[HN Gopher] Can you lose your native tongue? (2024)
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Can you lose your native tongue? (2024)
Author : Thevet
Score : 95 points
Date : 2025-02-18 18:34 UTC (4 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...
| tuukkah wrote:
| Typically, children first learn to talk (although it can be a
| sign language) and only later to read and write.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| If they grew up born to German parents in a foreign
| country...
| Aachen wrote:
| 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)
| kps wrote:
| 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.
| Swoerds wrote:
| 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 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?
| aaplok wrote:
| > I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me
| as his main source of it.
|
| My experience is that it gets hard when they realise that they
| can get away with only German. Many kids choose to only use the
| "primary" language, even when spoken in the secondary one. They
| eventually regret that choice when they get to their twenties.
|
| Not all kids do that though. I am not sure what influences
| this, but as a parent of trilingual children, my recommendation
| is to expose them to the culture as much as you can. Talk to
| family online, take them to English speaking places and
| countries, watch movies. In other words, make speaking English
| useful to them. If your family in the US have older kids, yours
| might end up looking up to them - mine have an older cousin who
| is one of their favourite members of the family and definitely
| gives motivation to communicate. Also, be more stubborn than
| them if they try to only speak German.
|
| Sorry if this comes across as unsolicited advice. Nothing I
| said is revolutionary and you might already have thought it
| through. We got very lucky with ours, but this is stuff I would
| have benefitted from when our kids were young, so I'm passing
| it on.
| MandieD wrote:
| Not at all - I appreciate it!
| seszett wrote:
| > _Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak
| German._
|
| I think that's the main thing. I have been very stubborn in
| "not understanding" the other (local) language with my
| children, even if it's obvious to them I do understand it.
| Today (they are still young) they speak both languages,
| including between themselves, and they don't seem to have a
| preference for one language over the other.
| stevoski wrote:
| "Are you coming with?"
|
| After a few years living in Germany (as a native English
| speaker), my English and that of my friends became peppered
| with these German-isms.
| bradrn wrote:
| I say this as a native English speaker... but I speak South
| African English (or something similar), and I've heard that
| this expression is due to Afrikaans influence!
| stavros wrote:
| That's probably because Afrikaans is Dutch, and Dutch is
| German.
| bradrn wrote:
| Well, 'is' isn't quite the right word... but they're all
| closely related languages, yes, which is why I mentioned
| it.
| stavros wrote:
| Yep, I was being liberal with "is" there, but hopefully
| the point came across.
| jessekv wrote:
| Dutch is German, and English is French.
| stavros wrote:
| English is French and German.
| jessekv wrote:
| And therefore, Dutch is English :D
| stavros wrote:
| No, English and Dutch are distant cousins.
| yapyap wrote:
| Afrikaans is Dutch yes, Dutch is not German.
|
| Learn your languages before spreading unwise nonsense on
| the internet.
| carlmr wrote:
| Not OP here. You're right, but you could be more
| charitable in your reading of the previous comment. While
| it's wrong at the micro level it's not even nonsense on
| the macro level. Dutch and German are at the very least
| very related. They share a lot of constructs and words.
|
| There's no reason to be so disrespectful.
| eps wrote:
| Similarly "I've been here since two days" is usually a
| giveaway that somebody's translating from French.
| stavros wrote:
| Isn't German the same? "Ich bin schon seit zwei Tagen
| hier".
| raphael_l wrote:
| It's actually also indicative of German! (and I would
| assume a few other languages?)
|
| "Ich bin seit zwei Tagen hier."
| OJFord wrote:
| Hindi too, main do din se yahan hun.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if it were _most_ languages
| really, English 'for' seems the weirder construction.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| You could use it in English too so long as you add 'ago'
| on the end. "Since two days" makes no sense in English
| because "since" refers to a point in time not a duration.
| OJFord wrote:
| That still doesn't sound natural to me. You could answer
| 'since when' with 'two days ago', but declaring it as a
| statement I'd say 'for the last two days' or 'since the
| day before yesterday'.
|
| You could get away with it in speech since it sounds like
| 'since.. [thinking] two days ago' and it's acceptable to
| change construction like that in casual speech, but
| written it doesn't seem right to me.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Could also be do din tak but that implies you're about to
| take off
| dizhn wrote:
| Do you notice an increase in this usage lately? I see it
| a lot on reddit and hn. All romance languages probably
| have it by the way. I know Italian does for sure.
