Editorial - Dwellings at the expense of the mother tongue
By Misch Pautsch Switch to German for original article
Speaking is probably one of the most fundamentally human abilities. It is difficult to imagine a force that suppresses the primal instinct to teach one's own child a mother tongue. But social media and the Luxembourgish housing market manage even that.
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Besides upright walking and opposable thumbs, the emergence of complex, abstract communication via sound is an evolutionary moment that has made us the dominant species on this planet. Of course, there are physical or cognitive impairments that make this impossible for some people. But as a species, language defines us to a large extent (representatives of sociology, philosophy and mathematics may forgive me, my linguistics degree is speaking through me).
Over thousands of generations, it has been the most normal thing in the world for parents to pass on their language to their children – and through it, the intergenerational knowledge from which today's highly complex civilisation is woven. Talking to children is so intuitive that most of us instinctively adjust our language to that of the child we are talking to, even if it is not our own.
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