Can you lose your native tongue? (2024)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
At that point, I moved back to India. And I had to converse with a telephone company call center, even though I selected English as my language in the phone tree, they repeatedly put me to Hindi speaking ones - I just could not converse with them. I tried. I could absolutely understand them, but I could just not speak hindi. The words or rather the sentences will not form.
Not any more. I think now I am truly bi/trilingual, but there was that day / week / month / year, when I had lost the ability to speak in Hindi. Not sure why, and it was not a one time event.
[ The only additional information that may be relevant : In between these years, I learned a semester of Russian. I learnt french. I got familiar with a multitude of south Indian languages - Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam hearing friends speak them on a regular basis. And I was also conversant with Punjabi, common in our region in north india. But I never spoke any of these in day to day life for 14 years. And all these languages blurred into each other when I really had to use something other than English. ]
[ Also, I had a reason to switch to English pretty much exclusively. My son has learning disability and would find it hard in school as he will speak in Hindi and teachers would not understand. This is a long time back. So I decided not to confuse him and switched to english exclusively and lived like that for about a dozen years before this telephone company incident happened. I have posted about him before, this is not new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28665942 ]
Edit - I think I am done. I want to learn Spanish since it will be useful locally, but my brain can not take any more confusion. When you do not use these regularly, but have a faint notion of many many words, the brain does get confused on a regular basis. And I was not trying to brag, expressing helplessness.
People I know that know more languages than me seem to be worse at all of them.. and by worse I mean they can hold a fluent conversation, but have extremely poor spelling and grammar.
Of course I only have exposure to my indian friends who moved to Australia for work, so they're biased towards people who went through university and learned English in school.
Interestingly, some 18 years ago I went to intern in Mexico. After 6 months there, I was quite fluent in Spanish. But when I wanted to think of a Romanian word, all that popped up was Spanish. Pretty wild how the brain works.
(Romanian, Spanish, French, Italian, … are all Latin influenced languages, btw.)
As I learned French as an adult, when I didn't know a French word, the Spanish word would often come to me.
Now I'm learning German, and often the French word comes to me when I don't know a German word. However, I've also struggled to speak French again because the German often comes to my head first.
It has been amusing to observe that one doesn't learn a third language as a strict subset of the second. For example, I know a lot more French than German, but I know the German "Tierarzt" (veterinarian) but not the French equivalent.
I was born in Hong Kong and lived there for 13 years, moved to the US and I'm now 40+. I was back in HK last year and although didn't have problems understanding people in Cantonese for the most part, there were situations like calling a restaurant (to make a reservation) where I absolutely could not understand the waitstaff's Cantonese. After 30 years I still consider myself more fluent in Cantonese than English but language and culture had evolved in HK so much that the way younger people talk, especially on the phone where it's harder to hear, is almost completely foreign to me at this point.
I think this is because Cantonese speakers tend to read and write in Modern Standard Chinese (more like written Mandarin) and so are much less anchored by the permanence of text. Additionally, Chinese characters provide even less guidance on pronunciation than English spelling. In this landscape, Hong Kong's small media ecosystem is a fertile breeding ground for new language.
I work with a younger guy from the south and he definitely has an accent but that could be an anomaly.
One of my Tamilian friends who lived in Delhi all his life went to visit Chennai. He was asked more than once if "he was from Sri Lanka" due to his accent - which was probably not Sri Lankan Tamil accent, but unfamiliar enough to get them thinking.
On the other hand, Chinese people speak Mandarin with each other when there are no English speakers in the group. It was partly why I learned Mandarin...
I had the same problem after having speaking in English for a long time and rarely any Hungarian. I had issues finding the right words.
1. It's a relatively small dialect that's sort of a mix between the major languages of two South Indian states, owing to medieval migration. It's never on any forms and I would never expect it to be, but it also does not have a distinct name. And even more confusingly, despite it being named the same as one of the aforementioned major languages, I can't speak that one at all, and instead can speak the other.
2. After living abroad as a child and going to schools where English was the primary medium of instruction my entire life (even after moving back to India), I am by far the most fluent in English of the 4 languages I can speak (not all of them fluently). I think in English.
I often find myself sad about the attrition of my mother tongue, especially because I'm noticing it happen more and more not just to me but to my entire generation. I've often considered trying to document it in some way, but I've no idea where to even start such an effort.