| yurishimo wrote:
| I said this long before I moved out of the US. I live in NL
| now. I wish I could tell you where it came from. Probably
| from my stepfather who was raised in a rural Texas area that
| probably had some old Germanic roots.
| OJFord wrote:
| That sounds perfectly British English to me, to the extent
| that I thought your point was going to be it was something
| German had stamped out of you.
|
| Interestingly, I'm not sure if it's nationwide, or a local
| dialect (Dorset/West country) thing - interesting because
| there's a lot of German/Saxonism retained in the dialect,
| usually about word choice or spelling though, not phrases. As
| far as I'm aware anyway, not an expert.
|
| (For example we tend to prefer the -t ending of -ed verbs:
| 'burnt' not 'burned' etc. including in stronger cases words
| like 'turnt' ('turned' in any usage, not the modern slang for
| drunk) that Wiktionary etc. will tell you are obsolete.)
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I grew up in a many-lingual house and really only know English,
| though I am trying to finally learn proper German.
|
| But my word choices and pronunciations are definitely not 100%
| native. There are moments where I can feel the vtable pointing
| me to the wrong language for a word. Sometimes I get back to
| English, sometimes I pause, and sometimes a word from some
| other language pops out.
|
| As an example I sometimes say "no thank you" in Swedish in
| situations where that is wildly wrong. I can't speak Swedish,
| but I have those basic phrases in there.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Similar timeframe in Germany, not only did my English got
| worse, even though I have more years of speaking English (since
| the age of 10), I also occasionally miss some Portuguese words,
| my native tongue.
|
| Thankfully hearing it regularly keeps me up to date, though
| there are those moments where right in the middle of a
| conversation I have to stop and reflect on how exactly
| something is named.
| lqet wrote:
| Lately I noticed that I cannot even speak my native German
| dialect as easily as when I was a teenager (I moved away from
| home to university when I was 20). I often hesitate because I
| am not sure whether some word I said was correct in my native
| dialect, or the local dialect where I live now, or the dialect
| of my wife (Swiss German). At home, we speak a wild mixture of
| 3 different dialects and standard German. Our 5-year-old mainly
| speaks standard German because that's what they speak at
| kindergarten (most of the teachers don't speak the dialect, and
| there is a significant number of French, Italian, Ukrainian,
| and Syrian kids for which learning the dialect would be even
| harder). At work, I speak a mixture of English and standard
| German.
|
| After living in Germany for nearly 10 years, but working in
| Switzerland, my wife recently had an identity crisis because a
| Swiss colleague thought she was German, and had just learned
| Swiss German very well.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I have the same experience as well. After living in Germany for
| 12+ years, my English sometimes has this weird mix of English
| words and German grammar.
|
| My daughter however speaks fluent English and German so I don't
| think they'll have the same problems.
| gizajob wrote:
| If English had German grammar :
| https://youtu.be/50jkO2s4Sp0?si=fvPfoJW9WKG51IL-
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Some youths in Sweden are doing this in Swedish, being unable
| to properly communicate in their native language. Their English
| is usually not that great either though.
|
| Some are foreigners, others are extreme nerds who have failed
| to interact with people and have lived on the internet.
|
| It's really sad.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Learning language is a lifelong journey, I'm convinced we
| continue to master our native language as well as we age.
| Maybe more so if we care and pay attention to it. So I hope
| there is still hope for some of the youth..
|
| And I would add that I think becoming more than proficient in
| and deepening understanding of one's own language (Swedish in
| that case) is important, in parallel with learning foreign
| languages.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| After I read anything German, i cant stop myself from
| pronouncing all the s's as z's for a few days
| jwarden wrote:
| I am also raising a bilingual 3-year-old in Spain. I speak to
| him only in English. But i have recently read The Nurture
| Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, which argues convincingly
| that his English _will_ be limited in certain important ways
| unless he also has a native English-speaking peer group.
| wheels wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| 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** :)
| munchler wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gausswho wrote:
| As a native US english speaker, this was fascinating to
| read and uncover my unknown learnings. You are not
| incorrect, but I would make a big caveat: 'as if it were'
| or 'as if it was' can, depending on context, sound
| foreign, in a transliterated way. Many native speakers, I
| think, expect some other phrasing to express the same
| meaning. Often through helpful ambiguators like 'like'.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| The subjunctive is almost dead in colloquial British
| English.
