Forgetting My First Language
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I have lost all fluency in Japanese. Japanese culture had always been a part of my life as a child, but despite my family (cousins, etc) growing up on misoshiru and jpop and anime, we all spoke portuguese, so Japanese-the-language never felt like "home".
These days, I also occasionally forget portuguese vocabulary. I do still "speak" with family, but mostly by text via WhatsApp, and conversations are usually pretty casual and don't involve nearly as much eloquence as, say, a good book. The vast majority of my life now revolves around english-speaking culture: my job is full of english technical jargon that I've no idea how to translate, english is the language I share w/ my wife, and it's the language I use to consume information and entertainment. English is now my "home", so to speak.
I think the author has a similar experience: she learned english in primary school and lived a primarily english-oriented life, so english became "home". The phenomenon of wanting to reconnect with one's roots later in life doesn't strike me as particularly unusual either. In retrospect, I did unintentionally distance myself from my own parents during my 20s (partly because that's sorta the whole point of becoming an independent adult and discovering new things) and only really started to regain that level of touch after having kids.
My point is: loss of language can have a lot to do with prioritizing things one feels are impactful in their lives (though those things may not necessarily be important - parents are certainly important, but it's the sort of thing that one can easily take for granted). Having had such a weird life experience wrt "first language", I'm keenly aware that the first-ness or even the familial aspect don't necessarily correlate with the cultural surface area that a person interfaces with the most. In some rare cases, your second - or third - language is what feels like home.
However there's now significant research showing to not do that. Here in Sweden immigrant parents are actively encouraged to speak their mother tongue at home and not try to help their children by speaking Swedish, because it's counterproductive. Essentially knowing another language helps children more than listening to their parents speak in imperfect Swedish.
So if you are an immigrant, speak in your native language with your children, they will pick up the new language better by themselves and know another language.
If you don't keep poor people suffering like folks do in the US, being poor isn't as big of a detriment and the adults are perfectly able to improve on their own time. And it isn't like being an immigrant means you are poor.
Personally I found the 80% figure hard to believe. According to something else I saw online, it was 20th percentile in the US = 50th percentile in Europe. Which still shows how dominant the US is!
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global...
Other differences between the USA 20th percentile group and the Euro 50th percentile group is that one of them has healthcare and a longer lifespan.
By contrast if you speak a language that you struggle with, your lack of fluency gets in the way of supporting your children's cognitive development. And a child who has never learned to think in any language, has a cognitive deficit that is hard to fix.
But who knows really? Perhaps I'd be even smarter if I were trilingual?
I have seen everything from the heartbreaking circumstances of the author, where the child is unable to communicate with their own parents, to children who steadfastly refuse to learn the language of their peers. Both extremes result in social and intellectual development being stifled. In both cases, there is a need to help the child navigate a middle road in order to aid their social and intellectual development. That is before you even consider the typically cited benefits of being multilingual since it is only considering being functional in their communities.
For many parents, the primary goal for promoting bilingualism is purely practical: speaking w/ grandparents and other family. For the most part, the child will still need formal complementary studies later in life if they want to truly master the parents' mother tongue to a grown adult's level of proficiency, especially for languages with little or no overlap w/ english.
IMHO, the benefits of nurturing a mother tongue are largely coincidental: e.g. romance language learners get an advantage over pure english speakers from understanding latin-based radicals (especially for stuff like scientific nomenclature). But for many languages, maintenance comes with an opportunity cost aspect: my wife speaks Mandarin and actively maintains it, but that comes at a cost that her English vocabulary is not as well developed/polished as mine (as a romance language speaker who doesn't need to do virtually any upkeep wrt writing/reading skills and who enjoys vocabulary overlap between english and latin-originated words, etc)
I'm sure he was quite fluent in the basics. Language is to serve people, not people a language.
My parents fled Communist China but they still made sure I learned Chinese language, history and culture.
Nowadays I disagree with much of US and UK politics but I still want my kids to learn English and be well versed in classic literature, etc.
