Mark Williamson wrote:
But it does provide an added benefit.
Regardless of the fact that he has been exposed to Italian since he
was a child, Nuorese is still his first language.
Anyone who becomes extremely fluent in a second language is still
never capable of the understanding and information absorption that
they can get with their native language -- someone whose native
language is German, but speaks flawless English without an accent and
has lived in an English-speaking region for 15 years, will still be
able to understand something in German at a deeper level.
It depends on the level and timing of exposure. If someone is
simultaneously exposed to two languages from birth, they could both be
said to be native languages. In my case, I learned Greek at around 1-2
years of age, and English at around 3. My English is much, much better
than my Greek, despite Greek being my "native language" and the primary
language I used at home through most of my childhood. English my
"second language", but since I do nearly all my reading in English and
attended school exclusively in English, I find reading information in
English to be more natural. I don't even read Greek very fluently
(though I speak it fluently), and don't have the vocabulary to read
about philosophy or math or whatever in Greek, since all my schooling
has been in English. So for me, an English encyclopedia is orders of
magnitude more useful than a Greek encyclopedia.
This seems to be similar with a lot of minority languages we're
discussing---languages primarily spoken rather than written, and spoken
primarily in non-academic contexts, and whose speakers do most of their
schooling, reading, and writing in some other language.
-Mark