My Forgotten Language: the brain can lose and reclaim an abandoned mother tongue

I still regularly meet expats living in a foreign country who believe that it's better for their kid not to learn both their father tongue and mother tongue together with the language from the country they live in so that they don't get confused. It's sad because it's a richness they could give their kids but don't because of fear or bad advice.

&gt; That’s why if someone who knows a language never speaks it again after age 7, there’s a good chance they’ll forget most of it. But if you yank them away around age 12 or older and reintroduce them to it 30 years later, there’s a good chance they won’t miss a beat, Hernandez says.<p>This squares with my experience. I learned Kannada from age 4 to 7, living in Bangalore. My sister, 4 years older than me, also learned it, and can still read and understand the language. I, on the other hand, had forgotten Kannada within 8 months of leaving Bangalore for Mumbai, where it&#x27;s not commonly spoken.

An older friend had a stroke, in recovery she switched to having better communication ability in her nearly abandoned native Spanish, and had greater difficulties communicating in her everyday dominate language for like 70 years- English - of her 75 years.

Back in the 90s I took a linguistics class and wanted my semester paper to be a review of the literature on this topic. I started my research and found nothing. I figured it was my research skills falling short and I didn&#x27;t know the right terminology and places to look. So I asked my professor. He suggested talking to other faculty. I did. They gave me some terminology suggestions buuuut.... also told me that they didn&#x27;t think there was much out there on the topic. In fact, one of them told me I almost certainly wouldn&#x27;t find anything. And he was right (then, having burned half the semester chasing down a dead end and facing the choice between doing original research in two months vs changing topic, I picked human usage of computer language, which got me a C+ because the prof was adamant computer languages aren&#x27;t human languages).<p>Anyway, I was astounded that this aspect of acquisition wasn&#x27;t well-studied, and I&#x27;m glad to see it has been since.<p>Edit: I never meant to contend that computer languages are human languages in the sense that the former can function in every way the later can -- so I wasn&#x27;t suggesting that anyone should say &quot;C is a language just as Spanish is a language.&quot; But I <i>did</i> argue that programming languages come by their name honestly, are meant to communicate between humans, and most importantly find their way into language colloquially, and as such deserve attention from linguists. My prof seemed to have engaged with the paper as if I were making the &quot;C is like Spanish!&quot; argument, whether that&#x27;s because (a) I wasn&#x27;t clear enough in my writing (b) he wasn&#x27;t paying close attention or (c) there&#x27;s something else that eluded me is left as an exercise for... well, me, and apparently hacker news participants who want to take it up as a matter of discussion. :)

Native Tamil &#x27;speaker&#x27; here.<p>My parents put me in English medium school with Hindi as second language (Several years of Sanskrit as well) to survive outside south India (they suffered outside South India, for not knowing Hindi; they trained themselves in it and gave easier way to me learn other languages).<p>But since I didn&#x27;t have formal education in Tamil, a highly sophisticated language evolved over (2000-3000 years); I can&#x27;t write or read genuine version of it (can do some guess work based on familiar characters from common media). But I can speak in Tamil fluently since my family speaks in Tamil, also at several times my friends who are into Tamil literature have been amazed by my choice of vocabulary when speaking in Tamil.<p>I think,<p>1. I compensate for my lack of knowledge in reading&#x2F;writing Tamil by listening keenly to the language.<p>2. I can say from first hand experience that, the OP is also benefitted by living in an environment where he gets to listen to Tamil quite regularly; enough to give him understanding of the language.

Fantastic - this has been on my mind recently.<p>Moved back from China to the UK with our 3 &amp; 5 year olds whose mother language was Chinese. I’d assumed there would be some kind of struggle getting them adjusted to English - exactly the opposite.<p>Now both kids have 95% lost their Chinese, and I’m having to ‘forcibly’ reintroduce it. Kind of amazed me.

The concept of needing more energy when speaking a 2dn language really resonates with my experience:<p>While learning English as a 2nd language, we noticed that when in a group of nonnative speaker, the who does the talking had a harder time understanding the native speakers than the others from the group. This never failed, whoever spoke had more problem to understand than he listeners.<p>Maybe an explanation is that the extra cognitive energy uses to speak prevented as good comprehension as when fully spending the energy&#x2F;focus on listening.

When I get drunk enough I&#x27;ll get a super thick accent and my words will switch over to ${OTHER_LANG}.

Arturo Hernandez teaches this coursera class.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coursera.org&#x2F;learn&#x2F;bilingual" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coursera.org&#x2F;learn&#x2F;bilingual</a>

One of the virtues of being fluent in two or more languages: many times in my life I&#x27;ve seen some great opportunities for interpreters.