Losing Your Native Language- BBC

3 June 2014 Last updated at 19:07 ET

Share this page

• Print

• Share
• Facebook
• Twitter

How do people lose their native language?

Magazine Monitor A collection of cultural artefacts

Continue reading the main story

More from the Monitor

• How to read a poem consisting only of punctuation
• What makes an epic paper plane flight?
• The Magazine in full

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.

Some people have gone decades without speaking or hearing their first language but they retain the ability to speak it easily, says Dr Monika Schmid, a linguistics researcher at the University of Essex in the UK. But others begin losing fluency within a few years of not speaking it.

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.

Continue reading the main story

More from the Magazine

• What language would Jesus have spoken?
• The cult of the hyperglot
• Bringing the Manx language back from the dead
• The Native American language that tricked the codebreakers
• Is English conquering France?

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.