Whenever someone asks me what my first language is, I'm always conflicted for a two main reasons:

1. It's a relatively small dialect that's sort of a mix between the major languages of two South Indian states, owing to medieval migration. It's never on any forms and I would never expect it to be, but it also does not have a distinct name. And even more confusingly, despite it being named the same as one of the aforementioned major languages, I can't speak that one at all, and instead can speak the other.

2. After living abroad as a child and going to schools where English was the primary medium of instruction my entire life (even after moving back to India), I am by far the most fluent in English of the 4 languages I can speak (not all of them fluently). I think in English.

I often find myself sad about the attrition of my mother tongue, especially because I'm noticing it happen more and more not just to me but to my entire generation. I've often considered trying to document it in some way, but I've no idea where to even start such an effort.

No discussion of language loss is complete without mentioning the hundreds of indigenous languages that were eradicated by force:

> "Funded by the federal government and contracted to religious missionaries, the purpose of a residential school was to reprogram Native children—by force if necessary—eliminating their tribal beliefs, modes of dress, music, language, and thought. If they resisted, they were brutally abused. Known as residential schools because students were required to reside on campus, the institutions were notorious for their cruelty. When students spoke in their Native languages, they were punished by having their tongues punctured with sewing needles. At the St. Anne’s residential school, run by the Oblate order in Fort Albany, Ontario, a makeshift electric chair was built to punish students with electric shocks."

Excerpt From "We Had a Little Real Estate Problem"

Kliph Nesteroff

I lived in a Hindi speaking area for my first 23 years. Then I lived in a cosmopolitan area for 5 years. And then I lived in US for 14 years predominantly speaking english.

At that point, I moved back to India. And I had to converse with a telephone company call center, even though I selected English as my language in the phone tree, they repeatedly put me to Hindi speaking ones - I just could not converse with them. I tried. I could absolutely understand them, but I could just not speak hindi. The words or rather the sentences will not form.

Not any more. I think now I am truly bi/trilingual, but there was that day / week / month / year, when I had lost the ability to speak in Hindi. Not sure why, and it was not a one time event.

[ The only additional information that may be relevant : In between these years, I learned a semester of Russian. I learnt french. I got familiar with a multitude of south Indian languages - Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam hearing friends speak them on a regular basis. And I was also conversant with Punjabi, common in our region in north india. But I never spoke any of these in day to day life for 14 years. And all these languages blurred into each other when I really had to use something other than English. ]

[ Also, I had a reason to switch to English pretty much exclusively. My son has learning disability and would find it hard in school as he will speak in Hindi and teachers would not understand. This is a long time back. So I decided not to confuse him and switched to english exclusively and lived like that for about a dozen years before this telephone company incident happened. I have posted about him before, this is not new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28665942 ]

This last weekend, I met a friend's wife. She immigrated here from Vietnam when she was ~4 years old and has since forgotten how to speak Vietnamese. I was shocked

Anecdote: my wife immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea in her mid-20s with only a smattering of English and multiple college degrees in her home country.

Since then she's lived more or less in a 98% English only bubble, received more education here and has worked a steady job in various Engineering roles. Over the intervening 25+ years she's learned an uncountable number of new things and concepts over her life, but only knows the U.S. English language words for them (mostly technical, engineering, software, or workplace administrative topics).

These topics also exist in Korea, or have arisen in Korea, and Koreans have given their own words and thoughts to these things. Sometimes they are loan words, sometimes not. Sometimes the loanwords are not obvious, not sourced from English, or filtered through an intermediary language like Japanese which put its own spin on it.

So these days when she's talking with her family or friends, when they discuss something that showed up after she left Korea, they sometimes have to have a brief discussion to teach each other what to call it. Her other Korean friends who have been in the U.S. about as long as she has have similar struggles.

She's also "lost" some of her higher-level native-sino-Korean words since she literally hasn't had to use any of it since college in Korea. Words like the name for an unusual philosophical movement during a historic period in Korean history for example.

