Can you lose your native tongue? (2024)

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 ]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

> "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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.