LLMs could represent an interesting opportunity not just for linguistic preservation, but also to make smaller languages more relevant to their communities again. This article [0], despite its headline claiming the opposite, contains some examples of researchers training LLMs to that end, and how it's helped them reconnect with their mother tongues and relatives.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/04/gener... discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40143621
As a fellow South Indian, i would like know more. Which states are they?
I've tried to do some research, but there's not very much literature and what's there is paywalled. I was even going to email one of the most prominent authors in the field of Vijayanagar-era history and migrations for a copy of her book, but found out that she'd passed away a few years prior, sadly.
> but I've no idea where to even start such an effort.
I think there are two arms to this kind of cultural agenda. One is indeed to document it in the ways it is used by native speakers in the domains of life that its speakers use it in.
The other is more accessible and creative, to reform it by drawing it out of homes and villages and making it a suitable vehicle for conversation in the global intellectual zeitgeist. That means giving standard names to every periodic table element, to Newtonian mechanics, to business concepts, and so on, but also to things like "mobile phone", "ballpoint pen", "gym", "soda". A good starting point can come from translating Wikipedia.
To be frank even a language with as ideological a community of speakers as Hebrew borrows a lot from the English/Latinate vocabulary for modern terms. There may be other examples, but probably the language I know to be most successful in such a project is Standard Written Chinese. It got a headstart with the Japanese forming Sinitic calques as Japan modernized in the Meiji era, but then today the standard practice is to form calques for new terms rather than transliterate, which is quite rare.
I think that depends, many sufficiently large regions do STEM in regional languages. English is just a language for trade - where there are no need for international communication, there can be little reasons to fall back to English.
We're raising our kid to be bilingual (my husband is German), but I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it.
My experience is that it gets hard when they realise that they can get away with only German. Many kids choose to only use the "primary" language, even when spoken in the secondary one. They eventually regret that choice when they get to their twenties.
Not all kids do that though. I am not sure what influences this, but as a parent of trilingual children, my recommendation is to expose them to the culture as much as you can. Talk to family online, take them to English speaking places and countries, watch movies. In other words, make speaking English useful to them. If your family in the US have older kids, yours might end up looking up to them - mine have an older cousin who is one of their favourite members of the family and definitely gives motivation to communicate. Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German.
Sorry if this comes across as unsolicited advice. Nothing I said is revolutionary and you might already have thought it through. We got very lucky with ours, but this is stuff I would have benefitted from when our kids were young, so I'm passing it on.
I think that's the main thing. I have been very stubborn in "not understanding" the other (local) language with my children, even if it's obvious to them I do understand it. Today (they are still young) they speak both languages, including between themselves, and they don't seem to have a preference for one language over the other.
After a few years living in Germany (as a native English speaker), my English and that of my friends became peppered with these German-isms.
That said, after centuries of relative stability, modern Dutch is absorbing English words as fast as it can. Who knows if it is still recognisable in 50 years.
Learn your languages before spreading unwise nonsense on the internet.
There's no reason to be so disrespectful.
“Ich bin seit zwei Tagen hier.”
I wouldn't be surprised if it were most languages really, English 'for' seems the weirder construction.
You could get away with it in speech since it sounds like 'since.. [thinking] two days ago' and it's acceptable to change construction like that in casual speech, but written it doesn't seem right to me.
Interestingly, I'm not sure if it's nationwide, or a local dialect (Dorset/West country) thing - interesting because there's a lot of German/Saxonism retained in the dialect, usually about word choice or spelling though, not phrases. As far as I'm aware anyway, not an expert.
(For example we tend to prefer the -t ending of -ed verbs: 'burnt' not 'burned' etc. including in stronger cases words like 'turnt' ('turned' in any usage, not the modern slang for drunk) that Wiktionary etc. will tell you are obsolete.)
But my word choices and pronunciations are definitely not 100% native. There are moments where I can feel the vtable pointing me to the wrong language for a word. Sometimes I get back to English, sometimes I pause, and sometimes a word from some other language pops out.
As an example I sometimes say “no thank you” in Swedish in situations where that is wildly wrong. I can’t speak Swedish, but I have those basic phrases in there.
Thankfully hearing it regularly keeps me up to date, though there are those moments where right in the middle of a conversation I have to stop and reflect on how exactly something is named.
After living in Germany for nearly 10 years, but working in Switzerland, my wife recently had an identity crisis because a Swiss colleague thought she was German, and had just learned Swiss German very well.
