The Mother Tongue And Related Issues In Algeria

The definition of a First Language, a Mother Tongue, a Native Language, an Arterial Language or simply L1 has long been debated in the literature from various perspectives: Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics and Didactics in particular. These terms have often been tied up with the concept of a Native Speaker, i.e., someone who has ‘learnt’ through what the behaviourists call stimulus-response behaviours (e.g. Mummy milk all gone! For “Mummy the milk has all gone” or “Mummy, I finished the milk”), or who has acquired during his socialisation process (the holophrastic, the structural and the syntactic stages) a communication tool (Language) which enables him to talk and communicate with his mother in the first place and with his immediate family surrounding before he/she communicates with other members (children and adults) of the community or society where he grows up.