11 ms·

Can you lose your native tongue? (2024)

• abctx 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/EQjeG https://archive.ph/EQjeG
  • croisillon 2y ago
    thanks but somehow the first paragraph doesn't show up properly on my end 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.
    • dredmorbius 2y ago
      FYI, often Archive Today will see multiple fetches, one of which works. You can report failed fetches as well with the feedback ("report bug or abuse") link, top right. 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.
• OptionOfT 2y ago
  Belgian born, raised in Flanders, speaking Flemish (=Dutch dialect). 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.
  • skerit 2y ago
    > 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.
    • oefnak 2y ago
      You should use English subs anyway if the original language is English.
    • OptionOfT 2y ago
      That's interesting. I switched to English subs way before moving to the US. I started getting annoyed at incorrect translations, or missing context (i.e. in the Simpsons). 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?
• LeftyStrat 2y ago
  I wish I could lose my southern accent.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• browningstreet 2y ago
  My parents were both born abroad. I was born in the US. As a child we spoke their native language at home. It was my first language. Then I went to preschool and learned English. We ended up moving to another country for a while and I learned that language too. Then we returned to the US and I can only speak English. It’s absolutely had an effect on my speaking and thinking habits. I’ve tried to learn those other two languages and I think it’s been harder than it is for most people. It’s blocked. I have ephemeral thoughts I can’t convey in language. It’s like having persistent deja vu.
• cyrnel 2y ago
  No discussion of language loss is complete without mentioning the hundreds of indigenous languages that were eradicated by force: > "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
• bane 2y ago
  Anecdote: my wife immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea in her mid-20s with only a smattering of English and multiple college degrees in her home country. 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.
• s09dfhks 2y ago
  This last weekend, I met a friend's wife. She immigrated here from Vietnam when she was ~4 years old and has since forgotten how to speak Vietnamese. I was shocked
• egorfine 2y ago
  Anecdotal evidence of a multilingual person living in a country desperately scrambling to transition from one language to another: 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.
• ralferoo 2y ago
  I couldn't read the paywalled article, but yes. My auntie was born to English parents in the UK, moved from UK to Switzerland when she was in her early 20s and only visited the UK a handful of times after that. I never met her until she was in her mid 70s when she visited the UK for her mum's 100th birthday, and she really struggled with English even though it was her mother tongue. 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.
• bionsystem 2y ago
  I once met a guy who did. He was in his 70s born in soviet Russia, emigrated as a kid in western Germany at 5 or 6, and was re-learning Russian at 70+ because he forgot all about it.
• MisterBastahrd 2y ago
  It's not exactly the same, but I'm Creole / Cajun and have been living in Texas for almost 9 years now. When I encounter other people of a similar background, I sort of ease back into the way we talk back home, which is to say not entirely Cajun French but we use a lot of those words to describe specific things and there is a different manner in which we speak. 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.
• bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  I lost my native tongue, my mother married an American when I was 6, we left Denmark, he said we shouldn't speak Danish (he said so I would learn English quicker, she said because he was paranoid we were talking about him), when I moved back in my late 30s I had to relearn the language. I didn't do any better than others in my class, so I don't think I remembered any of it. I did actually remember a bit of German (we lived in Germany for 4 years and I had German in high school)
• upcoming-sesame 2y ago
  I wouldn't say completely lose, but definitely feel like I'm missing words more often and get stuck
• tonijn 2y ago
  I believe there’s a huge variation between individuals in their ability to keep/loose their native tongue and learning new tongues
• yawnxyz 2y ago
  I grew up in Stockholm / grew up speaking Swedish. Haven't spoken Swedish unless I'm at IKEA (for some reason Swedes flock there?!), which doesn't happen very often. I can still read/understand but it's hard to remember words
• nosianu 2y ago
  I remember reading about a German woman who after the end of WWII married one of the American soldiers and moved to the US with him. She then never needed to use German again until she was quite old. She barely spoke any German by that time. I think she was interviewed by a German journalist - that's why I ended up reading about it.
  • echelon 2y ago
    Do you remember where you read this? That's a fascinating anecdote.
    • nosianu 2y ago
      I'm almost sure this was pre-Internet and paper. Asking Google is useless, I only get general pages about German "war brides". I'm trying to ask ChatGPT but right now it seems to hang while loading. I thought about asking DeepSeek, but I don't want to create a login (the ChatGPT site does not require one). 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.
  • sfRattan 2y ago
    There were large swathes of Americans in those generations who stopped using German publicly because of World Wars One and Two. German was at the time the second most commonly spoken language at home in America. You still see vestiges of it in recorded data about ancestry [1]. 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/File%3ACensus-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_ancestry#/media/Fil...