| caffro wrote:
| https://www.thoughtco.com/irrealis-were-
| grammar-1691045#:~:t...
| 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.
| ratg13 wrote:
| I speak a few languages, and find myself losing the grip on
| the native one.
|
| People I know that know more languages than me seem to be
| worse at all of them.. and by worse I mean they can hold a
| fluent conversation, but have extremely poor spelling and
| grammar.
| ehnto wrote:
| I have noticed it with a lot of Indian people I know, an
| aptitude for language. My understanding is that many learn
| Hindi, their home tongue, and english at school.
|
| Of course I only have exposure to my indian friends who moved
| to Australia for work, so they're biased towards people who
| went through university and learned English in school.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Yes, a lot of Indians that emigrate to foreign countries
| will have gone to schools where classes are taught in
| English, except for the local language class that is taught
| in that language. There are so-called "English medium"
| schools ("medium" as in the method of conveyance of
| knowledge in this case). There are also schools that are
| $local_language medium, but they were generally for poor
| people / lower social classes.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Only around 40% of Indians speak Hindi at home. Many
| Indians don't speak Hindi at all. But a lot of Indians will
| learn Hindi and English in addition to what they speak at
| home.
| uwehn wrote:
| I grew up in Romania. Spoke German at home, it was my
| Muttersprache (German minority in Romania). Went to a German
| school, but learned Romanian in K-12 there, spoke it fluently.
| Left Romania when I was 18. I can still understand most when I
| listen (I can watch Romanian movies not dubbed). I can read it
| and understand most of what I read. But I cannot form sentences
| anymore, cannot speak it for the life of me. Pretty strange. I
| guess it needs effort to revive it in one's brain.
| blindseeker wrote:
| Same here! Just that my family emigrated when I was 5 years
| old, plus my Romanian native mother passed when I was 14.
| this was some 25 years ago. Now, I do understand Romanian
| media, but can't speak past a simple ,,Buna ziua, ce mai
| faci".
|
| Interestingly, some 18 years ago I went to intern in Mexico.
| After 6 months there, I was quite fluent in Spanish. But when
| I wanted to think of a Romanian word, all that popped up was
| Spanish. Pretty wild how the brain works.
|
| (Romanian, Spanish, French, Italian, ... are all Latin
| influenced languages, btw.)
| wjholden wrote:
| I learned a little Spanish growing up in the USA.
|
| As I learned French as an adult, when I didn't know a
| French word, the Spanish word would often come to me.
|
| Now I'm learning German, and often the French word comes to
| me when I don't know a German word. However, I've also
| struggled to speak French again because the German often
| comes to my head first.
|
| It has been amusing to observe that one doesn't learn a
| third language as a strict subset of the second. For
| example, I know a lot more French than German, but I know
| the German "Tierarzt" (veterinarian) but not the French
| equivalent.
| godot wrote:
| I feel languages and cultures also gradually change over time
| and over a couple of decades it can be fairly different when
| you've been disconnected from it.
|
| I was born in Hong Kong and lived there for 13 years, moved to
| the US and I'm now 40+. I was back in HK last year and although
| didn't have problems understanding people in Cantonese for the
| most part, there were situations like calling a restaurant (to
| make a reservation) where I absolutely could not understand the
| waitstaff's Cantonese. After 30 years I still consider myself
| more fluent in Cantonese than English but language and culture
| had evolved in HK so much that the way younger people talk,
| especially on the phone where it's harder to hear, is almost
| completely foreign to me at this point.
| komadori wrote:
| That is true of all languages, but I think that Cantonese has
| a particularly high change velocity in terms of vocabulary
| and pronunciation compared to, say, English.
|
| I think this is because Cantonese speakers tend to read and
| write in Modern Standard Chinese (more like written Mandarin)
| and so are much less anchored by the permanence of text.
| Additionally, Chinese characters provide even less guidance
| on pronunciation than English spelling. In this landscape,
| Hong Kong's small media ecosystem is a fertile breeding
| ground for new language.
| acomjean wrote:
| I know a guy whose mother came from italy to the US when she
| was young. He went back some Family over there. He was told
| "you speak Italian well, but you sound like my grandmother"
| kgdiem wrote:
| Same thing happens in the US too --- at least in the north
| east. If you go to New York, northern New Jersey, Boston or
| even Chicago, people in their 40s and younger don't often
| sound like their parents; there's little to no accent.
|
| I work with a younger guy from the south and he definitely
| has an accent but that could be an anomaly.
| cyberax wrote:
| Perhaps it's language dependent? My Indian colleagues mostly
| speak English with each other, even if they have a common
| native language.
|
| On the other hand, Chinese people speak Mandarin with each
| other when there are no English speakers in the group. It was
| partly why I learned Mandarin...
