Can I forget my native language in emigration

Even as an adult, you can actually lose the ability to fully communicate in your own language. But explaining how and why this happens is not so simple. Sophie Hardak, a Briton of German origin, especially for Air force told how people lose their language skills and why some people can speak their native language after decades in immigration, while others forget it.

Фото: Depositphotos

Sitting in the kitchen of her London flat, Sophie tries to understand what her brother, who lives in Germany, wanted to say - he sent a text message with the word fremdschämen. Sophie, who left her native country 20 years ago, does not want to ask her brother again; the woman is interested in remembering or guessing what this word means. But she feels discomfort because of her misunderstanding, because it is her native language.

Most long-term expats are familiar with this feeling: the longer you live in another country, the poorer your native language becomes. But from a scientific point of view, everything is not so linear. It turns out that the tendency to forget one’s native speech does not always depend on the time spent in another language environment. Monica Schmid, a linguist at the University of Essex who studies language learning in bilinguals, says: “The moment you start learning a new language, the two language systems begin to compete with each other.”

Speech skills, on average, remain flexible until 12, but even a 9 nine-year-old can completely forget his native language if he is picked up from the country where he is spoken. With adults, everything is different. An adult in most cases never completely forgets his native language, with the exception of traumatic situations.

Schmid interviewed elderly German Jews who fled to Britain and the United States during World War II. It turned out that those of them who left in the first days of hostilities, many years later, better retained their native German language. But those who fled, having already experienced violence and persecution (in particular, the terrible pogrom of Jews in 1938, infamously known as Kristallnacht), seemed to erase the German language from their consciousness and hardly spoke it afterwards. German, along with the fact that it was the language of a loving family and home, became the language of terrible memories - and the psyche suppressed it.

Of course, this example is a rare exception. Typically, adults still remember their native language throughout their lives, regardless of where they live and how often they communicate in it. As Schmid explains, bilinguals have to form a kind of switch between languages, each time choosing a word from two languages ​​- native and acquired.

Using his own example, Schmid chooses from two words, “desk” and “Schreibtisch,” to describe a table. The choice occurs the moment a woman born in Germany and living in the UK sees this very table.

It all depends on the context, and in German she will choose a German word, in English she will choose an English word. But if this mechanism does not work very smoothly, confusion can arise. And this is a very common occurrence, especially if you are talking with a person whose situation with languages ​​is the same as yours.

Laura Dominguez, a linguist at the University of Southampton, studied Spaniards living in the UK and Cubans living in the US. The Spaniards spoke predominantly English and lived in different parts of the English-speaking country. The Cubans lived in the same city - Miami, where there was a developed Spanish-speaking community, and constantly spoke their native language. All Spaniards from Britain regularly told the expert that they forgot their native words. Whereas the Cubans from Miami did not have such a problem. But there is also an interesting nuance: the British Spaniards, who hardly spoke their native language, preserved their grammar quite well, while the Cubans completely lost it. And the reason was not English, but other variations and dialects of Spanish that they learned in Miami. After returning from the United States, Dominguez herself began speaking with a Mexican accent.

The expert emphasizes that forgetting one’s native language is not a betrayal of one’s roots, but a natural process, a new reality of an emigrant’s life. But as soon as he goes to his homeland, both the specific accent and forgetfulness disappear - the language is quite easy to restore.

Sophie learned what the mysterious word "fremdschämen" means - "to watch someone do something awkward and feel ashamed for them." Most likely, the woman writes, this word has spread in the German language in recent years. And after 20 years abroad, she shouldn’t be surprised. However, the author admits that she feels sad that her brother uses a word that she no longer understands.

“There is a certain sense of loss in this. Most likely, there is a word for this feeling in German, but it will take me a while to remember it,” says Sophie.

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