Moreover, we are not descendants of any "good" culture (such as those who brought us famous Russian classics): they were all either brutally killed or pushed out of the country. We are the descendants of illiterate peasants who came to power in 1917 and killed everyone else - we have no good heritage behind us, apart from the heritage of Communism, which while did some cool things to be proud about, was inherently evil - to be proud of Soviet achievements is like being proud of Nazis because they built cool autobahns.
I'm even glad Trump got to be a thing. At least it's not difficult to explain what's going on in Russia anymore.
Just take Communism: it's not a Russian invention. It's invented in Germany by a bunch of mostly Jews. But it didn't stick in either Germany of Israel - Russians wholeheartedly embraced it as an excuse to destroy their pre-existing society (which was mostly ran by foreigners - Germans mainly - Russians been mostly in lower classes - and yet it was evil, too), set on a path to destroy the world.
___
[§]: Not "White Russia" as in Byelorussia / Belarus; "White" as opposed to "Red".
I married into an Armenian family, and can attest that you don't have to teach your kids English if you live in America. I know several families who spoke Armenian exclusively at home and their kids still found themselves fluent in English by 5 years old. It's everywhere and they are sponges.
Won't this cause the situation Estonia has with the Russian-speaking minority? Enough immigrants banded together to create Russian-speaking communities. Many of them never learned any Estonian as a result, because they didn't feel they needed to. Most people in stores spoke Russian, they put their kids into a Russian speaking school etc.
The end result is that there are many people in Estonia that have lived here almost their entire lives, but cannot speak Estonian at all. This makes their lives more difficult: from finding a job to getting a better education to dealing with bureaucracy.
Even if you send your kids to an Estonian speaking school it causes issues. They'll suffer academically - imagine doing school effectively in a foreign language. It would make a kid want to go to school even less. In that case you're effectively handicapping their future.
I'm not sure that some minor cognitive advantages are worth the risk of not assimilating.
What you are talking about is development of communities in a language different than the local language with their own stores, schools etc... That's a different subject altogether.
This was a terrible choice - he couldn't socialise with local children (preschool age) and is severely underdeveloped in that area, plus his vocabulary isn't that developed as the only place he heard English was at home.
Maybe the Swedish policy works for school age children, but preschool - I very much doubt it without special education programs.
Was your nephew in an English speaking preschool in Croatia?
Problem was he couldn't even go to kindergarten as he would be completely unmanageable for them and couldn't socialise well - in large part due to language issues.
My dad's Portuguese is fluent but still has quirks to this day. Obviously picking it up from school works. But my paternal grandma never learned Portuguese and her husband died young (car crash). She never developed a social circle after that, which meant her health deteriorated slowly over time (since she'd just stay home all the time) and she ended up dying isolated in a elderly home, even though she was surrounded by people.
On my mother's side, my grandparents immigrated to be farmers, so my mom had a lot of siblings. They developed a quirky pidgin where sentences - especially when more advanced vocabulary was involved - mixed Portuguese and Japanese. This speaks to limitations of learning a language exclusively in a familial setting: some topics just never come up, especially considering age-appropriate subject matter.
I think the educational and social-outside-home components are extremely important to learning a language - most of what I remember from Japanese comes from spaced repetition from nihongakkou (Japanese school) or self study.
You have people spending years learning a second language, why throw away that "advantage"? Forget about preserving heritage or any other political motives. Just as pure pragmatic benefit, I would prefer my kid to have 2 languages.
All the other Mexican (as in first generation in US) families in the US that I personally know are similar.
Forgetting is cache invalidation! Especially forgetting the names for things.
This is why it's so important to make our priorities part of our routine, so they stay in cache. Do you love someone? Talk to them regularly (whether that's chatting to parents, spending time in a romantic relationship, or prayer). Thank you lhorie for reminding me to message my parents more often!
Another thing that may be even more effective is if you have kids then use your native language exclusively with them. My son speaks perfect Hungarian for example, and it just warms my heart when visiting his grandma (who doesn’t speak English at all) I can see him telling her bedtime stories before going to sleep.
Grew up with immigrant parents where Mandarin was spoken in the household but lived in a area with no other Chinese-Americans. Even though I was exposed to the spoken language daily, I wound up forgetting how to read and write Mandarin by middle school.
