Laura Simmons writes about language loss for IFLScience:
Is it possible for someone who is bilingual or multilingual to unlearn their first language? The short answer is… kind of. It’s certainly possible to forget a lot of the vocabulary and grammar that once came naturally, through a process known as language attrition.
One leading researcher in this area is Professor Monika S. Schmid, a linguist from the University of York in the UK. A native German speaker, Schmid describes her own experiences with language attrition on her website. Some of the common signs of this include forgetting specific words, using odd expressions or putting words together incorrectly, and becoming more hesitant when speaking.
It’s very common for people who spend long periods of time learning and speaking a new language to start to have difficulty with their native language – in linguist-speak, the L1. But while this can be distressing, it is unlikely that an adult will completely forget a language they once spoke fluently.
For young children, however, it’s a different story. Children’s brains are much more flexible when it comes to language acquisition, but that also leaves them more vulnerable to completely losing their L1 if they’re in an environment where they’re no longer exposed to it. […]
Language attrition in adults affects different people in different ways, and there are lots of sociological and psychological factors at play. For example, someone who has to leave their native country due to war or persecution may simply not wish to use their L1 again, something that Schmid studied with respect to German Jews who fled the Holocaust.
But there’s also some interesting neuroscience underlying all this. Humans are some of the only mammals capable of true vocal learning. The best model animals we have to study this are songbirds from the order Passeriformes, which includes many of your familiar garden visitors like finches and sparrows.
It’s been suggested that the brain pathways underlying human vocal learning are very similar to those that exist in the songbird brain. Birds have a system of two circuits involving different brain areas – one that’s active when they’re first learning their distinctive song, and one they use later to reproduce the song once they’ve learned it.
In humans, so the theory goes, we have a similar vocal learning circuit that’s active in babies and children as they learn to talk. But when you go to learn a new language later on in life, the balance between the two brain circuits has shifted, and the vocal learning circuit is effectively switched off at a much earlier stage. In other words, we can’t recapture the same processes we used to learn to speak for the very first time. […]
Schmid highlights that there has been a dearth of research into language attrition, which is somewhat at odds with how upsetting it can be for people, and the negative reactions they can face. She cites numerous examples of personal testimonies where people discuss their difficulties around losing their L1 proficiency. […]
One thing that might seem like an obvious solution would be to ensure you spend time speaking to others with the same native language as you, to keep practicing as much as possible. In reality, this can have the opposite effect, as linguist Laura Dominguez explained to BBC Future.
Dominguez noticed that Cuban immigrants living in a largely Spanish-speaking community in Miami had lost some of their native grammatical structures, more so than a group of Spaniards living in the UK and speaking mostly English on a daily basis. Dominguez concluded that this was because the Cubans were communicating mostly with Colombians and Mexicans, and so had taken on traits from these different variants of Spanish, something that she thinks happens more easily with languages or dialects that are very similar to our own. […]
Most researchers seem to agree that one of the best remedies for language attrition is a trip back to one’s native country, where full immersion in the language normally helps to reawaken those skills. But Dominguez stressed that attrition should not necessarily be a cause for alarm. “Attrition is not a bad thing. It’s just a natural process,” she explained. “These people have made changes to their grammar that is consistent with their new reality.”
Language is constantly evolving. Accents and dialects change and morph over time. Feeling like your L1 is slipping out of your grasp can be a difficult experience, not least because of how one’s native language can be tied up with feelings around identity and heritage.
But it’s comforting to know that once a native language is established, the research suggests that it can’t be truly lost. And the fact that our speech and language use can change and adapt to our circumstances isn’t really something to be feared – it’s part of what makes us human.
More links and discussion at the linked page. Thanks, Bathrobe!
The local Catholic priest in Bawku in the 1990s, who had been in Ghana since independence, said that he could no longer speak his native Dutch, though I never had the opportunity or inclination to find out just how profound this loss was. (He was one of a handful of Europeans who have ever learnt to speak Kusaal: he even used to give his sermons in it.)
