Is it possible to forget a language

Home - Blog - Is it possible to forget your native language? Is it possible to forget your native language? Simona Pralovska What happens to our language after we go to live abroad? How not to forget your mother tongue? Here are the easiest ways to do it: Regular calls home — if you live abroad, conversation with your family or friends for even as little as half an hour weekly can prevent your mother tongue from becoming rusty.

Reading, writing, and listening — read books, magazines, or internet articles in your native language. You can write diaries, listen to the radio, watch TV programmes or movies in your native language, and ensure regular maintenance of your native language in doing so. You will not only find new friends, but also keep your mother tongue in shape.

Simona Pralovska. Do you like our blog? Share it! Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. In fact, the science of why, when and how we lose our own language is complex and often counter-intuitive. Socialising with other native speakers abroad can worsen your own native skills. And emotional factors like trauma can be the biggest factor of all. Schmid is a leading researcher of language attrition , a growing field of research that looks at what makes us lose our mother tongue.

In children, the phenomenon is somewhat easier to explain since their brains are generally more flexible and adaptable. Studies on international adoptees have found that even nine-year-olds can almost completely forget their first language when they are removed from their country of birth.

Older people are more likely to lose their native tongue if they had undergone traumatic events Credit: Getty Images. But in adults, the first language is unlikely to disappear entirely except in extreme circumstances. It was how much trauma they had experienced as victims of Nazi persecution. Those who left Germany in the early days of the regime, before the worst atrocities, tended to speak better German — despite having been abroad the longest.

Those who left later, after the pogrom known as Reichskristallnacht, tended to speak German with difficulty or not at all. Even though German was the language of childhood, home and family, it was also the language of painful memories. The most traumatised refugees had suppressed it. America is my country, and English is my language. Such dramatic loss is an exception. In most migrants, the native language more or less coexists with the new language.

How well that first language is maintained has a lot to do with innate talent: people who are generally good at languages tend to be better at preserving their mother tongue, regardless of how long they have been away. But now I can't. Nowadays, I'd never even list them as languages that I can get by in to be honest.

But I don't apologise for this or lose sleep over it. I knew it was going to happen. So what did I do differently with my successfully maintained 7 languages compared to these? Of course you can come up with lazy excuses why this is not possible, but the truth is that you can always find ways to use those languages. Find natives to meet in person via social networks , use certain sites to find people to talk to by Skype, be friendlier with tourists , join clubs and actively monitor your social circle and environment for opportunities to use the language.

All of these are ways you can speak your language immediately. To maintain other aspects reading, writing, listening etc. Listen to podcasts in the target language, read blogs or online news or an entire book in that language, keep in touch with your foreign friends by chatting to them on Facebook or writing them emails; but do this every day.

The language will deteriorate in your mind if you don't keep it active. As far as I can tell, there is only one major disadvantage to my rapid learning strategy: the quicker you learn it, the quicker you'll forget it. This may sound bad, but it's way better than the alternative of learning so slowly you have nothing to show for it, ever. If you dive in intensively into your language learning project, and reach high conversational level or fluency after a few months, then you have to be sure that you are consistently maintaining it until it is definitely a permanent part of you.

I found with the languages listed above that within just a few months, I could forget the vast majority of my ability to communicate in these languages; I forgot it as quickly as I learned it. Spanish is the language I've put the most time into for example, and I am confident that I could cut myself off from the language entirely for a year for example and get back into it no problem.