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| English often is the common native language between Indians
| if you have people from different parts in India.
| Arnavion wrote:
| I'm the same. Spoke Hindi in India for the first 17 years of my
| life, and then the next 15+ I've lived in foreign countries and
| barely talked to anyone in Hindi, just English. I can still
| understand Hindi movie clips on Youtube, but reading Hindi
| articles on Wikipedia is hard when I try occasionally (I have
| to read out aloud and then listen), and forming sentences is
| extremely difficult because I just cannot remember most of the
| words. My brain keeps bringing up English words, and Japanese
| words because I spent a lot of time listening to Japanese,
| instead of Hindi words. It's the same feeling as "the word is
| on the tip of my tongue" where you keep remembering other words
| instead of the one you're looking for.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > The words or rather the sentences will not form.
|
| I had the same problem after having speaking in English for a
| long time and rarely any Hungarian. I had issues finding the
| right words.
| 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...
| billforsternz wrote:
| 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 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
| missedthecue wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| 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 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.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| 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.
| StrauXX wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It is called <<code switching>>, and it is also very common
| amongst Hongkongers and Singaporeans.
| rednafi wrote:
| Gen Z Spanish speakers do this all the time.
| somenameforme wrote:
| There was an interview with Gukesh Dommaraju after he won the
| chess world championship, and the interviewer from India
| asked him to respond in his native tongue which, so far as I
| understand it is Tamil. It was very odd listening to it when
| I could understand about 30% of the words!
| myflash13 wrote:
| Germans do that all the time. See Berlinglish. So do
| Ukrainians, although less often.
| 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
| graeme wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >"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 wrote:
| 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://www.quora.com/Every-service-at-Google-is-either-depr...
| klipt wrote:
| "Don't half ass two things instead of whole assing one
| thing."
| o11c wrote:
| I also know a tailor who is neither fluent in English nor his
| original language.
|
| But in my case I know enough over time and from the family to
| state: this was some sort of life-long speech defect, not a
| matter of learning.
| graeme wrote:
| You know that's a fair objection. My sample is small and I
| didn't know the tailor when younger. In the other cases I
| couldn't know how skilled they were in their native language
| when they spoke it.
| niemandhier wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is a rare counterexample to Betteridge's law of headlines
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Stuff like that indeed requires more thinking than it used
| to.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Are you speaking English primarily with Commonwealth speakers?
| Because while it isn't the same, a Dutch accent is surprisingly
| close to a lot of American accents. I have never encountered
| difficulty understanding native Dutch speakers who have good
| English (which is most of you). Yes, it's obviously _not_ an
| American accent, but compared to Scots? Way easier to
| understand.
|
| If it weren't for the fact that I am a huge, huge fan of
| _Trainspotting_ I would have been utterly lost in Edinburgh,
| let alone Glasgow. My wife could barely understand anything
| said by about 80% of the Scots and I would have to repeat
| sentences for her. Especially in noisy situations like crowded
| restaurants.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| > Are you speaking English primarily with Commonwealth
| speakers?
|
| A mix of mostly expats from all over the world. And I have
| some Irish friends and colleagues. And lots of Germans. But
| it helps that I get exposed to a lot of English/US media,
| youtube, etc.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Right, but if the listeners are not American or Canadian
| then they may find your accent challenging. Americans and
| Canadians spell things differently but we largely speak the
| same language. And we would not find your accent a
| challenge.
|
| Culturally, I am closer in some ways to Australians, but
| linguistically I have more in common with English speakers
| from Quebec than Aussies.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| If you emigrate to a country where you speak a different
| language, you become very aware of the harsh truth
| ajakate wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Privit! :-)
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fortran77 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm curious what language the author thinks in.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| (UK) My local council say 'rubbish bins' on their website. And
| talk about rubbish collection. I say dustbin sometimes at home
| to distinguish the bin outside from the one in the kitchen.
| 'Wheelie bins' is also totally understood
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > British people call the main bag you put rubbish into in the
| kitchen?
|
| For me, once it's in use, it'd just be "the bin" but I guess
| the specific name for the bag itself would be "bin bag" or "bin
| liner".