My daughter however speaks fluent English and German so I don’t think they’ll have the same problems.
Some are foreigners, others are extreme nerds who have failed to interact with people and have lived on the internet.
It's really sad.
And I would add that I think becoming more than proficient in and deepening understanding of one's own language (Swedish in that case) is important, in parallel with learning foreign languages.
My children are 6 and 9 and we've raised them tri-lingual. They mostly sound native in all three, but their Serbo-Croatian and English have some German artifacts as well. Also their vocabulary isn't quite at the age-appropriate level in English since I'm basically the only person they regularly use it with, and if I don't use a word with them, they probably don't know it. This may start to change now that my oldest has also begun reading books in English. (That went surprisingly quickly; once he started with English classes in the third grade, within 3-6 months, he no longer had a definite preference for books in German over English.)
The trap to be careful of is if your family language is German that the kids eventually stop answering in their parent's language. This seems to be easier when three distinct languages are in play, possibly. Since I speak English with their mom (Serbian), there's less pull towards the "outside" language (German). Oddly, the language the speak with each other has remained Serbo-Croatian. I'd always expected that to eventually change to German, but seems unlikely at their current ages. We mostly attribute this to them having sometimes spent several weeks alone with their grandparents in Serbia when they were young, and that being the only time they only spoke a single language for up to a month, and that having solidified it as their preferred language.
Tangentially related, I see more and more kids developing a "TV Accent" in Spanish in their early years which eventually gets replaced with their local one I'm guessing based on their exposure to parents and media vs School/Parents/Every day life
I speak Russian at home (in the USA), English at work, and do not have exposure to Ukrainian except for occasionally looking at local news sites.
When I visited Ukraine after 8 years, I found that, for the first several days, my brain was formulating sentences in English first when I wanted to say something. I needed to force myself to switch to Ukrainian.
But, overall, I felt that Ukrainian was moving into the "foreign" part of my brain.
Anecdotal account.
Not that I ever had to actually speak Ukrainian, I knew it so much better than the vast majority of our political elite. However as I was leaning Polish I have discovered that it sneakily replaced Ukrainian in mind. Just a couple months ago I have met a moron here in Warsaw who went to accuse me of shit and I wanted to answer him in perfect Ukrainian and... I couldn't. Not a word. All Polish.
In a few cases I've met people who could speak no language well. Their native tongue was gone or degraded but they had not achieved strong proficiency in English or the local language.
One was a tailor in Montreal. Tried English and French, they were so so at both and said they were from Italy originally. I speak some Italian so tried that. They struggled more than in English or French. They looked around 80, likely had been many decades.
It would be interesting to know what happens to native language skills if they returned to a native environment though. I expect they'd recover fairly quickly, at least in younger people.
Me, me, me ;) My spoken Russian has somewhat degraded. And my English and "strong proficiency" are worlds apart. 30 years of living in USSR and then 30 years in Canada.
Their native tongue was gone or degraded but they had not achieved strong proficiency in English or the local language.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175216
https://www.quora.com/Every-service-at-Google-is-either-depr...
But in my case I know enough over time and from the family to state: this was some sort of life-long speech defect, not a matter of learning.
I learned English at school and later started working remotely in places where English was obviously the primary language. Then I moved to the US and spoke Bengali only at home.
The final nail in the coffin was when I moved again to Berlin, Germany, and started picking up a little German just to get by. Now I speak English at work, Bengali at home, and a tiny bit of German. These days, my Bengali is a horrible hodgepodge of English and Bengali words strung together by alien conjunctions and interjections.
Haven’t seen anyone else do that.
Seeing all the comments here makes me feel a bit bummed out. I still would really like to become proficient in another language one day, but it seems like it's really a "use it or lose it" proposition, and I don't think there's any language I could learn that I'd have the opportunity to use often enough to retain it, assuming I could immerse myself enough to learn it in the first place.
(Well, I suppose I could learn my wife's native language, but I'm a little skeptical that she would want to talk with me in it often enough to to keep it fresh in my mind.)
BTW, Spanish and Italian are similar enough that there could be confusion in the learner's brain (happened to me - after two years of Spanish in school, self study of Italian from six audio tapes failed because for each word, the Spanish version was promptly recalled instead of the newly acquired Italian one).
IMHO, it's worth it, and from what I read in the UK interest in foreign languages is declining (and it corresponds with personal experience, when I studied a bit of French and Russian, the French course had no Brits in it, and the Russian course just one, everyone else was a foreigner).
