Can you lose your native tongue? (2024)

Have you tried finding the glottolog id of your language?

https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/drav1251

You could try contacting your local university's linguistics dept, they might know somebody that knows someone that's interested in documenting the language.

First language is not the same as native language. It is the same for majority - that is the source for controversy.

> sort of a mix between the major languages of two South Indian states

As a fellow South Indian, i would like know more. Which states are they?

Something I'm thinking about with under-resourced languages is that you have to either be OK with an extensive replacement of vocabulary with English/other prestige language's vocabulary, or you need influential nationalists/ideologues devoting a lot of time coining new terms from native roots. We've seen vocabulary get supplanted with English (Norman/Latinate vocab), and these days we see it even in languages as high-resource as Japanese and Korean (English vocab), especially in business. I suppose this happened to your mother tongue as well in the past.

> but I've no idea where to even start such an effort.

I think there are two arms to this kind of cultural agenda. One is indeed to document it in the ways it is used by native speakers in the domains of life that its speakers use it in.

The other is more accessible and creative, to reform it by drawing it out of homes and villages and making it a suitable vehicle for conversation in the global intellectual zeitgeist. That means giving standard names to every periodic table element, to Newtonian mechanics, to business concepts, and so on, but also to things like "mobile phone", "ballpoint pen", "gym", "soda". A good starting point can come from translating Wikipedia.

To be frank even a language with as ideological a community of speakers as Hebrew borrows a lot from the English/Latinate vocabulary for modern terms. There may be other examples, but probably the language I know to be most successful in such a project is Standard Written Chinese. It got a headstart with the Japanese forming Sinitic calques as Japan modernized in the Meiji era, but then today the standard practice is to form calques for new terms rather than transliterate, which is quite rare.

> I've often considered trying to document it in some way, but I've no idea where to even start such an effort.

LLMs could represent an interesting opportunity not just for linguistic preservation, but also to make smaller languages more relevant to their communities again. This article [0], despite its headline claiming the opposite, contains some examples of researchers training LLMs to that end, and how it's helped them reconnect with their mother tongues and relatives.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/04/gener... discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40143621

I feel languages and cultures also gradually change over time and over a couple of decades it can be fairly different when you've been disconnected from it.

I was born in Hong Kong and lived there for 13 years, moved to the US and I'm now 40+. I was back in HK last year and although didn't have problems understanding people in Cantonese for the most part, there were situations like calling a restaurant (to make a reservation) where I absolutely could not understand the waitstaff's Cantonese. After 30 years I still consider myself more fluent in Cantonese than English but language and culture had evolved in HK so much that the way younger people talk, especially on the phone where it's harder to hear, is almost completely foreign to me at this point.

I grew up in Romania. Spoke German at home, it was my Muttersprache (German minority in Romania). Went to a German school, but learned Romanian in K-12 there, spoke it fluently. Left Romania when I was 18. I can still understand most when I listen (I can watch Romanian movies not dubbed). I can read it and understand most of what I read. But I cannot form sentences anymore, cannot speak it for the life of me. Pretty strange. I guess it needs effort to revive it in one's brain.

I'm the same. Spoke Hindi in India for the first 17 years of my life, and then the next 15+ I've lived in foreign countries and barely talked to anyone in Hindi, just English. I can still understand Hindi movie clips on Youtube, but reading Hindi articles on Wikipedia is hard when I try occasionally (I have to read out aloud and then listen), and forming sentences is extremely difficult because I just cannot remember most of the words. My brain keeps bringing up English words, and Japanese words because I spent a lot of time listening to Japanese, instead of Hindi words. It's the same feeling as "the word is on the tip of my tongue" where you keep remembering other words instead of the one you're looking for.

> The words or rather the sentences will not form.

I had the same problem after having speaking in English for a long time and rarely any Hungarian. I had issues finding the right words.

Wow. English+Hindi+French+Russian+Tamil+.... So cool. You should probably add some Arabic, some Chinese, some Xhosa, some Gaelic and some native American languages to this list to appear endlessly awesome :-)

Perhaps it's language dependent? My Indian colleagues mostly speak English with each other, even if they have a common native language.

On the other hand, Chinese people speak Mandarin with each other when there are no English speakers in the group. It was partly why I learned Mandarin...

I'm also a Texan in Germany, and my German's good enough that it often takes people a few minutes to notice I'm not a native speaker. (Left the US at 21, am now 44.) I definitely also have a lot of German artifacts in my spoken English at this point. At one point I was given the attempted compliment of, "Wow, your English is really good" – because I apparently almost sound like a native speaker. ;-)

My children are 6 and 9 and we've raised them tri-lingual. They mostly sound native in all three, but their Serbo-Croatian and English have some German artifacts as well. Also their vocabulary isn't quite at the age-appropriate level in English since I'm basically the only person they regularly use it with, and if I don't use a word with them, they probably don't know it. This may start to change now that my oldest has also begun reading books in English. (That went surprisingly quickly; once he started with English classes in the third grade, within 3-6 months, he no longer had a definite preference for books in German over English.)

The trap to be careful of is if your family language is German that the kids eventually stop answering in their parent's language. This seems to be easier when three distinct languages are in play, possibly. Since I speak English with their mom (Serbian), there's less pull towards the "outside" language (German). Oddly, the language the speak with each other has remained Serbo-Croatian. I'd always expected that to eventually change to German, but seems unlikely at their current ages. We mostly attribute this to them having sometimes spent several weeks alone with their grandparents in Serbia when they were young, and that being the only time they only spoke a single language for up to a month, and that having solidified it as their preferred language.

