introducing us to a worldview we could never otherwise perceive. In other words, we do rely on an existing system, but the new language constitutes a unique separate system of its own. According to the myth of The Tower of Bable, the multiplicity of languages is a mankind's punishment. The ideas of universal cognition and the fact that people are actually capable of learning foreign languages successfully are there to remove the “curse”, proving to us that linguistic diversity is more of a blessing that gives us a chance to ‘possess another soul'.
