How do some people on here have more than one native language?

Yes, simply, lol :biggrin:

Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian is brother languages, and if you speak one of them you speak others.

8) Yap ur right.=))

For example: people from Switzerland have 3-4 official languages, in Belgium there are 2-3,
even in Spain there are 3-4 languages at least! And there are minorities from neighboring countries living in many countries over the world... (unless they are forced to leave by some crazy politicians: then you have refugees speaking at least two languages)

A somewhat more mundane suggestion than people lucky enough to know 4 languages natively:

Don't forget that if you're from one country, but move to another at a young age, or are born there, you could easily speak your parents' language (which may even be more than one) perfectly fluently at home, and pick up the language of the country you're in to a native standard, too.

Many people I know are bilingual, schooled in one language and fluent in another from home. I guess they would put both as their 'native' language on LT, because 'fluent' as separated from 'native' implies a language one is very well schooled in, rather than something one has spoken since birth.

I guess it depends on what you consider a 'native' language: the one you have spoken at home since birth, or the one you are educated in? My two cents is that both can be, depending on the circumstances.

As an aside, a lot of Slavs (like Nemesida pointed out) share very similar languages, especially the ones that branched off the most recently. if you considered, say, Serbian as your native tongue, you might perhaps list Bosnian and Croatian as also native languages, because (with a bit of attention to new vocabulary etc) you might well be very confident in translating those languages, beyond just fluent.

What I really wonder about is how you can have a "unknown" native language?????

"A heritage speaker" - nice, now I know how to name the thing I am always fighting about with my stubborn friends emigrants ... about their kids speaking "mother" language, and the kids not beeing able to form a phrase by themselfs, but repeating what they hear and learn like parrots!!! Those kids that never visited their parents original country I am talking about.

I grew up in a household where my mother, who's a native Pole, spoke Polish to me, and my father spoke English. (Although my heritage is very widespread so there's German in there too)

Okinawan is a dialect, as I said in my previous comment. Are there people who still speak Welsh or Gaelic?

In my view, native language is a language in which we think. Even those who have more than one native languages think only in one language, don't they?

Mauler summarised it quite well. Yes, they are. When we say they are similar, we mean that a certain level of overlap makes a language from another branch possible to comprehend the gist of, if you're lucky. I doubt most people speaking one Slavic language could translate another from a different branch well without study, the grammar is a barrier and many regional variations in vocabulary. Part of the reason they can understand each other comes down to sharing stuff like music and being exposed to each other's languages and making intelligent guesses, it's not necessarily a given. Personally, I would not be able to turn to my Russian friends and claim that I speak Russian, but I could understand something of what they say, given context.

I don't think an English speaker can understand Welsh or Scottish Gaelic based on English, but then again, they're technically in different language families, so not comparable to the Slavic languages. It's much more like learning Latin benefits you when it comes to Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or French, it just makes it easier to guess what they probably mean. I'd like to hear what the Scandinavians think about this, I hear there are quite a few similarities in their languages :)

As for Japanese dialects, I think that goes to show that what is a dialect and what is a language is as much a political notion as a linguistic one. Where a people consider themselves one nation, they might class very very different forms as dialects*, whereas between warring ethnic groups who want to emphasise their uniqueness, a smaller difference may be enough for each to consider its own a language (and have several dialects within it, to make matters more confusing). And to attempt to define some languages as dialects in such a fraught context would be as much a political as a linguistic act. To quote Loring Danforth on the subject:

''Linguists recognise that determining whether something is a dialect of something else or whether it's a separate language is an issue that depends on a political situation, and not something that can be answered purely linguistically.''

(incidentally, that exerpt is taken from here , wherein he discusses that issue in the context of arguments that some Slavic languages are supposedly dialects.)

* Though maybe part of that is the Japanese language's propensity for richness? I hear keigo (very formal speech) is pretty radically different on quite a few levels to normal fairly formal Japanese or Japanese slang.

Very true. I didn't know that :)

My mother language is Portuguese, but my grandparents come from Italy, i understand italian very well, but im not "fluent" in italy, and if u know any latinum language, is more easy to learn others latinum language (portuguese, spanish, french, italian, "LATIN").

I never "learn" spanish, but i understand spanish very well.
Elsewhere maybe is different (like russian and ukranian and etc), but the people have "ONE" mother tongue.