As a linguist I may be biased, of course, but I would encourage you to pursue at least one language other than English more deeply (instead of, say, dabbling in three superficially), because it opens up a new horizon being able to navigate a culture without translator and reading its literature in the original. There are certain words, phrases and sayings in each language that when you "get" them you feel like "I no other language could one say this better!", whether it's Danish, English, Spanish, German or Latin.
One of my Ph.D. advisers was British and the other one U.S.-American, and I won't forget
PS: Is there a link without paywall to the original article?
If you want to give Spanish another go I can recommend dreamingspanish as they have just a ton of excellent learner content on various levels.
[1] to the point that I sometimes have trouble expressing certain concepts in my native German even though I live in Germany because so much of my life happens in other languages.
I'm learning German, I finished the Duolingo course, and now I'm just reading in German. Books, news sites, and suchlike. It is not the best way, I know from my experience of English: if you don't speak in language, you cannot speak it; if you don't listen it you cannot hear it. My plan is to let it go, as it goes, collect a big vocabulary and the feel for the language, and then maybe take some courses, to polish theory and get an experience of writing, talking, or otherwise generating German sentences. I learned English in this way.
We'd take trips to see relatives in Finland every summer, and I could speak fluent finish up until I was 16 - after that I needed more time. Then there was a 10 year gap where I did not go to Finland, due to studies and work, and spoke minimal.
Now I can barely get a simple sentence right. But I can still read a bit, and I can sort of listen to people have a conversation. But speaking is rough, really rough.
With that said, I've bet some Norwegians that have lived in, say US, for 50-60-70 years, and have a really thick accent - and use lots of English words when they can't come up with the Norwegian word. Two of my grand-uncles moved to respectively Canada and USA when they were 20, and lived there until they passed away in their 90s. Overhearing grandpa talk to them on the speaker phone was...interesting, to put it that way.
However, I speak/read/write in what is technically my second language (English) as if it were my first language.
English grammar is often confusing in cases like this because verbs mostly don’t have distinct spellings/pronunciations for the subjunctive mood, even though the subjunctive conjugations are part of the grammar.
It also doesn’t help that “subjunctive” is kind of the “else” condition among the three verb moods, the other two being “indicative” and “imperative,” so you often notice that it’s the subjunctive by ruling out the other two.
My father left his birthplace when he was 4 or 5, and only knows a few words of his first language.
> "Funded by the federal government and contracted to religious missionaries, the purpose of a residential school was to reprogram Native children—by force if necessary—eliminating their tribal beliefs, modes of dress, music, language, and thought. If they resisted, they were brutally abused. Known as residential schools because students were required to reside on campus, the institutions were notorious for their cruelty. When students spoke in their Native languages, they were punished by having their tongues punctured with sewing needles. At the St. Anne’s residential school, run by the Oblate order in Fort Albany, Ontario, a makeshift electric chair was built to punish students with electric shocks."
Excerpt From "We Had a Little Real Estate Problem"
Kliph Nesteroff
And making calculation is almost impossible. I need to switch to Spanish and then translate it back
It happened the first time over dinner. I was saying something to my husband, who grew up in Paris where we live, and suddenly couldn’t get the word out. The culprit was the “r.” For the previous few months, I had been trying to perfect the French “r.” My failure to do so was the last marker of my Americanness, and I could only do it if I concentrated, moving the sound backward in my mouth and exhaling at the same time. Now I was saying something in English — “reheat” or “rehash” — and the “r” was refusing to come forward. The word felt like a piece of dough stuck in my throat.I'd also found the initial paragraph partially obscured by a video element. Removing that (Element Inspector, uBlock Origin's element zapper) fixes that for me under Firefox.
I was born in the US, but my first language was Marathi, and it was really the only language I was fluent in until I was around 4. After learning English in school, I started to always answer my parents in English. We didn't really live near a Marathi community, so it came to be that I could understand Marathi fluently (albeit with very limited vocabulary) around family but couldn't form a sentence to save my life.
Same story for all my US/Canadian cousins, and most other 2nd gen desis I've met.
But the biggest surprise turned out to be that language changes over time, and what words and way of speaking that I recall from 37 years ago have changed dramatically that even if I had 100% retention 10% of what I say will not be understood today, and 10% of what is currently being spoken I could not understand.