So yes, in some sense she's "losing" her native language as both the language co-evolves in two different geographies, and as she doesn't use some parts of it she's forgotten some complex vocabulary. But basic grammar structures seem to persist and day-to-day working vocabulary seems unphased.

On the flip side, I don't speak Korean in any useful capacity, but know a few hundred words, and can read/write Hangul enough to get around. There are nouns and concepts I only know in Korean, or in the English translation of the native Korean terms, even if there are perfectly fine native English words for the thing -- mostly food words. Like "주꾸미", it's a kind of Octopus, but I have no idea what it's called in English. I also have adopted a kind of simplified English grammar when we're talking, or we're in Korea that seems to make me more understandable to the average Korean. I can see that in an alternate history, we had moved to Korea 25+ years ago I'd have most certainly lost an amount of fluency in English as my working language shifted to Korean.

I've lived in Germany for twenty years, and despite speaking what I would consider a merely adequate and certainly not native level of German, I've noticed that there's something a bit off about how I speak English. It's glaringly apparent when I'm back in Texas. Like the author, I make some strange word choices that are almost like direct translations from German, and it's had an effect on my grammar, too.

We're raising our kid to be bilingual (my husband is German), but I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it.

My parents were both born abroad. I was born in the US. As a child we spoke their native language at home. It was my first language. Then I went to preschool and learned English. We ended up moving to another country for a while and I learned that language too. Then we returned to the US and I can only speak English. It’s absolutely had an effect on my speaking and thinking habits. I’ve tried to learn those other two languages and I think it’s been harder than it is for most people. It’s blocked. I have ephemeral thoughts I can’t convey in language. It’s like having persistent deja vu.

I'm an English-only speaker who has at times tried to learn other languages (Spanish, Mandarin, Italian), but aside from some very basic proficiency (I hesitate to even call it "proficiency") in Spanish, I never got anywhere useful in anything else.

Seeing all the comments here makes me feel a bit bummed out. I still would really like to become proficient in another language one day, but it seems like it's really a "use it or lose it" proposition, and I don't think there's any language I could learn that I'd have the opportunity to use often enough to retain it, assuming I could immerse myself enough to learn it in the first place.

(Well, I suppose I could learn my wife's native language, but I'm a little skeptical that she would want to talk with me in it often enough to to keep it fresh in my mind.)

I’m a native speaker of Russian and Ukrainian.

I speak Russian at home (in the USA), English at work, and do not have exposure to Ukrainian except for occasionally looking at local news sites.

When I visited Ukraine after 8 years, I found that, for the first several days, my brain was formulating sentences in English first when I wanted to say something. I needed to force myself to switch to Ukrainian.

But, overall, I felt that Ukrainian was moving into the "foreign" part of my brain.

“Parents were discouraged from teaching their children languages other than English, even if they expressed themselves best in that other language.“ Yes my Spanish-speaking father and English-speaking mother decided, when I was growing up in USA in the 60s, not to speak Spanish to me, in case it fucked my learning and development up. Shame, it would have been cool.

Yes. My native tongue is Bengali—the 7th most spoken language in the world.

I learned English at school and later started working remotely in places where English was obviously the primary language. Then I moved to the US and spoke Bengali only at home.

The final nail in the coffin was when I moved again to Berlin, Germany, and started picking up a little German just to get by. Now I speak English at work, Bengali at home, and a tiny bit of German. These days, my Bengali is a horrible hodgepodge of English and Bengali words strung together by alien conjunctions and interjections.

Belgian born, raised in Flanders, speaking Flemish (=Dutch dialect).

Worked at a US company in Belgium where the lingua franca was English.

Moved to the USA 8 years ago.

My wife (from the Netherlands, but a native Flemish speaker) and I switched to speaking English at home.

Couple of weeks ago I'm walking in our neighborhood and I met this guy with a Flemish sounding name. He was Flemish. Started to speak Flemish to me. I could not reply. Could not find words, and didn't know how to move my tongue to produce those sounds.