Did my best to re-learn it but I rarely ever read/write in Mandarin so I would just regress after a bit - by this point I think I’ve re-learned how to read or write basic Mandarin at least three times and have regressed each successive time. Interesting note is that I seem to be significantly faster at re-learning things each time I go back to it, but that might just be constant repetition more than anything.
This is the phenomenon exploited by spaced repetition learning. “Trying to remember” is when you learn things the best.
Reading something in Mandarin for a couple of minutes every few days will be better than weeks of effort every few years, even though it's less time spent overall.
And I can't communicate verbally at all...
That said, the voice in my head just pronounces the Japanese Kanji in my native Cantonese...
I doubt anyone _actually_ learns Mandarin without learning how the common characters are pronounced... Unless you don't have to verbally communicate with a teacher / fellow classmates?
When I go through a text I understand I either don't sound the words or pronounce broken translation in my mind.
I've doubted this approach a few times because, as you say, it's uncommon, but I'm sticking with it and I'm curious what comes out of it in a year or two.
For instance, rewriting your sentence above into something somewhat like this:
I finish wonder this; accept word element character language, you not think word ability read language.
Hardly readable once you start getting long sentences in books. Japanese speakers can't just natively go ahead read and understand 95% of a Mandarin book even if they know all the Simplified/Traditional Chinese characters which are not commonly used in Japanese. They can sometimes understand simple sentences, and can more easily understand, say, street signs.
The fact that I'm the father, who works more and spends less time with the kids than my wife doesn't help either. I guess it's called mother tongue for a reason.
I have found music to be the key, they absolutely love for example the Sebő Együttes, which is indeed absolutely fabulous music. Their favourite is this: https://youtu.be/H8SY89dSDa8
Is that a typo, or an endearing role reversal?
On the other hand, it is very easy for children to completely lose their first language (sometimes in as short as 6 months when exposure is entirely removed).
In this case, it seems that the author was not a Cantonese-dominant speaker from school age, and their Cantonese input was limited, so I imagine the attrition really occurred during childhood. Now, they just retain some slowly fading scraps of the language.
Such speakers are termed heritage language learners, and they're the focus of a huge body of research, especially focused on the Spanish-speaking communities in the US.
Lots of foreigners try hard to fit in. It has consequences.
Even then, attrition doesn't result in complete ("true") language loss. First, there is a decline in vocabulary, and eventually a loss of accurate phonology so that native listeners no longer judge them to be native speakers. However, they generally retain the ability to comprehend and communicate in their native language, even if they haven't used it for many years.
The point is simply that it is VERY difficult to completely lose your native language as an adult, assuming it was your dominant language throughout childhood.
Now nieces/nephews who might pass for fluent to some when they were 4-6 yr, after only 2-3 years after going to school can hardly form the most basic of sentences and cannot communicate with their parents/grandparents at all. All of this is under an environment where only Spanish is spoken at home. They can still understand it but will probably forget that aswell in time.
The conclusion seems to be that those that are fluent do not forget but those who werent do. I suspect the author considered being able to communicate with her parents as proof she knew the language. Parents can communicate with their children perfectly fine where others would struggle to understand a single word.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_attrition :- “Various case studies show that children who emigrate before puberty and have little to no exposure to their first language end up losing the first language.”
Schools in mainland China are allowed to only teach in Mandarin, not the local dialects and almost all TV media is Mandarin. Even in HK, most local schools don't teach Cantonese formally anymore and it's hard to find Cantonese specific written materials like textbooks etc especially for kids.
To the author's point, in US cities with large Chinese populations like SF or NYC, there are many bilingual English-Mandarin or Mandarin immersion schools to pass on the language to kids, but few or none Cantonese ones.
Without that supporting academic ecosystem, it's just a oral language spoken by less and less each generation.
It is also pretty easy to see why the Chinese would wish to have a standard national language that everyone understands and not just people speaking a hodgepodge of mutually unintelligible ones, if you give it honest consideration. Japan, their model for building a modern state, as well as Europe, just had the good fortune to get through this process before modern sensibilities made it taboo. Even US states have taken action to prevent bilingual education and education in nonstandard English dialects such as AAVE.