That has nothing to do with losing native tongue and everything to do with the fact that language, including pronounciation, is always evolving.
I grew up in Geneva. So French at school and among friends. Then my parents and I moved to Ukraine and lived there since the independence, so Russian at home and that's my mother tongue. Ukraine has been rushing to transition its population to Ukrainian for a decade or two - all with limited success. And on top of that I am as close to being a native English speaker as possible while living abroad.
So what happens in an environment like that? Looks like people tend to express and think about different parts of life in different languages. When I think legal matters in my homeland, it's mostly Ukrainian. When I think about IT and computers and while lurking here or on Reddit, it's English. Daydreaming about childhood: French. When stressed: brain loses everything but English. Inner monologue: mostly Russian.
So, to sum up the question: can one lose their native tongue? Answer: I have no idea.
I rarely write in Dutch and I've noticed that things that I shouldn't have to pause and think about actually have me in doubt when I do. Little spelling issues. Grammatical stuff. Etc. It's still there but I have to stop and think. It would all come back pretty quickly if I'd move back probably. That's what happened the last time I did that, 25 years ago. But even after just a few years away it took me a while to adjust.
And even though I live in Germany, it's not my first or second language. More like a distant third. I'm speaking English most of the time. With an accent that sometimes confuses native speakers but I wouldn't be able to pass for a native speaker mostly. I sound more obviously Dutch when I get tired. My grammar gets worse, etc. Accents are hard to lose.
I understand German well enough but I'm barely able to form a coherent sentence. I have no hope of getting it even close to the level of my English. And I have no use for a language that makes me sound like a verbally challenged migrant in business situations. The non trivial amount of effort to even get close to my English is not time I have left in this life. So, I'm not super motivated to spend a lot of time on that. I stopped apologizing for / feeling guilty about that many years ago.
Anyway, we're heading for universal translators now powered by LLMs. The main challenge is speed; not quality of the translations at this point. Less need than ever to learn a new language. Fun times might be ahead for people that are a bit adventurous. No more need to ask "do you speak English?".
I'm finding that ei/ij is something I now need to look up regularly. Vocabulary sometimes takes me a second to remember (new words, that I learned after moving away, probably as much as old words), or whether an expression/saying is Dutch or German or English or an Internet reference, but nothing is a hindrance to fluency as much as the dumb ei/ij thing—that we could simply have abolished centuries ago instead of learning it by heart for generations—since I need to really pause and do an external lookup instead of thinking/umming for 500ms
For others who read this: ei/in is like whether to write cocoa with a c or a k, if both letters were equally common (it's a 50/50 split with no logic to it) and sometimes the other variant has a completely different meaning
If it weren’t for the fact that I am a huge, huge fan of Trainspotting I would have been utterly lost in Edinburgh, let alone Glasgow. My wife could barely understand anything said by about 80% of the Scots and I would have to repeat sentences for her. Especially in noisy situations like crowded restaurants.
A mix of mostly expats from all over the world. And I have some Irish friends and colleagues. And lots of Germans. But it helps that I get exposed to a lot of English/US media, youtube, etc.
Culturally, I am closer in some ways to Australians, but linguistically I have more in common with English speakers from Quebec than Aussies.
Until he was 10 and started classroom English in 5th grade - he had a very easy time of it. That year of getting English sounds into his little kid brain, despite coming from a non-native speaker who had only spent a few semesters in England, did some sort of magic, because ever since I've known him, he's sounded British enough to fool Americans (British people, on the other hand, can hear that something's off, and of course can't place his accent). He's a more fluent English speaker than I am a German speaker, but we both have to speak more English at our jobs than German.
EDIT: ChatGPT actually loaded. I used the first paragraph of my comment as query. It did not give me a specific story, but it claims it "knows" about the phenomenon of German war brides forgetting much of their German, when they did not use it much after moving. Too bad I can't tell what the sources are for that information, ChatGPT saying something isn't proof.
I suspect many among them would've largely forgotten a functional knowledge of German by the ends of their lives, even though it was their mother tongue and kitchen table language growing up.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_ancestry#/media/Fil...
I think the memories are encoded in terms of the thoughts of the time, so when they are revisited, they reactivate the same speech patterns.
I can still read/understand but it's hard to remember words
When I had visited Korea it was really heartening in one aspect (as much difficult as it was to converse there) - it was witnessing how they have retained their language and are proud of it (or maybe not; it maybe just natural and how it is as a matter of fact) and actually use it in every way possible.
