Experts say you may find it temporarily harder to remember some aspects of your native language if you move abroad, but you're unlikely to forget it entirely if you're past a certain age. (Image credit: Jose Luis Pelaez Inc via Getty Images)
A native language, or “the language you grew up speaking,” is the first language a person learns and is usually an important part of their identity, allowing them to communicate with loved ones and embrace their culture and heritage.
But is it possible to forget your native language – for example, if you move to another area or country and start speaking a different dialect or language?
Linguists refer to this phenomenon as “native language attrition,” or the process by which, over time, you become less competent in your native language—perhaps because you don’t use it as often.
Experts say that under certain conditions it is possible to forget one's native language, especially if young children move to another country or region where a different language is spoken.
A prime example is young children adopted by families in other countries. For example, a 2003 study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex found that children born in Korea but adopted by French families between the ages of 3 and 8 showed no better comprehension of Korean at age 30 than native French speakers who had never been exposed to the language.
But the older you are when you move, the more likely you are to retain your native language because you will have a much stronger foundation in it, Laura Dominguez, a professor of linguistics at the University of Southampton in the U.K., told Live Science. So it’s unlikely that a teenager or adult will forget entire chunks of language, like past tense forms, she added.
Indeed, research shows that people are less likely to lose their native language after puberty (ages 8 to 13 for girls and ages 9 to 14 for boys). This is likely because after this age, our brains mature and become less malleable and susceptible to change.
However, the part of your native language most susceptible to loss, even over short periods of time, is vocabulary, Dominguez noted.
For example, say you're an English-speaking college student who spent a semester abroad in Spain. You might notice that when you return home, it takes you a little longer to remember how to pronounce certain expressions or words in your native language, Dominguez said.
But that doesn’t mean you’ve completely forgotten those native words. Rather, your brain just needs a little more time to remember them, she noted. It’s as if your brain had to look through index cards from two different dictionaries. But once you’re fully immersed in your native language — in this case, back home — you’ll learn to do it faster, Dominguez added.
Grammar is a part of language that is a little more resistant to forgetting than vocabulary, she added.
For example, in a 2023 study published in The Language Learning Journal, Dominguez and her colleagues found that Spanish speakers for whom English was a second language did not change the way they used the present tense in Spanish, which differs from English, after more than 15 years of living in the UK.
In Spanish, the present tense can have two meanings: to indicate a regular action, such as “I often run in the morning,” and to depict an action that occurs while speaking, such as “I sing in the shower,” Dominguez explained. In contrast, in English, for the latter action, you would say “I sing in the shower.”
Research also suggests that a similar principle applies to forgetting a second language you've lost touch with, depending on how much you initially learned and how long you studied it. In fact, you may be surprised at how much you remember when you return to it, Antonella Sorace, a professor of developmental linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in the U.K., told Live Science.
“We may consciously feel that everything is forgotten, but our brain
Sourse: www.livescience.com
