Linguistics

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Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] DerisionConsulting 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Does anyone who speaks more than one language, or is social with people who know more than one language, actually think that your first language is just stuck in there?

I know the stereotype of people from the USA is that they only speak one language, but they should at least know someone who's first language isn't English, right? Or do most only socialize with people who are very similar to them?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm natively German but nowadays I consume almost everything in English and barely ever speak German, which causes me to slowly forget my native language. I can feel my vocabulary getting more and more limited and I often have to think hard for certain words that I know immediately in English. So yeah, if you don't use a language, native or otherwise, then you'll slowly unlearn it over time. Shouldn't be too surprising, it's like this with a lot of mentally related skills, like math for example. I couldn't do most of the shit I've learnt in school at some point because I never really had a use for it and consequently forgot all about it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

My mother tongue is Norwegian, and it’s the language we speak at home. However, I get up next to the Swedish border and watched a lot of Swedish TV and went shopping there, even studied there a year, so it’s also quasi native. As is English, with Scottish & American family. (My American uncle had lived in states for 60 years, his Norwegian is atrocious.). Since 2009, I have lived in five different countries, only two years in Norway, and spoken mostly English and French with some Danish, German, Arabic, Czech, Bosnian.

I used to be a writer, but now my Norwegian is a mess and I haven’t got one language I can call my own.

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