Now, I can speak Flemish fine with my mom and sister. I struggle with words sometimes and my word order is incorrect.

But it only works when I call them. A spontaneous need to speak Flemish just... fails.

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.

My native tongue (or mother tongue; for me it's the same and I assume it's the same to keep it less complicated and not being too anal about linguistics) is something that most people never know exists and when I tell them they say "oh, but that's just Hindi" which is ironic because my native tongue predates Hindi, in any shape of form, by at least 1000 years. Another sad irony is, the Southern part of my country, blames me for trying to destroy their mother tongues with Hindi while completely unaware that it's Hindi that is destroying (actually destroyed) my mother tongue and Hindi itself is being destroyed by English.

When I had visited Korea it was really heartening in one aspect (as much difficult as it was to converse there) - it was witnessing how they have retained their language and are proud of it (or maybe not; it maybe just natural and how it is as a matter of fact) and actually use it in every way possible.

Can I loose my mother tongue? I don't think so. When I go back home (my village) the switch happens within a matter of hours or maybe a day or two (max) - vocabulary, accent, grammar, lilt - everything comes back. Very strange, at least to me. Can I lose my first language? I already lost it. Hindi was my first language and now it's English and I kind of feel sad about it that it happened in my own country where English is not a native (or mother) tongue of anyone at all.

In linguistic terminology L1 and L2 refer to your native tongue versus second language, respectively.

So the process of declining performance in your native language is known as "L1 attrition", but it's an extremely under-researched topic. In case any academics are reading this that migth be aware of key papers, I'd appreciate a link or bibliographic reference.

I was born in Norway, but between age 1-2 we lived in Sweden, then age 2-3 in Norway, and age 3-7 in Finland. I spoke fluent Finish, and started to struggle a bit with Norwegian. When I was 7 we moved back to Norway, and I had a thick accent. I'd still speak and read finish for a couple of years home.

We'd take trips to see relatives in Finland every summer, and I could speak fluent finish up until I was 16 - after that I needed more time. Then there was a 10 year gap where I did not go to Finland, due to studies and work, and spoke minimal.

Now I can barely get a simple sentence right. But I can still read a bit, and I can sort of listen to people have a conversation. But speaking is rough, really rough.

With that said, I've bet some Norwegians that have lived in, say US, for 50-60-70 years, and have a really thick accent - and use lots of English words when they can't come up with the Norwegian word. Two of my grand-uncles moved to respectively Canada and USA when they were 20, and lived there until they passed away in their 90s. Overhearing grandpa talk to them on the speaker phone was...interesting, to put it that way.

I lost words, not tongue so much (checks to see if tongue is still there)

But the biggest surprise turned out to be that language changes over time, and what words and way of speaking that I recall from 37 years ago have changed dramatically that even if I had 100% retention 10% of what I say will not be understood today, and 10% of what is currently being spoken I could not understand.

That has nothing to do with losing native tongue and everything to do with the fact that language, including pronounciation, is always evolving.

Yes, you can (I submit myself as the example), but I'm not sure that the article/author is talking about fluency. Anecdotally, I lost fluency in my native tongue during my teens, though I don't carry a non-native accent when I do speak it.

However, I speak/read/write in what is technically my second language (English) as if it were my first language.

Absolutely. Have met multiple people who could not speak their native language after a long absence from their homeland.

In a few cases I've met people who could speak no language well. Their native tongue was gone or degraded but they had not achieved strong proficiency in English or the local language.

One was a tailor in Montreal. Tried English and French, they were so so at both and said they were from Italy originally. I speak some Italian so tried that. They struggled more than in English or French. They looked around 80, likely had been many decades.

Something strange. I (Spanish speaker having lived in an English speaking country for 15 years) still struggle with maths. It’s really difficult to understand numbers that are relatively high (hundreds and thousands) unless I can see them written.

And making calculation is almost impossible. I need to switch to Spanish and then translate it back

https://archive.ph/EQjeG

I've lived outside the Netherlands on and off since 1998 and permanently since 2005. I still speak Dutch with family and some friends but not that fluently; my mother teases me when she catches me making silly mistakes.