My great-aunt lost the ability to speak English in later life (being in an environment where everyone she actually wanted to talk to spoke Welsh), but I’m not sure that English really counted as a L1 for her. I think she only really learn it in her teens. Like my grandfather, she was born in Argentina, and she was quite bit older than him.
This is an interesting topic for some members of my family. What it doesn’t specifically address is what may happen when a child is raised bi- or multi-lingual and then doesn’t use one of the L1 languages for a long time.
I raised my sons bi-lingual, Spanish/English. Around age six, they began to avoid using Spanish in public, as we lived in an English speaking community. Their Spanish gradually deteriorated from lack of use. One of them attended a law school in New York City, but did his final year in Madrid. He told me that it took a few weeks to regain good conversational skills, and longer to re-establish full fluency in Spanish.
That’s but a single, anecdotal data point, and I can’t draw any conclusions from it.
@ cuchuflete
It’s lucky that the other language was a major language like Spanish. If it were a minor language spoken (not written) in a small area of an unimportant country, as many of the languages of the world are, or even the official language of a less important country (I’m thinking of Mongolian here), your son would never have had the occasion to revive his Spanish.
I clearly have lost some fluency in Russian (and picked a number of calques) over the several years when I’m using other languages more often (also there was a preciding period of more than a decade when I was reading mostly in English, but talking mostly to Russians).
It is not something other can notice I think.
The other factor is whether the child has grown a long-term memory yet.
I was raised bilingual till I was about 2. I have no memory of having ever spoken or understood what was then called Serbocroatian, and while I’ve had plenty of exposure later, I never recognized anything from earlier.
Contrast my dad, who spoke only Hungarian till he was 5 or 6 as far as I know, and then unlearned it – but in his much later attempts to learn Hungarian he recognized things that “came back”. I’ve never had that experience.
The other factor is whether the child has grown a long-term memory yet.
This was apparently the experience of many colonial British children under British Raj. They learnt Hindi from their Indian nannies when their parents were in India, but since they went back to the UK when they were very young ended up losing it entirely.
“Dominguez concluded that this was because the Cubans were communicating mostly with Colombians and Mexicans, and so had taken on traits from these different variants of Spanish, something that she thinks happens more easily with languages or dialects that are very similar to our own. […]”
I wonder if this effect tracks with the pattern of spread of Vulgar Latin in Europe as opposed to the Mediterranean basin.
This was apparently the experience of many colonial British children under British Raj. They learnt Hindi from their Indian nannies when their parents were in India, but since they went back to the UK when they were very young ended up losing it entirely.
That was my experience with Japanese — I spoke it as well as English until we went back to the States when I was (I think) four, and I forgot it completely.
Ditto LH.
I was the eldest and spent more time interacting with our monolingual maid and my kindergarten teachers and classmates in Kokura, Japan, while my mother bore three more boys and my father spent time learning to preach in Japanese while serving as chaplain of Seinan Jo Gakuin (a girls high school at the time). I was the translator for my next elder brother at Japanese kindergarten, according to my father. But I managed to forget Japanese during our furlough year, while attending 1st grade in Louisville, KY, while my father was in seminary.
My baby sister (J), born in Louisville that year, turned out to be the most fluent of us in conversational Japanese because her four brothers paired off into sets of best friends, while she was left to make friends in the neighborhood. All the kids in our Hiroshima neighborhood called our house J-chan no uchi ‘J’s house’.
My elementary years were spent in Kyoto, 2nd grade in Camp Botanical Garden(!) with mostly military kids. It closed the next year, so I joined the inaugural class of what became Kyoto International School, which used English-language Calvert curriculum materials. All my subsequent schooling was in (American and Canadian) English, so my Japanese speaking ability still has a boyarashii (boyish) flavor to it. However, I will try to use washi instead of boku when referring to myself during next month’s return visit to Japan with my youngest sister and brother and their spouses.
I think my early exposure to natural conversation (and speech levels) greatly improves my listening comprehension, and the era of small electronic dictionaries has greatly increased my reading ability (when traveling around Japan), but not really enough to read a newspaper or novel without a lot of lookups.