Can I loose my mother tongue? I don't think so. When I go back home (my village) the switch happens within a matter of hours or maybe a day or two (max) - vocabulary, accent, grammar, lilt - everything comes back. Very strange, at least to me. Can I lose my first language? I already lost it. Hindi was my first language and now it's English and I kind of feel sad about it that it happened in my own country where English is not a native (or mother) tongue of anyone at all.
For example, back home we will double up on adjectives to emphasize how strong they are. Something is REALLY hot? It's hot hot. If your kid is mischevious, we call that "canille." (kan-eye). If they're REALLY mischevious, they're canille canille.
You tend to lose that if you only ever encounter people from other ethnic groups. We even have words that are hyperlocal to certain areas. You won't find "chenise" in a Cajun or Creole dictionary, but the word is used in the river parishes of Louisiana to describe the thorn from these tiny plants that if, you're bare footed, will sometimes embed themselves in the soles of your feet. So if I go to Lafayette and use the word, people usually have no idea what I mean, but my friend from Thibodaux does.
So, you spoke German at some point, but these days, you could not decipher a restaurant menu or ticket-vending machine? Not meant disparagingly, just truly curious...
I know someone who learned to understand German spoken on TV and would sometimes speak it themselves (on day trips across the border primarily I imagine), so they've got a good intuition for e.g. word gender (that their native language doesn't have) but they can write most words only phonetically and don't know the grammar. Thankfully German orthography is not like English', but it's also not a 1:1 map (cheese isn't kese; name arbitrarily has no h)
I can still understand sufficiently simple spoken German and decipher some written German. You could say I read it at the level of the two-year-old I was.
I'm British, in the US for 15 years. I've forgotten the British terms for some items.
I have no idea any longer what British people call the main bag you put rubbish into in the kitchen? In America it would be a trash bag or garbage bag (I can't tell when each of those is most applicable). Is it just a black bag in England?
And what is the equivalent of a garbage truck? A rubbish lorry?
These things have been completely lost to me.
I believe “dustbin” is from the Victorian era where what little rubbish people had was burnt in the fireplace. The “dustbin man” would come by and take away your fireplace ashes.
So we had two (steel) dustbins, and the dust-men would empty them.
I can't remember if the bin wagon had a different name, I shall have to ask my parents.
british exile for 24 years
Binliner definitely seems to tweak some deep neurons.
For me, once it's in use, it'd just be "the bin" but I guess the specific name for the bag itself would be "bin bag" or "bin liner".
> And what is the equivalent of a garbage truck? A rubbish lorry?
I've seen both but people would also just refer to "the bin men" (as in "the bin men come on Thursday")
So the process of declining performance in your native language is known as "L1 attrition", but it's an extremely under-researched topic. In case any academics are reading this that migth be aware of key papers, I'd appreciate a link or bibliographic reference.
Here are some the things that I found; I can't guarantee they're all scientifically sound though, you'll have to do your own checks:
[1] Schmid, M.S. 2011. Language Attrition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/language-attrition/E01D...
[2] Gallo et al., First Language Attrition: What It Is, What It Isn’t, And What It Can Be (December 23, 2019). Higher School of Economics Research Paper No. WP BRP 113/PSY/2019. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3508640
[3] Francis, 2023. When does second language learning lead to first language attrition? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365372235_When_does...
Also, everyone has a smaller active and larger passive vocabulary, so alone it's not a sign of attrition.
Worked at a US company in Belgium where the lingua franca was English.
Moved to the USA 8 years ago.
My wife (from the Netherlands, but a native Flemish speaker) and I switched to speaking English at home.
Couple of weeks ago I'm walking in our neighborhood and I met this guy with a Flemish sounding name. He was Flemish. Started to speak Flemish to me. I could not reply. Could not find words, and didn't know how to move my tongue to produce those sounds.
Now, I can speak Flemish fine with my mom and sister. I struggle with words sometimes and my word order is incorrect.
But it only works when I call them. A spontaneous need to speak Flemish just... fails.
And forgive me for writing Flemish and not Dutch. It's different enough that it requires more active listening when you don't have a trained ear for it.
Flemish here. The written forms are diverging a lot too, and I wish streaming platforms would take notice. It's so annoying when watching a good TV-show or movie and the subtitles are clearly Netherlands-Dutch.
