A foreign language is a language indigenous to another country. It is also a language not spoken in the native country of the person referred to, i.e. an English speaker living in Japan can say that Japanese is a foreign language to him or her. These two characterisations do not exhaust the possible definitions, however, and the label is occasionally applied in ways that are variously misleading or factually inaccurate.
Some children learn more than one language from birth or from a very young age: they are bilingual or multilingual. These children can be said to have two, three or more mother tongues: neither language is foreign to that child, even if one language is a foreign language for the vast majority of people in the child's birth country. For example, a child learning English from her English father and Japanese at school in Japan can speak both English and Japanese, but neither is a foreign language to her.
Read more about Foreign Language: Foreign Language Education and Ability, Research Into Foreign Language Learning, Foreign Language Vs. Second Language
Famous quotes containing the words foreign language, foreign and/or language:
“If you don’t know foreign languages, you don’t know anything about your own.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“She planted corn and left the rest
to elements, convinced that God
with giant faucets regulates the rain
and saves the crops from frost or foreign wind.”
—Richard Hugo (1923–1982)
“We have tried so hard to adulterate our hearts, and have so greatly abused the microscope to study the hideous excrescences and shameful warts which cover them and which we take pleasure in magnifying, that it is impossible for us to speak the language of other men.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)