Singapore is a good example of this: they adopted English as the common national language, while having a bilingual education system that preserves the mother tongues.
I’d also say it’s not like they’re really going around saying you can’t speak Cantonese at home. The issue is that there is natural attrition when school and official things are in one language (not that different from what the article describes).
yellow → standard Chinese
native → Malay
brown → Tamil
If the father is a Fujian Hakka, the children will learn standard Chinese in addition to English. If the father is from New Delhi, the children will learn Tamil in addition to English. If the father is from Lisbon, the children will learn English only.
Can't speak for Japan, but most European countries still have regions where minority languages are spoken. Take Catalonia for instance.
You might even make an analogy between Catalan and Cantonese, in the sense that it’s mostly historical circumstance that makes Cantonese have such a privileged position compared to most other Sinitic languages. Wu and Min languages each have almost as many speakers as Yue languages but you wouldn’t know it by English-language coverage of the topic.
Being part of a recognized language minority in Europe usually gives you the right to education in that language.
As a result a educated Indian from a non-Hindi speaking state is generally trilingual in English, Hindi and their mother tongue.
This is not exactly true.
Core subjects, like math, history, and science must have a unified curriculum taught in Mandarin. However, there are language, art, and humanities classes that teach and preserve other Chinese dialects/languages.
You probably already know the nuances, but just to be clear, schools have probably never taught Cantonese "formally" at all - instead, schools taught "Chinese" (i.e. a localized version of written Mandarin) using Cantonese. And now some schools in HK are teaching Mandarin using Mandarin.
> it's hard to find Cantonese specific written materials like textbooks etc especially for kids.
True. Please consider supporting one of the few projects out there trying to fix this problem: https://hambaanglaang.hk/
> Without that supporting academic ecosystem, it's just a oral language spoken by less and less each generation.
Cantonese has been "taboo" for various reasons. Learned people traditionally shunned it for Classical Chinese (pre-1950s) and for Written Mandarin (post-1950s). We're trying to fix that. It's crazy to think that a language spoken by at least 20+ million people never had any proper monolingual dictionary (until we made one...)
That claim is incompatible with historic records and linguistic scrutiny. Northern Mandarin developed only in the recent ca. 500 years, so that cannot be a majority. Middle Qing until early Republican era was oriented around eastern (i.e. Nanking) Mandarin. The process of displacing eastern with northern started in ca. 1850 and was complete a hundred years later.
But how does this happen? If your mom and dad only speak Cantonese, then if you're having real conversations with them, you're maintaining that language.
The original poster must be right, she must have not cared to have deep conversations with them for a long long time to let things get this bad. Because he's right, plenty of people immigrate to the US and maintain their native language even if they never use it outside the home.
Yes, that is exactly how it works. The logic in the article is that the author lost Cantonese because she wasn't speaking it. Atrophied.
The post we're replying to makes a good point. How do you not use the only language your parents speak? It means you're not talking to your parents.
Just so I am clear, you're saying it's not an accepted fact that people don't lose a language they actively speak?
There's a quick summary at https://languageattrition.org/use-or-lose/, from where you can get links to decades of research on language attrition. Apparently, for people who speak multiple languages, there's some kind of interference effect between languages that's very counterintuitive, which means there's not the correlation between time spent per language and fluency that you would think there would be.
Deep enough conversations, periodically, prevent language attrition. How can I convince you? It's really just like anything else: practice helps. Is that a controversial claim?
The article admits that she
• rebelled and for a time would not speak (shout) to the parents other than English
• moved to the other side of the continent.
That was almost two decades ago. The article brought back some memories.
Reflecting on my own dreams I don't recall ever speaking/reading in them (and I don't narrate/monologue in general; my thoughts are neither primarily language- nor pictorially-based).
I have by no means forgotten my first language, but over the years I have certainly noticed loss of vocabulary, or more frequently more effort to switch over to thinking in a different pattern and finding the right words.
Sometimes I'll catch myself about to inject an English word when speaking Norwegian to my mother.
I don't think my fluency will ever disappear as they did for the article writer, in part because I used it daily for much longer than the writer did, and in part because I still read a reasonable amount of Norwegian, but it drives home how much of fluency depends on regular use.