My experience in Singapore, where I lived from age 4 to age 7, was not like that.I don’t think I picked up any significant amount of Malay or Cantonese from my nannies (unless you count knowing how to count from one to ten as picking up a significant amount of Malay). I think my nannies were probably Cantonese speakers, but they spoke English to me and my sisters.
PS. Your server seems to have forgotten my gmail address: is that normal?
My youngest daughter was three and a half when we arrived in France. She became fluent in French quite quickly, but she couldn’t insist that we speak French at home (as I understand that other children in similar circumstances do) because neither I nor my wife spoke French well enough. My wife always spoke to her in Spanish, but my Spanish wasn’t good enough for that, so I always spoke to her in English. By the time she was six she was effortlessly fluent in English, Spanish and French (at the level of a six-year old, of course). At about that age she would sometimes insert French words into English sentences, when she didn’t know the English words, but it was very obvious from the virtual quotation marks (very slight pauses) around the insertion that she knew exactly what she was doing.
She is still fluent in all three, many years later. She’s never shown any sign of losing one of them, or getting confused between them.
When I went to Birmingham in 1970, one of my senior colleagues had a Hungarian wife. (She had an aristocratic-sounding name, and I think she came from the land-owning class.) Later on I was collaborating with a Canadian colleague who had left Hungary in 1956, like many others. When he came to visit me in Birmingham he talked with the professor’s wife in Hungarian. She was impressed that he could still speak Hungarian after 20 years. I was surprised that she was surprised, because I had thought that one would never lose one’s native language. On the contrary, however, he told me that he knew many Hungarians in Toronto, and that it was by no means unusual to find ones who couldn’t understand or speak Hungarian.
There is a Hungarian professor of biochemistry at Oxford who claimed not to be able to speak Hungarian when he met another Hungarian colleague at a meeting. In that case it was almost certainly a pretence, as he didn’t want to talk to someone he thought (correctly, as it happened) might be a supporter of the communist regime in Hungary.
> he told me that he knew many Hungarians in Toronto, and that it was by no means unusual to find ones who couldn’t understand or speak Hungarian.
I’ve known a couple ‘56er refugees including our former state rep who I’d known from work, the other the owner of a neighborhood dry cleaners. I didn’t know them well enough to know their continuing comprehension of Hungarian. Both were Jewish and hadn’t previously met each other. It has me wondering whether Jews were prevalent in that diaspora and whether Yiddish might have been a common L1 in mid-century Hungary.
I had agreed to introduce the state rep candidate to people in my building. It was touching to see her share stories with the other woman, already elderly and entering her dotage. It’s possible they spoke to each other in Hungarian, but it was 25 years ago and I don’t remember.
A year or so later, I do remember finding the latter woman on the fire escape one morning, uncertain why or how she’d gotten there. I helped her back in and let her daughter know.
There is a Hungarian professor of biochemistry at Oxford who claimed not to be able to speak Hungarian when he met another Hungarian colleague at a meeting. In that case it was almost certainly a pretence, as he didn’t want to talk to someone he thought (correctly, as it happened) might be a supporter of the communist regime in Hungary.
Previously on LH.
(Followed by a vaguely similar anecdote about Irish reported by me from Anna Korostelyova.)
@J1M, a very weird feeling. I’m absolutely confident that I heard that name many times, uttered that name and talked to the bearer of that name (and the photo in Google is familiar as well) – I guess she must be from the “Celtic” crowd in MSU in 90s – but I absolutely can’t associate her name with any specific words or actions or tell if she attended a course with me or taught one to me:(
Anna Korostelyova previously on LH, previously, previously, previously.
(I’d have included a few more links if I wasn’t worried about running into the spam-prevention limit.)
To the best of my knowledge I’ve never personally met her – not knowingly anyway.
When I was working as a reporter in France, I once had to go and interview the newly appointed (English) head gardener of Monet’s famous garden at Giverny. He’d been living in France for so long that his native English was full of Gallicisms, to the point where I could hardly use it! I remember asking him how it felt when the first visitors came in in the morning, and he said, “Oh it’s very recompensing, a very recompensing feeling.”