But I do remember the fanfare around children's movies finally being dubbed by Flemish voice actors, and not just getting the Dutch dub. Flemish was finally recognized as worthy of its own dub.
Are you saying it's different vs say 10 years ago?
And don't ask me to translate anything, all that comes daily in a language, stays in that language. For example, the tech stuff is exclusively English, household predominantly Russian, conversational is mostly German. Therefore translation is yet another skill that requires you to connect meanings and connotations of words and phrases between two languages. This is probably the issue people have, when they learn a language in writing by a dictionary.
In Genesis, a key event in creation is Adam naming all the animals and plants around him. While neighbors to Israel surely had their own language and terms, this definitely makes a statement about cultural primacy and correctness of speech.
Since then she's lived more or less in a 98% English only bubble, received more education here and has worked a steady job in various Engineering roles. Over the intervening 25+ years she's learned an uncountable number of new things and concepts over her life, but only knows the U.S. English language words for them (mostly technical, engineering, software, or workplace administrative topics).
These topics also exist in Korea, or have arisen in Korea, and Koreans have given their own words and thoughts to these things. Sometimes they are loan words, sometimes not. Sometimes the loanwords are not obvious, not sourced from English, or filtered through an intermediary language like Japanese which put its own spin on it.
So these days when she's talking with her family or friends, when they discuss something that showed up after she left Korea, they sometimes have to have a brief discussion to teach each other what to call it. Her other Korean friends who have been in the U.S. about as long as she has have similar struggles.
She's also "lost" some of her higher-level native-sino-Korean words since she literally hasn't had to use any of it since college in Korea. Words like the name for an unusual philosophical movement during a historic period in Korean history for example.
So yes, in some sense she's "losing" her native language as both the language co-evolves in two different geographies, and as she doesn't use some parts of it she's forgotten some complex vocabulary. But basic grammar structures seem to persist and day-to-day working vocabulary seems unphased.
On the flip side, I don't speak Korean in any useful capacity, but know a few hundred words, and can read/write Hangul enough to get around. There are nouns and concepts I only know in Korean, or in the English translation of the native Korean terms, even if there are perfectly fine native English words for the thing -- mostly food words. Like "주꾸미", it's a kind of Octopus, but I have no idea what it's called in English. I also have adopted a kind of simplified English grammar when we're talking, or we're in Korea that seems to make me more understandable to the average Korean. I can see that in an alternate history, we had moved to Korea 25+ years ago I'd have most certainly lost an amount of fluency in English as my working language shifted to Korean.
Interestingly I’ll be the 3rd generation in my Familie to loos his mother tongue.
My grandfather spoke east Prussian which was lost to low German. My mother spoke low German which was lost to high German. I grew up in high German and probably at some point will be mostly English speaking .
I'm Natively Dutch myself but live in Denmark, and sometimes also struggle to find the correct Dutch words when talking to my friends. Not that my Danish great, my partner isn't Danish and since I work at an international company, the default language is English.
I tell myself that if I apply myself it will come back but I'm starting to have doubts it will be that easy.
I mean, Sweden is not their home any more, and Swedish is not their main language, but as someone who has lived abroad I can't understand how it happens.
After 50 years of rarely speaking the language, she'd stopped thinking in English, and although she could recollect most vocabulary (although not as quickly as German), she could only construct English sentences by thinking in German and translating that to English, and usually ending up with German word order.
I'm a native Dutch speaker and used to be relatively fluent in German (which is not a given: despite being close neighbors, the languages are very different). Then, I lived in Cape Town for a while, and had to learn some Afrikaans (also closely related to Dutch, but yet widely dissimilar).
This somehow 'erased' my ability to speak German! Only after moving back to Europe and after many years, I was able to do basic stuff like ordering in restaurants in German again.
TL;DR: the human brain is, like, weird, man...
In a work/technical context I am definitely thinking and reasoning in English.
At home if I am discussing or planning something my inner voice is definitely in my mother tongue.
What is interesting is that irrespective of context if I m doing basic arithmetics or simplifying an equation my inner monologue is _always_ in my mother tongue.
Another one is levels of pain. If I have some misfortune or accident I might swear in English. But if I _really_ hurt myself there is deluge of swear words in my mother tongue.
So yeah, you can lose your native tongue if you're no longer massively exposed to if after 20-25, I think. And even in that case, you'll probably fall behind a lot after a few decades of 0 exposure and massive exposure of another language.
Maybe I will shift to a language I have never spoken in life.