    • detourdog 2y ago
      In the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country was a town that Bismark that changed its name to Quentin after Quentin Roosevelt died in the Great War (WW I). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin,_Pennsylvania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin,_Pennsylvania
• kps 2y ago
  Anecdata… my first language was German, which I can no longer speak (and never learned to read).
  • antithesis-nl 2y ago
    That's interesting, because for me, being able to read a language comes first, then being able to understand it being spoken, then speaking it in some (but definitely not all) contexts. 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...
    • kps 2y ago
      My parents spoke German when I was a baby, but switched fully to English when I could walk so that I would fit in with other neighbourhood children. I learned to read in English. 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.
    • tuukkah 2y ago
      Typically, children first learn to talk (although it can be a sign language) and only later to read and write.
    • selimthegrim 2y ago
      If they grew up born to German parents in a foreign country…
    • Aachen 2y ago
      The person you're responding to must have meant as a child, but I can also provide an adult anecdote: I could understand spoken German sooner than written because I, well, never read the language (can't understand it anyway) but was listening to conversation at the dinner table of German family and so picked it up that way 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)
• Swoerds 2y ago
  I visited my mom's uncle when I backpacked in Australia, he moved there from the Netherlands at a young age. He could still speak a few words, but definitely wouldn't be able to hold a full conversation in Dutch. 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.
• dzuc 2y ago
  An excellent book on this: https://www.zonebooks.org/books/43-echolalias-on-the-forgetting-of-language https://www.zonebooks.org/books/43-echolalias-on-the-forgett...
• markus92 2y ago
  Languages need a lot of upkeep if you want to keep speaking them fluently. On the other hand, just like muscle, once you've had it it's a lot easier to get back than having to put it on for the first time.
  • MandieD 2y ago
    My husband's mother, a German who spent a few semesters in Britain in the late 50s and subsequently taught English and geography in gymnasium (German academic track middle and high school), taught him and few other neighborhood children some English during her maternity year after his younger sister was born. He was 4. She then went back to work, he went into regular German Kindergarten (preschool), and the whole matter was forgotten. 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.
• MandieD 2y ago
  I've lived in Germany for twenty years, and despite speaking what I would consider a merely adequate and certainly not native level of German, I've noticed that there's something a bit off about how I speak English. It's glaringly apparent when I'm back in Texas. Like the author, I make some strange word choices that are almost like direct translations from German, and it's had an effect on my grammar, too. 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.
  • wheels 2y ago
    I'm also a Texan in Germany, and my German's good enough that it often takes people a few minutes to notice I'm not a native speaker. (Left the US at 21, am now 44.) I definitely also have a lot of German artifacts in my spoken English at this point. At one point I was given the attempted compliment of, "Wow, your English is really good" – because I apparently almost sound like a native speaker. ;-) 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.
  • joseda-hg 2y ago
    I wouldn't worry too much about it, English is prevalent and useful enough that as long as gets to a reasonable level early enough, he should be able to pick stuff that separate him from your specific manerisms 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
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• munchbunny 2y ago
  Yes, you can (I submit myself as the example), but I'm not sure that the article/author is talking about fluency. Anecdotally, I lost fluency in my native tongue during my teens, though I don't carry a non-native accent when I do speak it. However, I speak/read/write in what is technically my second language (English) as if it were my first language.
  • riwsky 2y ago
    as if it were
    • munchbunny 2y ago
      Ha. Got me.
    • przemub 2y ago
      past subjunctive, bit** :)
    • munchler 2y ago
      Heck, I'm an English-only speaker, and I still get were/was wrong all the time. Honestly, I have no idea what the rule is there. They both sound correct-ish to me.
      • munchbunny 2y ago
        In this structure, “were” is used in cases where you are entertaining a hypothetical, and “was” is for something that was true. 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.
        • ninalanyon 2y ago
• kshacker 2y ago
  I lived in a Hindi speaking area for my first 23 years. Then I lived in a cosmopolitan area for 5 years. And then I lived in US for 14 years predominantly speaking english. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28665942 ]
  • qwerty456127 2y ago
    Wow. English+Hindi+French+Russian+Tamil+.... So cool. You should probably add some Arabic, some Chinese, some Xhosa, some Gaelic and some native American languages to this list to appear endlessly awesome :-)
    • kshacker 2y ago
      I can not speak most of them. But having friends speak them for years makes you start catching the words, phrases, sentences and even the context though not equally well, not all the time, and not the same for each language - this is for the South Indian languages. I did formally study French and Russian (1 semester). And lol, I took Russian when the USSR still existed :) Those were the days. 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.
