How do people lose their native language?
Sgt
Bowe Bergdal spoke English for 23 years until he was captured by
Taliban fighters in Afghanistan five years ago. But since his release,
he has trouble speaking it, says his father. How can you lose your
native language, asks Taylor Kate Brown.
It's rare to totally lose command of a first language, she says. Instead people have "language attrition" - trouble recalling certain words, use of odd grammar structures or develop a foreign accent. A study of those who lived without their first language for a long period of time found they soon became indistinguishable from people speaking in their second language, to the ears of other native speakers.
Age is a factor. Once past puberty, Dr Schmid says, your first language is stable and the effects of attrition can reverse themselves if you are re-immersed. But children as old as 10 don't necessarily retain the language they were born into. In a study of French adoptees who left South Korea in childhood, when asked in their early 30s to identify Korean, they did no better than native French speakers with no exposure to Korean.
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The difficulties in recalling
your first language are greater the more immersed you are in a second
language, says Dr Aneta Pavlenko at Temple University in Philadelphia,
because cognitive resources are limited. Despite teaching Russian at
university in the US, she herself returned to her Russian-speaking
community in Kiev to realise she had forgotten how to start a
conversation at the post office.
It's well known that brain injuries can have an impact on
language loss, but emotional trauma can also affect it. Among German
Jews who fled the country during the Holocaust, Dr Schmid says the loss
of language was far more dramatic the greater their trauma.
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