|
| > And what is the equivalent of a garbage truck? A rubbish
| lorry?
|
| I've seen both but people would also just refer to "the bin
| men" (as in "the bin men come on Thursday")
| dfawcus wrote:
| Bin wagon.
| DicIfTEx wrote:
| Being British English, I'm sure are are bitterly fought-over
| regional variations, but I would say 'bin bag' and 'bin lorry'.
| And 'roll' for a round breaded morsel.
| ghfhghg wrote:
| 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.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| jll29 wrote:
| 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?
| ema wrote:
| Speaking is use it or lose it[1] but understanding stays. If
| you spend on average twenty minutes a day listening to content
| that is at a level where you understand most of it for twenty
| years at the end of it you will have no trouble understanding
| that language in most contexts. You can even have year long
| gaps as long as the average works out. Learning to understand a
| language isn't hard (if there's sufficient learner content) it
| just takes a lot of time. Of course if you have enough free
| time you can do 4 hours a day and get there in less than two
| years. Once you are at that level you are in an excellent
| position to learn to speak the language even if you have to
| repeat that part of the process if you leave long gaps.
|
| If you want to give Spanish another go I can recommend
| dreamingspanish as they have just a ton of excellent learner
| content on various levels.
|
| [1] to the point that I sometimes have trouble expressing
| certain concepts in my native German even though I live in
| Germany because so much of my life happens in other languages.
| ordu wrote:
| 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.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Out of interest, what is your mother tongue?
| seafoamteal wrote:
| 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.
| t_mann wrote:
| > I've often considered trying to document it in some way, but
| I've no idea where to even start such an effort.
|
| LLMs could represent an interesting opportunity not just for
| linguistic preservation, but also to make smaller languages
| more relevant to their communities again. This article [0],
| despite its headline claiming the opposite, contains some
| examples of researchers training LLMs to that end, and how it's
| helped them reconnect with their mother tongues and relatives.
|
| [0]
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/04/gener...
| discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40143621
| carlmr wrote:
| You could try contacting your local university's linguistics
| dept, they might know somebody that knows someone that's
| interested in documenting the language.
| culi wrote:
| Glottolog is pretty damn thorough. I bet you can find it here
|
| https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/drav1251
| leosanchez wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I'm guessing Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
| shrikant wrote:
| I assume Palakkad Tamil, which is more Malayalam than Tamil.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| Something I'm thinking about with under-resourced languages is
| that you have to either be OK with an extensive replacement of
| vocabulary with English/other prestige language's vocabulary,
| or you need influential nationalists/ideologues devoting a lot
| of time coining new terms from native roots. We've seen
| vocabulary get supplanted with English (Norman/Latinate vocab),
| and these days we see it even in languages as high-resource as
| Japanese and Korean (English vocab), especially in business. I
| suppose this happened to your mother tongue as well in the
| past.
|
| > but I've no idea where to even start such an effort.
|
| I think there are two arms to this kind of cultural agenda. One
| is indeed to document it in the ways it is used by native
| speakers in the domains of life that its speakers use it in.
|
| The other is more accessible and creative, to reform it by
| drawing it out of homes and villages and making it a suitable
| vehicle for conversation in the global intellectual zeitgeist.
| That means giving standard names to every periodic table
| element, to Newtonian mechanics, to business concepts, and so
| on, but also to things like "mobile phone", "ballpoint pen",
| "gym", "soda". A good starting point can come from translating
| Wikipedia.
|
| To be frank even a language with as ideological a community of
| speakers as Hebrew borrows a lot from the English/Latinate
| vocabulary for modern terms. There may be other examples, but
| probably the language I know to be most successful in such a
| project is Standard Written Chinese. It got a headstart with
| the Japanese forming Sinitic calques as Japan modernized in the
| Meiji era, but then today the standard practice is to form
| calques for new terms rather than transliterate, which is quite
| rare.
| culi wrote:
| Have you tried finding the glottolog id of your language?
|
| https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/drav1251
| polydevil wrote:
| First language is not the same as native language. It is the
| same for majority - that is the source for controversy.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/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
|
| [3] Francis, 2023. When does second language learning lead to
| first language attrition?
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365372235_When_does...
| tuukkah wrote:
| 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.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| You should use English subs anyway if the original language
| is English.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I wish I could lose my southern accent.
| browningstreet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 "juggumi", 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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