I rarely write in Dutch and I've noticed that things that I shouldn't have to pause and think about actually have me in doubt when I do. Little spelling issues. Grammatical stuff. Etc. It's still there but I have to stop and think. It would all come back pretty quickly if I'd move back probably. That's what happened the last time I did that, 25 years ago. But even after just a few years away it took me a while to adjust.

And even though I live in Germany, it's not my first or second language. More like a distant third. I'm speaking English most of the time. With an accent that sometimes confuses native speakers but I wouldn't be able to pass for a native speaker mostly. I sound more obviously Dutch when I get tired. My grammar gets worse, etc. Accents are hard to lose.

I understand German well enough but I'm barely able to form a coherent sentence. I have no hope of getting it even close to the level of my English. And I have no use for a language that makes me sound like a verbally challenged migrant in business situations. The non trivial amount of effort to even get close to my English is not time I have left in this life. So, I'm not super motivated to spend a lot of time on that. I stopped apologizing for / feeling guilty about that many years ago.

Anyway, we're heading for universal translators now powered by LLMs. The main challenge is speed; not quality of the translations at this point. Less need than ever to learn a new language. Fun times might be ahead for people that are a bit adventurous. No more need to ask "do you speak English?".

Even English/English gets corrupted.

I'm British, in the US for 15 years. I've forgotten the British terms for some items.

I have no idea any longer what British people call the main bag you put rubbish into in the kitchen? In America it would be a trash bag or garbage bag (I can't tell when each of those is most applicable). Is it just a black bag in England?

And what is the equivalent of a garbage truck? A rubbish lorry?

These things have been completely lost to me.

I remember reading about a German woman who after the end of WWII married one of the American soldiers and moved to the US with him. She then never needed to use German again until she was quite old. She barely spoke any German by that time. I think she was interviewed by a German journalist - that's why I ended up reading about it.

I would say yes. ESL for 44 years. But I do keep up my native language. It doesn't take much. Just think in that language once in a while, read or watch media in that language occasionally. Even if it's just 1% of the media you consume, it will keep it fresh. But if you're completely isolated from it for decades, it will fade.

My grandma moved to the US from Germany when she was young. When she was in her late 70's or early 80's she told me she wasn't completely fluent in German anymore. It definitely atrophied to some degree.

An excellent book on this: https://www.zonebooks.org/books/43-echolalias-on-the-forgett...

I grew up in Stockholm / grew up speaking Swedish. Haven't spoken Swedish unless I'm at IKEA (for some reason Swedes flock there?!), which doesn't happen very often.

I can still read/understand but it's hard to remember words

Languages need a lot of upkeep if you want to keep speaking them fluently. On the other hand, just like muscle, once you've had it it's a lot easier to get back than having to put it on for the first time.

Forming mental connections between objects and their respective words is the forgettable part. I will understand and read and write my native language, but recalling anything beyond household vocabulary for speech is hard. I found it is rather trainable, especially if you force yourself into a podcast/streaming format of monologues

And don't ask me to translate anything, all that comes daily in a language, stays in that language. For example, the tech stuff is exclusively English, household predominantly Russian, conversational is mostly German. Therefore translation is yet another skill that requires you to connect meanings and connotations of words and phrases between two languages. This is probably the issue people have, when they learn a language in writing by a dictionary.

Anecdata… my first language was German, which I can no longer speak (and never learned to read).

I might be an outlier here because I have not lost any of the languages I grew up speaking (Marathi and Hindi). In fact I can also switch between various accents in them. Even after learning few more languages later in life, I can still speak/read/write fluently in these.

I think it's pretty common actually among some immigrant groups (2nd gen Indians in the US at least, of which I am one).

I was born in the US, but my first language was Marathi, and it was really the only language I was fluent in until I was around 4. After learning English in school, I started to always answer my parents in English. We didn't really live near a Marathi community, so it came to be that I could understand Marathi fluently (albeit with very limited vocabulary) around family but couldn't form a sentence to save my life.