• jmclnx 2y ago
  Yes you can. I know a few people who did. They came over to the US as teenagers and their parents refused to speak their language. So as the aged, they forgot more and more.
• mococa 2y ago
  Coincidentally, I was watching an interview today with someone from my country. This person lived for decades in a country where English is spoken, and several times when they pronounced a word from here, it came with an English accent.
• antithesis-nl 2y ago
  From personal anecdata, I can assure you it's entirely possible to 'lose' a language ability. Native tongue? Not so sure, but a closely-related one, definitely! 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...
  • billforsternz 2y ago
    I knew a guy back in the day who grew up in the Netherlands and then South Africa. And somehow the Afrikaans messed up his Dutch, and he basically didn't have a native language. His English was rough as well, I felt sorry for him despite being completely monolingual myself.
• jaimebuelta 2y ago
  Something strange. I (Spanish speaker having lived in an English speaking country for 15 years) still struggle with maths. It’s really difficult to understand numbers that are relatively high (hundreds and thousands) unless I can see them written. And making calculation is almost impossible. I need to switch to Spanish and then translate it back
  • missedthecue 2y ago
    I was just talking about this exact thing with a friend. Spoken English in everyday and professional settings is fluent but when it comes to math, we have to think the numbers in Spanish.
  • AStonesThrow 2y ago
    My Spanish is such that if I'm reciting a prepared script, it'll go fine until I try to read numbers as digits. So if I was preparing a script for myself I'd write them all out in words.
• exe34 2y ago
  my favourite anecdote about languages was when I went to see Salman Rushdie talk. His accent was perfectly north American while he spoke about contemporary things, but when he spoke about his childhood in India, he started speaking with a slight Indian accent. 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.
  • kreyenborgi 2y ago
    I know people who speak in a more central dialect when they speak of work, and their childhood dialect when they speak of family, hobbies
• rednafi 2y ago
  Yes. My native tongue is Bengali—the 7th most spoken language in the world. 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.
  • FlyingSnake 2y ago
    People from the subcontinent have this weird habit of adding English words randomly in their conversations. Sentences in Hindi/Bangla/Tamil etc and then straight up English words, and then switch back. Haven’t seen anyone else do that.
    • _1tem 2y ago
      Germans do that all the time. See Berlinglish. So do Ukrainians, although less often.
    • StrauXX 2y ago
      Do you mean Anglicisms? Those are very common in many languages nowadays. Especially those in the west. Youth language in the German speaking areas of Europe is around one fourth English words.
      • FlyingSnake 2y ago
        Yes, I’ve seen kids in Berlin do that as well, but this is not a recent phenomenon for Indians. I’ve observed it for more than 15 years now
    • inkyoto 2y ago
      It is called «code switching», and it is also very common amongst Hongkongers and Singaporeans.
    • 2y ago
• graeme 2y ago
  Absolutely. Have met multiple people who could not speak their native language after a long absence from their homeland. 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.
  • whamlastxmas 2y ago
    I think the 80 years old part is the biggest contributor there
    • graeme 2y ago
      Perhaps, but he was still a skilled tailor. I've also met much younger people with native proficiency in no language. Not many, perhaps only 3 total in my life but they exist. 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.
  • FpUser 2y ago
    >"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." 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.
  • rahimnathwani 2y ago
    Their native tongue was gone or degraded but they had not achieved strong proficiency in English or the local language. This reminds me of two things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175216 https://www.quora.com/Every-service-at-Google-is-either-deprecated-or-not-ready-yet-Google-engineering-proverb-What-does-it-mean https://www.quora.com/Every-service-at-Google-is-either-depr...
• niemandhier 2y ago
  I‘ll join the ranks of Germans loosing their mother tongue, I wonder why we are I susceptible to it. Even though living in Germany I am in an English speaking academic bubble, spending 10h a day reading, writing and discussing in English. 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 .
• TrackerFF 2y ago
  I was born in Norway, but between age 1-2 we lived in Sweden, then age 2-3 in Norway, and age 3-7 in Finland. I spoke fluent Finish, and started to struggle a bit with Norwegian. When I was 7 we moved back to Norway, and I had a thick accent. I'd still speak and read finish for a couple of years home. 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.
• drdrey 2y ago
  This is a rare counterexample to Betteridge's law of headlines
• jillesvangurp 2y ago
  I've lived outside the Netherlands on and off since 1998 and permanently since 2005. I still speak Dutch with family and some friends but not that fluently; my mother teases me when she catches me making silly mistakes. 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?".