Like the author, I immigrated to the US as a child, in fact to almost the same neighborhood in Brooklyn. Like her, I also made a point of learning English well, of looking at assimilation / "becoming American" as a really important goals - which I believe was right. I do have embarrassing memories of pretending to be American and not speak my native language in public -- it was a stupid idea to try to pretend to be something I wasn't, but I can see why the 11 year old version of myself that had just moved across the ocean would act that way.
The thing that's a little weirder to me is the loss of the first language (as compared to refusal to use it at times.) I suppose there may be a genetic component since the author and her brothers have all lost their Cantonese - I don't think this is common. Most times, people get rusty in their native language but it comes back easily with immersion. I do believe the author that this is a problem for her, it just seems like a rare one.
Two things felt crazy to me in the article.
First, I think the author's experience of allowing the sole language she had in common with her parents dilapidate - is extremely uncommon. You can pretend to be American all you want (as I did) but at the end of the day, if your dad doesn't speak English (mine still struggles) then you're "forced" to speak to him in your own tongue so you don't lose it. The author and her brothers must be weird birds indeed to have spent years not being able to communicate with their parents and somehow think that's fine.
Second, the author is clearly lamenting this but she's not talking about action until the very end. Cantonese speakers are extremely common in the US, as is media and opportunity to take classes etc. She's taking advantage of some of that, and I have to imagine that it must be easier for her to relearn the language than for someone studying it for the first time.
My point being, is if this is really important to her (as it should be) she should focus less on lamentations of the past and go whole-hog into fixing the problem today.
What I’m saying is, our understanding and knowledge of language is complex. It’s possible to speak a language without reading it. It’s possible to read a language without speaking it. It’s not as simple as you make it out to be.
There isn't a proper Cantonese dictionary (yet). The existing ones either assume you are already familiar with Mandarin Chinese, or are just simple translations to English.
There (almost) aren't any children's books in Cantonese.
There is very few literature, and serious books written in Cantonese.
The reason being Cantonese being traditionally considered a 'slangy spoken dialect of Chinese' not fit for writing serious work.
We're trying to fix that, but it will take some time.
She shares the author's pain in that she can not speak to her grandparents, at all.
I feel there's a point in life where language gets imprinted and you're stuck with it, probably by age 10 or so. People older will forever have varying degrees of accents, and people younger will happily accept whatever is current. I find it truly fascinating myself, especially because those older learning hear themselves speaking it perfectly.
Nowadays, (I'm living in the Balkans) I forgot words of my own language, and I (and most of my friends) mix English and my mother language quite often, creating a language similar to that in the "Clockwork Orange". Still don't know if that is a good thing or not. I'm trying to 're-learn' German and it is a lot harder than when I was a kid.
There is also a funny story about a baby in Serbia, whose first words were in English due to the media/cartoons the family gave to baby to watch.
Coming from South Africa, where there are eleven official languages [1], but English is the de-facto language for communication, it seems like having people not able to have a common language for communication is a recipe for balkanisation, ghettoisation, fragmentation and general strife.
[1] South Africa has eleven official languages, mostly because that was part of the cost of getting conservative Afrikaans speakers to accept the end of apartheid. Even today, they are the firmest proponents of multilingualism.
If we take just the language, we're comparing (French, Italian, German) against (Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venḓa, Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans). We're comparing the official languages of 3 world powers with very good life prospects for their speakers and those that kinda can do it, against 11 languages that have no value outside of 'talking to grandpa' or being able to read ancient texts.
Maybe I'm biased and perhaps I'm coming off a bit racist, that is not my intention. I just want to point out what I'm seeing here.
As i understand it, each isolated valley is pretty monolingual.
The experience is a bit different if you live in a bilingual canton but people are still mostly speaking one language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language_in_the_United_...
Of that 41 million, 24.6 million "Speak English only or speak English 'very well', which is 58.9%. Of those under 18, that fraction goes up to 81.1%
For comparison, other Indo-European languages has 69.3% and 81.5% for those under 18. Asian and Pacific Island languages: 54.1%/75.4% Other languages: 69.0%/78.7%
It's not a perfect proxy for the claim about the loss of language with each generation, but it's a good approximation. The pattern is similar across all languages (and the difference between Spanish and other Indo-European languages is negligible). I've read about research that has more explicitly found that there is no unique pattern for Spanish in the U.S.
