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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[–] [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.