How do you value your mother tongue?

[Gr3yL3gion]

My mother tongue supposeds to be portuguese or dutch, but my family are lost and none of them able to speak dutch, and only a little portuguese.

Nowadays, I communicate with people using various languages, cantonese, mandarin or hokkien with Chinese, malay with Malays and rarely speak some rather "Localised English" with others.

I really hope that someday I'll be able to learn some of my mother language, even though practically it is little or no use here in Malaysia.

 

[Dann]

I know what Tagalog, English, and Mandarin are, but what's Hokkien?

A Chinese dialect native to Fujian province and Taiwan. It's the one furthest apart from Mandarin. So different that there are some sounds or words for which there is no written Chinese equivalent. A written Hokkien conversation will have lots and lots of Latin letters inserted among the Han Chinese characters.

 

[Verbose]

Swedish has a tremendous cussing potential (the possibility of stringing nearly endless rows of bad words together), so I prefer it.

Besides, it still carries connotations on a gut-reaction level for me that languages learned later don't. I mean, I know and employ (love?) the bad words, but it's still a bit 'intellectual'.
I know the f-word is bad, I know what it means, it just doesn't feel very bad when using it. It's as if I use it to indicate to English speakers how I feel, but it has then gone through an intellectual conversion process that 'Helvetes jävla skit!' never does.

 

[Marla_Singer]

I feel a lot more comfortable in expressing myself in French than in English. That's the main reason why I've voted for the 1st option. However, there are other languages I would dream to learn : German, Italian and Spanish (in that order). My answer is mainly explained by the face I don't feel happy about my current language skills. I wish I could speak at least two languages more (well I'd already be glad with one other).

 

[Reno]

Swedish has a tremendous cussing potential

But Finnish even more so. The Germanic languages (German, English, Swedish etc.) just don't have the same feeling as the Finno/Ugric ones have.

Finnish & German though are still the best languages in the world.