Can you lose your native tongue? (2024)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Anecdotal evidence of native-language loss

  • Many commenters say unequivocally: yes, you can lose your native tongue, especially if you emigrate young or stop using it for decades.
  • Examples span German, Dutch, Hindi, Bengali, Romanian, Cantonese, Finnish, various Indian languages, Flemish, Russian/Ukrainian, and even Vietnamese and Danish.
  • Common pattern: people can still understand and often read their first language, but can’t reliably form sentences or hold a fluent conversation.
  • Some report extreme cases where older immigrants seem to have no language they speak really well anymore.

Partial attrition: which skills go first

  • Speaking is reported as most fragile; listening and reading tend to survive longer.
  • Vocabulary thins out first, especially for specialized or newer concepts; speakers fall back on the dominant language or mix them.
  • Dialects erode too: people lose local dialects or accents and drift toward a standard or toward the dominant foreign language.
  • Several note that re-immersion can restore a lot within weeks or months, though gaps in current slang and idioms remain.

Interference between multiple languages

  • People commonly describe “cross-talk” between languages:
    • Wrong language words popping up, or “tip-of-the-tongue” states filled by another language.
    • Native language spoken with a foreign accent after years abroad.
    • Direct translations of foreign grammar into English (“Are you coming with?”, “since two days”).
    • Math and counting often remain tied to the childhood language even when everything else is in English.

Raising bilingual/trilingual children

  • Parents in mixed-language homes discuss how hard it is to keep the minority language alive.
  • Strategies: strict “one parent, one language”, pretending not to understand the majority language, regular travel, calls with relatives, media and books in the target language, and providing peer groups in that language.
  • Kids often understand the home language but reply only in the dominant one and later regret it.

Language change, identity, and culture

  • Several point out that languages and slang evolve while you’re away, so even perfect retention would feel “out of date.”
  • There’s mention of historic suppression (German in the US, indigenous residential schools) and of small or unnamed dialects being crowded out by national languages and English.
  • One commenter introduces the term “L1 attrition” and notes it’s a recognized but still not fully mapped research area.