[HN Gopher] Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024)
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Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024)
Author : Thevet
Score : 24 points
Date : 2025-02-18 18:34 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| abctx wrote:
| https://archive.ph/EQjeG
| croisillon wrote:
| 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.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you remember where you read this? That's a fascinating
| anecdote.
| nosianu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/Fil...
| detourdog wrote:
| 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
| kps wrote:
| Anecdata... my first language was German, which I can no longer
| speak (and never learned to read).
| antithesis-nl wrote:
| 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...
| dzuc wrote:
| An excellent book on this:
| https://www.zonebooks.org/books/43-echolalias-on-the-forgett...
| markus92 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rednafi wrote:
| Sports machen?
| aeyes wrote:
| Almost impossible in this day and age unless you move when you
| are very young. Today the world is so connected that you always
| have some exposure to the language unless you go completely
| offline.
|
| In my case it's been almost 10 years since I emigrated. I rarely
| speak my native tongue but I can hop on a call any minute and
| have no problems speaking or understanding. I more frequently
| forget words or they don't come out the right way but I'm still
| much more proficient than in any other language.
|
| My native tongue is the only language in which I know the words
| for very specific things, for example the names of all the tools
| in a hardware store, names of plants or any word which you use
| once every ten years. After a certain age there is just no way to
| learn all that anymore. Because of that my brain switches between
| languages all the time and I keep everything fresh.
| munchbunny wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| as if it _were_
| munchbunny wrote:
| Ha. Got me.
| przemub wrote:
| past subjunctive, bit** :)
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Same here. I left my native country (family chose to move) when
| I was 8. By 12 or 13 I was probably more fluent in English than
| the original, although I continued to read, etc. I can still
| read, think a bit, help my family with duo lingo, but fluency
| would be a stretch so many years later. However, I have no
| doubt that if I moved back home, I could pick a fair amount up
| again in a few months. But I would probably forever be "teenage
| slang" non-fluent, as well as missing out on common idioms,
| etc.
|
| My father left his birthplace when he was 4 or 5, and only
| knows a few words of his first language.
| kshacker wrote:
| 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 ]
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| delduca wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| jaimebuelta wrote:
| 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
| exe34 wrote:
| 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.
| rednafi wrote:
| 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.
| graeme wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think the 80 years old part is the biggest contributor there
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