What you're seeing is not an indication that Spanish has a different pattern, but that there are more Spanish-speaking immigrants and are a more visible immigrant community to outsiders. My great-grandparents settled into communities of Czech and Slovene speakers and had children who were fully bilingual while of my parents' generation, only my father has any facility with Czech, which his mother credited to his being effectively raised by his grandmother in his early years. My own Czech knowledge doesn't extend much behind, Promiňte, prosim, rozumite anglický?
You can find communities where the first language is Chinese in almost any sizable urban area. There are parts of Chicago where the first language is Polish, but as the community is smaller and less visible to outsiders, most people don't even realize it. Los Angeles has numerous linguistic enclaves. When Pope John Paul II visited Los Angeles, what most excited the pope was that the Archdiocese offered Mass in more languages than any other diocese in the world. (Non-English church services are a big indicator of these linguistic communities).
They are very successful but almost always speak Armenian on top of the other 3 languages lebanese speak (lebanese, english, french).
They’re generally fluent but its not uncommon to detect an accent in armenian -lebanese even in recent generations.
There was an era that the parents insisted on communicating with their kids in English so that their kids didn't fall behind in school. Speaking not in English was a taboo at school: Kids raised their eyebrows. Some kids were punished for not speaking in English. (Circa 70s and 80s English speaking Canada)
Now we realized the attitude has been damaging. I've met some adults cannot hold deeper conversation with their parents just like what the author said. In addition, these adults may not know or understand culture subtitles why some trivial matters (such as number 4) being inappropriate.
My high school was great in celebrating all world cultures and the indigenous people. In addition, some of my teachers in Canada spoke other languages at home and understood well how kids would not fall behind by speaking their native tongue at home. Nowadays, many parents would like to send their kids to French immersion school so that the kids can appreciate working in other languages.
I am lucky enough to have enough vocabulary in Cantonese to understand grown-up topics with my parents. Occasionally, I helped the Canadian born Chinese to order proper food in restaurants. They thanked me profusely. I also have early elementary school level Mandarin so I can navigate in many Chinatowns around the world without a hitch. During some occasion, I feel like I have an adult body but think like a kid since I never lived as an adult in any predominantly Chinese speaking (Cantonese or Mandarin) nations.
This is an interesting legacy of the Eastern Bloc.
In the west there is a community of Vietnamese who fled the communists as boat people after the fall of Saigon.
In the east there is a community of Vietnamese who came from communist Vietnam to work in the GDR.
After driving a four-wheeler for a decade, without touching a bike, people tend to forget balancing. Although it takes very little effort to revive it. Just a session or two may be.
Same should be true for languages. Start talking frequently and it will revive all your language skills.
I wish I knew Cantonese. It's such a beautiful language. One of my dreams is to go to Hong Kong. Hopefully it won't be too pillaged by the Chinese before I get to visit.
Who knows what my grandchildren will speak.
Came to the United States as a teenager not knowing English, but quickly picked it up. Eventually her french speaking elders all died off so she stopped speaking french out of circumstance, she never taught her kids french and french materials were not available at the time. In her 90s she said she didn't remember how to speak french. I thought it was sad but it actually didn't bother her because she didn't need to speak french anymore.
Some people who didn't know her thought she was senile if she mentioned this to them.
I have made an effort though by reading a few books in Russian, including Crime and Punishment.
The author saying “I have so much to say, but not the words to say it” is the heartbreaking reality of my conversations with my parents. Luckily, my ability to understand is still sharp, so I get them talking and hear stories about their lives.
When I began to relearn Danish I started to remember German which I spoke from 6-10 and also had a year of in high school.
Why? (I honestly can't think of a reason)
I hope the author has children one day. It's the ultimate gift of being able to relate to your parents. Suddenly you understand the biggest and most important event of their entire lives: the birth of you, and perhaps your siblings. That can't be described fully in any spoken language, and it adds a beautiful layer to your relationship that you'll both understand so well. Even if you are never once able to speak about it.