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The text is interesting, and it confirms a suspicion that I had that L1 is not written in stone, or that your languages are not like a swamp ogre, full of layers. I wish that I could contribute more to this topic but language acquisition and attrition is rather far from my “turf”.
Duh.
I lived in Germany for two years, and when I returned I visited the mother of one of my high-school girlfriends who’d been living in the States since she’d moved there from Germany when she was 20. So, she was around 40 at the time. Anyway, me, fresh from DE and pretty fluent in German tried to have a conversation with her in German and, after a couple of minutes she switched to English and said, “I’m sorry. I’ve just forgotten too much German to have a conversation in it.” She seemed sad about that.
But oddly, the reverse had been happening to me off and on since I’d gotten back. I’d been living with a German girl over there who didn’t know much English, and I hadn’t spoken English much in the past 18 months. For about a year after I returned I’d occasionally be unable to remember the English word for common things, like “trash can,” and have to ask whoever I was talking to to remind me what it was.
Doesn’t take much, honestly.
As someone who lost their tongue in a freak hotdog eating accident, I can confirm this is true.
I had to get a new robot tongue and it’s not as effective. But with practice, you make out the sounds you need.
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?
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.
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.
