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Losing your First Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4056 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes  Studies: Portuguese | Message 9 of 18 30 July 2013 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||
I spoke only Chinese until age 5 and now remember almost nothing of it. I can say and understand basic greetings and numbers, that is it! So young kids that stop learning/speaking their mother tongue can definitely lose it completely. Now, if somebody speaks their mother tongue until age 20, I would imagine that it would be EXTREMELY unlikely that they wouldn't retain a very high level with even sporadic use the rest of their life. One of my siblings spoke Chinese until age 9 so the sibling is a receptive bilingual but doesn't speak much. The sibling understands Chinese at the level of a native, however. In summary, the age at which the person stops speaking the mother language a lot is a big factor in how well they will speak it as an adult. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4497 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 10 of 18 30 July 2013 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Going along with the study cited in Ari's post - it seems very unlikely for adults to
lose their native language, even with only sporadic use. For example, my father was born and raised in the Netherlands and came to the United States when he was 26 or 27. (To marry my mother - awww.) He has made a handful of short trips back to the Netherlands since then and occasionally speaks with his parents by phone. Other than that, he hasn't used Dutch at all for over 20 years. No TV, no books, no movies, nothing. Even so, when I started self-teaching Dutch, my father was able to converse with me fluently. His command of the language was excellent and idiomatic. I often struggle to find the right separable verb for a situation in Dutch; my father never does. The only thing is that he sometimes struggles to remember nouns, even simple ones like kaasschaaf. But that is just a minor thing. Even my mother has not entirely forgotten Mandarin, despite not having lived in Taiwan since she was seven. She still has high listening comprehension and can speak some from years of speaking "Chinglish" at home with her parents. She just prefers not to. Edited by Hekje on 30 July 2013 at 8:20pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Dark_Sunshine Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5559 days ago 340 posts - 357 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 11 of 18 31 July 2013 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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My opinion on this is purely based on my personal experience, but whilst I agree it's
probably near impossible for an adult to lose the ability to *understand* his or her mother tongue, I think a loss of competence in speaking it, to varying degrees would be quite easy. I say this because I've been living in France for a year, and although I still speak my native English every day, I find the fact that I think in 'franglais' means I often come out with all kinds of unnatural 'Frenglish' utterances, switching adjective/noun or adverb/verb word order to name just one example. I also hesitate a lot, searching for the right word or expression, much as non-native speaker would do. This has happened in only one year, and I am not at all 'immersed'in French, as I work full time as an English teacher (although admittedly, I mostly converse with francophone learners of English and my anglophone colleagues, who almost all suffer from the same problem). If this can happen to me in one year, then I imagine the deterioration of oral fluency could be much more significant over several years in someone who has little to no contact with fellow speakers of his or her mother tongue. In the small town where I grew up in the UK, there was a Polish man who had come to the UK shortly after WW2, married a British woman and never went home again. He always claimed to have forgotten how to speak Polish, although my father was always very skeptical about this and accused him of lying! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4433 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 12 of 18 01 August 2013 at 10:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Like others have said, age is a crucial factor. What Dark Sunshine says is very interesting, as from my own experience I can confirm that if your first language stops being your main language, you lose competence in it. I have been living outside Norway for almost 20 years, and my main working language has been English all this time. In addition I have lived most of that time in French-speaking contries, and at home I speak Spanish with my wife. Therefore, I use Norwegian to talk to my children, and whenever I speak with my family or friends on the phone, maybe once or twice a week. Of course, I have no problem communicating in Norwegian, but I do notice when I am in Norway that the language has evolved, and people use expressions and phrases that are not part of my "vocabulary". Besides, sometimes I have to stop and think hard to find the right words, because they come easier to me in English or even French.
Also, if I talk about my job, I find it hard to come up with the right terminology in Norwegian, as I work in English and French, so all my professional interaction is in these two languages. Still, if I were to write literature, I would certainly do so in Norwegian. After all, it is my native tongue and the first 30 years of my life I lived in Norway. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| wv girl Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5033 days ago 174 posts - 330 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 13 of 18 01 August 2013 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I knew a man from India who said he really didn't remember much of his native language. He'd been educated in
English and had lived 20-30 years in the US. He infrequently participated in Indian community events in our area and they were often conducted in English. He'd married a native English speaker, so his native language wasn't used at home. I believe his parents were deceased & he wasn't close to siblings, so had no reason to use it to communicate with family. He preferred American culture to Bollywood films or Indian music, so never had exposure through those means. I was always suspicious of his claim, but maybe it was true. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4238 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 14 of 18 03 August 2013 at 8:40am | IP Logged | ||
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A large part of learning a language is interest whether you think of it as a mother tongue or not. If the
language you speak is at or close to a native level, I'd think of it as a mother-tongue. If someone lives in the US for many years whether he /she is ethnically Chinese, Indian or African, I'd think of English as his /her mother-tongue. If you want to retain your mother-tongue, you'd have to do your part to keep up it such as reading newspapers, watching the news & listening to radio broadcasts. Nowadays it is so much easier to find radio broadcasts in practically any language on the Internet. All you have to do is take the time to tune in. A few months ago a friend was visiting from the US. We got used to talking in English that it became our official language of communication. But when it comes to correspondence, we prefer to use Chinese. I got a head start on the computer being able to use Chinese character input software almost 10 years before he started typing his letters instead of handwriting. The interesting thing is that he lived in the US all his life in small towns with 10,000 population or less and many with just 5% Chinese. He has relatives off in Taiwan but very seldom visits. Over the years he really pushed himself to learn many characters and went to take night classes in University to brush up his language skills. He was taught by his parents to speak Chinese but didn't pick up writing Chinese until much later. In this part of the world using Chinese is rather unnecessary but he puts in a a lot of time & effort. Chinese is 1 language you can maintain your spoken language more easily than writing because the language doesn't use an alphabet. I know a few people who studied Chinese until they were in the first 2 years of high school and then switched to an English curriculum. They still maintain a high fluency in the spoken language but have trouble with the written characters. Edited by shk00design on 03 August 2013 at 8:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4084 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 15 of 18 27 August 2013 at 3:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I was reading about Dutch grammar in dutchgrammar.com, and the author discussed
pronomial verbs in Dutch, but with also its connection and equivalents in English: http://174.120.106.92/~bieneke/en/?n=Pronouns.ad01 I was wondering if one can speak English like this, but I cannot remember learning these forms, or if I did, probably in little detail. It sounds nice in Dutch, but in English it also sounds very nice and efficient, albeit uncommon. For example, converting "I have the new pen that you had given me, and I write with it for work." into "I have the new pen that you had given me, and wherewith I write for work," I am not sure how other Germanic languages use this construction, but would it sound strange to talk as such in speech, or at least to start doing so? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4501 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 16 of 18 27 August 2013 at 9:43am | IP Logged | ||
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In English talking like that would also mean re-using "whither, thither" "wherefore",
etc. Sure you could, but you might as well pronounce all English like in Shakespearean times or before. In Dutch that's just how you talk. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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