Lately I noticed that I cannot even speak my native German dialect as easily as when I was a teenager (I moved away from home to university when I was 20). I often hesitate because I am not sure whether some word I said was correct in my native dialect, or the local dialect where I live now, or the dialect of my wife (Swiss German). At home, we speak a wild mixture of 3 different dialects and standard German. Our 5-year-old mainly speaks standard German because that's what they speak at kindergarten (most of the teachers don't speak the dialect, and there is a significant number of French, Italian, Ukrainian, and Syrian kids for which learning the dialect would be even harder). At work, I speak a mixture of English and standard German.

After living in Germany for nearly 10 years, but working in Switzerland, my wife recently had an identity crisis because a Swiss colleague thought she was German, and had just learned Swiss German very well.

Some youths in Sweden are doing this in Swedish, being unable to properly communicate in their native language. Their English is usually not that great either though.

Some are foreigners, others are extreme nerds who have failed to interact with people and have lived on the internet.

It's really sad.

“Are you coming with?”

After a few years living in Germany (as a native English speaker), my English and that of my friends became peppered with these German-isms.

> I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it.

My experience is that it gets hard when they realise that they can get away with only German. Many kids choose to only use the "primary" language, even when spoken in the secondary one. They eventually regret that choice when they get to their twenties.

Not all kids do that though. I am not sure what influences this, but as a parent of trilingual children, my recommendation is to expose them to the culture as much as you can. Talk to family online, take them to English speaking places and countries, watch movies. In other words, make speaking English useful to them. If your family in the US have older kids, yours might end up looking up to them - mine have an older cousin who is one of their favourite members of the family and definitely gives motivation to communicate. Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German.

Sorry if this comes across as unsolicited advice. Nothing I said is revolutionary and you might already have thought it through. We got very lucky with ours, but this is stuff I would have benefitted from when our kids were young, so I'm passing it on.

I am also raising a bilingual 3–year-old in Spain. I speak to him only in English. But i have recently read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, which argues convincingly that his English will be limited in certain important ways unless he also has a native English-speaking peer group.

I grew up in a many-lingual house and really only know English, though I am trying to finally learn proper German.

But my word choices and pronunciations are definitely not 100% native. There are moments where I can feel the vtable pointing me to the wrong language for a word. Sometimes I get back to English, sometimes I pause, and sometimes a word from some other language pops out.

As an example I sometimes say “no thank you” in Swedish in situations where that is wildly wrong. I can’t speak Swedish, but I have those basic phrases in there.

Similar timeframe in Germany, not only did my English got worse, even though I have more years of speaking English (since the age of 10), I also occasionally miss some Portuguese words, my native tongue.

Thankfully hearing it regularly keeps me up to date, though there are those moments where right in the middle of a conversation I have to stop and reflect on how exactly something is named.

Speaking is use it or lose it[1] but understanding stays. If you spend on average twenty minutes a day listening to content that is at a level where you understand most of it for twenty years at the end of it you will have no trouble understanding that language in most contexts. You can even have year long gaps as long as the average works out. Learning to understand a language isn't hard (if there's sufficient learner content) it just takes a lot of time. Of course if you have enough free time you can do 4 hours a day and get there in less than two years. Once you are at that level you are in an excellent position to learn to speak the language even if you have to repeat that part of the process if you leave long gaps.

If you want to give Spanish another go I can recommend dreamingspanish as they have just a ton of excellent learner content on various levels.

[1] to the point that I sometimes have trouble expressing certain concepts in my native German even though I live in Germany because so much of my life happens in other languages.

You can go in deeply enough that you won't forget it even if you pick it up later in your life, but the trouble is you cannot know whether (or not yet) you have reached that level. If you were to pursue that as a personal project, spending a few months or one full year abroad to fully immerse and then following up back home with some routine of combined reading of books in the language and occasional meetup group to have some occasional practice/use is what I would recommend.

BTW, Spanish and Italian are similar enough that there could be confusion in the learner's brain (happened to me - after two years of Spanish in school, self study of Italian from six audio tapes failed because for each word, the Spanish version was promptly recalled instead of the newly acquired Italian one).

IMHO, it's worth it, and from what I read in the UK interest in foreign languages is declining (and it corresponds with personal experience, when I studied a bit of French and Russian, the French course had no Brits in it, and the Russian course just one, everyone else was a foreigner).

As a linguist I may be biased, of course, but I would encourage you to pursue at least one language other than English more deeply (instead of, say, dabbling in three superficially), because it opens up a new horizon being able to navigate a culture without translator and reading its literature in the original. There are certain words, phrases and sayings in each language that when you "get" them you feel like "I no other language could one say this better!", whether it's Danish, English, Spanish, German or Latin.

One of my Ph.D. advisers was British and the other one U.S.-American, and I won't forget

PS: Is there a link without paywall to the original article?

Yeah, it can be hard, if the second language is not English. It easy to find places to practice English and get some other benefits as well. (Like NH for example, where you can read news or talk with people)

I'm learning German, I finished the Duolingo course, and now I'm just reading in German. Books, news sites, and suchlike. It is not the best way, I know from my experience of English: if you don't speak in language, you cannot speak it; if you don't listen it you cannot hear it. My plan is to let it go, as it goes, collect a big vocabulary and the feel for the language, and then maybe take some courses, to polish theory and get an experience of writing, talking, or otherwise generating German sentences. I learned English in this way.

People from the subcontinent have this weird habit of adding English words randomly in their conversations. Sentences in Hindi/Bangla/Tamil etc and then straight up English words, and then switch back.

Haven’t seen anyone else do that.

> And forgive me for writing Flemish and not Dutch. It's different enough that it requires more active listening when you don't have a trained ear for it

Flemish here. The written forms are diverging a lot too, and I wish streaming platforms would take notice. It's so annoying when watching a good TV-show or movie and the subtitles are clearly Netherlands-Dutch.