  • Aachen 2y ago
    What kind of mistakes do you make? 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
• Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
  If you emigrate to a country where you speak a different language, you become very aware of the harsh truth
• ajakate 2y ago
  I think it's pretty common actually among some immigrant groups (2nd gen Indians in the US at least, of which I am one). 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.
• galkk 2y ago
  I’m a native speaker of Russian and Ukrainian. 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.
  • egorfine 2y ago
    Привіт! :-) 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.
• PinkSheep 2y ago
  Forming mental connections between objects and their respective words is the forgettable part. I will understand and read and write my native language, but recalling anything beyond household vocabulary for speech is hard. I found it is rather trainable, especially if you force yourself into a podcast/streaming format of monologues 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.
  • AStonesThrow 2y ago
    I feel that many tech job interviews are failed when a candidate's unable to express themselves with industry jargon, demonstrate that they've been through formal college training, or read the documentation and collaborated with other pros. Or their eyes are glazing over as the local tech stack is explained. And finally the trick question that elicits a confidently incorrect answer because they're out of their depth. 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.
• fortran77 2y ago
  I lost fluency in mine, but it was a language spoken at home with my parents (their native language) while I spoke another language with everyone else outside of home.
• saagarjha 2y ago
  I’m curious what language the author thinks in.
  • DoingIsLearning 2y ago
    Curiously I think that also depends at least in my anecdata case. 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.
• bjoli 2y ago
  One thing I always found fascinating are swedes moving to the US and begin speaking Swedish with an American accent after 10+ years. Not as a thing. They really sound like a US immigrant, with all the same un-idiomatic errors that many do, even after many years in Sweden. 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.
• qingcharles 2y ago
  Even English/English gets corrupted. 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.
  • orobinson 2y ago
    Bin bag, bin lorry. I grew up saying dustbin but most people just call them bins these days. 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.
    • dfawcus 2y ago
      We had coal fires, and no central heating when I was a young child. 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.
  • dannyobrien 2y ago
    your second example i've struggled with myself (and came up with the same clumsy rubbish lorry back-derivation). but i think the first is "binliner"? british exile for 24 years
    • qingcharles 2y ago
      Sweet baby Jesus, it's Danny O'Brien. I actually quoted NTK in a court hearing some time ago; that was confusing. I was also filming Chips With Everything at the time you were doing 404 with Dave :) Binliner definitely seems to tweak some deep neurons.
      • dannyobrien 2y ago
• ghfhghg 2y ago
  French was the first language I spoke well and I haven't spoken it for 25 years. I'm appalled at myself when I struggle to speak with my French family. I tell myself that if I apply myself it will come back but I'm starting to have doubts it will be that easy.
• deleted 2y ago
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• FlyingSnake 2y ago
  I might be an outlier here because I have not lost any of the languages I grew up speaking (Marathi and Hindi). In fact I can also switch between various accents in them. Even after learning few more languages later in life, I can still speak/read/write fluently in these.
• vermooten 2y ago
  “Parents were discouraged from teaching their children languages other than English, even if they expressed themselves best in that other language.“ Yes my Spanish-speaking father and English-speaking mother decided, when I was growing up in USA in the 60s, not to speak Spanish to me, in case it fucked my learning and development up. Shame, it would have been cool.
  • ninalanyon 2y ago
    This idea that one language will hinder the learning of another seems pervasive. But experience suggests it's not true. My children learned Norwegian with no effort at all when in kindergarten despite us speaking only English to them at home. They were indistinguishable from native speakers in both languages by the age of four.
• Justta 2y ago
  She spoke French and English from childhood, her family spoke those languages. I cannot accept English is her native language. English language as a whole is not fully single language. It has influence of many languages. Only a portion of the language can be considered native that has substantial contribution from England etc. Other parts are not native or something anyone needs to feel their own. Most languages are not purely from a region or a race except some tribal languages. I have no particular liking for the language I spoke as a child. If you go deep some influences on it are forced to suit a particular identity. Maybe not European languages. Test is whether our ancestors spoke what we consider our native language 500 years ago. Maybe I will shift to a language I have never spoken in life.