Same story for all my US/Canadian cousins, and most other 2nd gen desis I've met.

French was the first language I spoke well and I haven't spoken it for 25 years. I'm appalled at myself when I struggle to speak with my French family.

I tell myself that if I apply myself it will come back but I'm starting to have doubts it will be that easy.

I wish I could lose my southern accent.

Coincidentally, I was watching an interview today with someone from my country. This person lived for decades in a country where English is spoken, and several times when they pronounced a word from here, it came with an English accent.

I‘ll join the ranks of Germans loosing their mother tongue, I wonder why we are I susceptible to it. Even though living in Germany I am in an English speaking academic bubble, spending 10h a day reading, writing and discussing in English.

Interestingly I’ll be the 3rd generation in my Familie to loos his mother tongue.

My grandfather spoke east Prussian which was lost to low German. My mother spoke low German which was lost to high German. I grew up in high German and probably at some point will be mostly English speaking .

One thing I always found fascinating are swedes moving to the US and begin speaking Swedish with an American accent after 10+ years. Not as a thing. They really sound like a US immigrant, with all the same un-idiomatic errors that many do, even after many years in Sweden.

I mean, Sweden is not their home any more, and Swedish is not their main language, but as someone who has lived abroad I can't understand how it happens.

I visited my mom's uncle when I backpacked in Australia, he moved there from the Netherlands at a young age. He could still speak a few words, but definitely wouldn't be able to hold a full conversation in Dutch.

I'm Natively Dutch myself but live in Denmark, and sometimes also struggle to find the correct Dutch words when talking to my friends. Not that my Danish great, my partner isn't Danish and since I work at an international company, the default language is English.

Yes you can. I know a few people who did. They came over to the US as teenagers and their parents refused to speak their language. So as the aged, they forgot more and more.

If you emigrate to a country where you speak a different language, you become very aware of the harsh truth

I’m curious what language the author thinks in.

my favourite anecdote about languages was when I went to see Salman Rushdie talk. His accent was perfectly north American while he spoke about contemporary things, but when he spoke about his childhood in India, he started speaking with a slight Indian accent.

I think the memories are encoded in terms of the thoughts of the time, so when they are revisited, they reactivate the same speech patterns.

I lost fluency in mine, but it was a language spoken at home with my parents (their native language) while I spoke another language with everyone else outside of home.

This is a rare counterexample to Betteridge's law of headlines

Sebastian Stan moved to the US when he was 12, I think. His Romanian is passable, but not amazing (besides the obvious access, his grammar is probably at middle school level).

So yeah, you can lose your native tongue if you're no longer massively exposed to if after 20-25, I think. And even in that case, you'll probably fall behind a lot after a few decades of 0 exposure and massive exposure of another language.

From personal anecdata, I can assure you it's entirely possible to 'lose' a language ability. Native tongue? Not so sure, but a closely-related one, definitely!

I'm a native Dutch speaker and used to be relatively fluent in German (which is not a given: despite being close neighbors, the languages are very different). Then, I lived in Cape Town for a while, and had to learn some Afrikaans (also closely related to Dutch, but yet widely dissimilar).

This somehow 'erased' my ability to speak German! Only after moving back to Europe and after many years, I was able to do basic stuff like ordering in restaurants in German again.

TL;DR: the human brain is, like, weird, man...

She spoke French and English from childhood, her family spoke those languages. I cannot accept English is her native language. English language as a whole is not fully single language. It has influence of many languages. Only a portion of the language can be considered native that has substantial contribution from England etc. Other parts are not native or something anyone needs to feel their own. Most languages are not purely from a region or a race except some tribal languages. I have no particular liking for the language I spoke as a child. If you go deep some influences on it are forced to suit a particular identity. Maybe not European languages. Test is whether our ancestors spoke what we consider our native language 500 years ago.

Maybe I will shift to a language I have never spoken in life.