  • saghm 2y ago
    I'm not sure I understand that point you're trying to make. As someone who only speaks English, if English isn't a "single language" or "considered native", then what's my "native language"? My understanding of the term is that "native language" is descriptor of a speaker rather than a categorization of a language itself, so the idea that a language itself can be "not native" universally doesn't make much sense to me. I understand that different parts of English have roots in different languages, but from my perspective as a modern speaker with only limited knowledge of other languages (a few years of Spanish in school and then a few semesters of Dutch in college, but I'm not even proficient at a conversational level of either at this point), the origins of the words I'm using are irrelevant to whether I can think naturally in them; the fact I can check Google to see the entomology of the words "check" and "proficient" and see that one comes from French and the other from Latin doesn't affect my ability to understand them being used in this paragraph together. I strongly suspect that anyone else who identifies as a native English speaker would similarly be able to understand both of those words equally well, so it's not very plausible to me that there's no such thing as English as a "native language".
• oblio 2y ago
  Sebastian Stan moved to the US when he was 12, I think. His Romanian is passable, but not amazing (besides the obvious access, his grammar is probably at middle school level). 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.
• kelnos 2y ago
  I'm an English-only speaker who has at times tried to learn other languages (Spanish, Mandarin, Italian), but aside from some very basic proficiency (I hesitate to even call it "proficiency") in Spanish, I never got anywhere useful in anything else. 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.)
  • ordu 2y ago
    Yeah, it can be hard, if the second language is not English. It easy to find places to practice English and get some other benefits as well. (Like NH for example, where you can read news or talk with people) 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.
  • jll29 2y ago
    You can go in deeply enough that you won't forget it even if you pick it up later in your life, but the trouble is you cannot know whether (or not yet) you have reached that level. If you were to pursue that as a personal project, spending a few months or one full year abroad to fully immerse and then following up back home with some routine of combined reading of books in the language and occasional meetup group to have some occasional practice/use is what I would recommend. 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?
• MarkusWandel 2y ago
  I would say yes. ESL for 44 years. But I do keep up my native language. It doesn't take much. Just think in that language once in a while, read or watch media in that language occasionally. Even if it's just 1% of the media you consume, it will keep it fresh. But if you're completely isolated from it for decades, it will fade.
• sunami-ai 2y ago
  I lost words, not tongue so much (checks to see if tongue is still there) 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.
• crossroadsguy 2y ago
  My native tongue (or mother tongue; for me it's the same and I assume it's the same to keep it less complicated and not being too anal about linguistics) is something that most people never know exists and when I tell them they say "oh, but that's just Hindi" which is ironic because my native tongue predates Hindi, in any shape of form, by at least 1000 years. Another sad irony is, the Southern part of my country, blames me for trying to destroy their mother tongues with Hindi while completely unaware that it's Hindi that is destroying (actually destroyed) my mother tongue and Hindi itself is being destroyed by English. 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.
  • seafoamteal 2y ago
    Out of interest, what is your mother tongue?
• seafoamteal 2y ago
  Whenever someone asks me what my first language is, I'm always conflicted for a two main reasons: 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.
  • leosanchez 2y ago
    > sort of a mix between the major languages of two South Indian states As a fellow South Indian, i would like know more. Which states are they?
    • umeshunni 2y ago
      I'm guessing Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
    • shrikant 2y ago
      I assume Palakkad Tamil, which is more Malayalam than Tamil.
    • seafoamteal 2y ago
      TN and KA
      • shrikant 2y ago
        Now I'm curious as to the name of this dialect, please?
• mattmaroon 2y ago
  My grandma moved to the US from Germany when she was young. When she was in her late 70's or early 80's she told me she wasn't completely fluent in German anymore. It definitely atrophied to some degree.
• jll29 2y ago
  In linguistic terminology L1 and L2 refer to your native tongue versus second language, respectively. 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.
  • spidersouris 2y ago
    A quick Google search for "L1 attrition file:pdf" or "first language attrition file:pdf" returns tons of results, so it doesn't seem to be that understudied. I think it mostly depends on what you want to focus on: do you want to know how a specific language or group of languages come to be lost by native speakers (e.g., indigenous languages)? Or are there some linguistics characteristics that you're more interested in analyzing (e.g., writing attrition, phonological attrition, grammar attrition)? 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/E01D99C677868227CED2DEB9E35E5E56 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 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_second_language_learning_lead_to_first_language_attrition https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365372235_When_does...
  • tuukkah 2y ago
    It seems people are mixing active and passive skills as well here: For example, if you don't speak or write a language (L1 or L2) for a while, those activities will become more difficult but it doesn't mean you would lose listening and reading as well. OTOH if you are separated from your L1 community for decades, you'll have grown apart and there's potentially a huge gap culturally and in vocabularies. Also, everyone has a smaller active and larger passive vocabulary, so alone it's not a sign of attrition.