I have a weird language history, so let me chime in. I was born in Brazil to Japanese parents. My first language as a young child was japanese. As I entered school, portuguese became the predominant language in my life and both my parents decided to focus on that, speaking portuguese at home. Once I grew up, I went to college in Canada and have lived in North America ever since.
I have lost all fluency in Japanese. Japanese culture had always been a part of my life as a child, but despite my family (cousins, etc) growing up on misoshiru and jpop and anime, we all spoke portuguese, so Japanese-the-language never felt like "home".
These days, I also occasionally forget portuguese vocabulary. I do still "speak" with family, but mostly by text via WhatsApp, and conversations are usually pretty casual and don't involve nearly as much eloquence as, say, a good book. The vast majority of my life now revolves around english-speaking culture: my job is full of english technical jargon that I've no idea how to translate, english is the language I share w/ my wife, and it's the language I use to consume information and entertainment. English is now my "home", so to speak.
I think the author has a similar experience: she learned english in primary school and lived a primarily english-oriented life, so english became "home". The phenomenon of wanting to reconnect with one's roots later in life doesn't strike me as particularly unusual either. In retrospect, I did unintentionally distance myself from my own parents during my 20s (partly because that's sorta the whole point of becoming an independent adult and discovering new things) and only really started to regain that level of touch after having kids.
My point is: loss of language can have a lot to do with prioritizing things one feels are impactful in their lives (though those things may not necessarily be important - parents are certainly important, but it's the sort of thing that one can easily take for granted). Having had such a weird life experience wrt "first language", I'm keenly aware that the first-ness or even the familial aspect don't necessarily correlate with the cultural surface area that a person interfaces with the most. In some rare cases, your second - or third - language is what feels like home.
Just a comment on your parents adopting Portuguese at home, because they thought it was important. I know this was (and still is) common among immigrants, and in some countries it was very strongly discouraged by schools etc to speak your native language.
However there's now significant research showing to not do that. Here in Sweden immigrant parents are actively encouraged to speak their mother tongue at home and not try to help their children by speaking Swedish, because it's counterproductive. Essentially knowing another language helps children more than listening to their parents speak in imperfect Swedish.
So if you are an immigrant, speak in your native language with your children, they will pick up the new language better by themselves and know another language.
This one thousand times. School and full immersion in another language will make your children learn it perfectly no matter what. Please speak with them and make them watch TV/videos in your family language. And if you happen to be a mixed couple, follow the One Parent One Language rule, to make things easier for the kids. Obvioualy these are rules of thumb and there might be special needs for different children.
I totally get the better-for-the-kids argument, but I think there's some nuance people gloss over.
My dad's Portuguese is fluent but still has quirks to this day. Obviously picking it up from school works. But my paternal grandma never learned Portuguese and her husband died young (car crash). She never developed a social circle after that, which meant her health deteriorated slowly over time (since she'd just stay home all the time) and she ended up dying isolated in a elderly home, even though she was surrounded by people.
On my mother's side, my grandparents immigrated to be farmers, so my mom had a lot of siblings. They developed a quirky pidgin where sentences - especially when more advanced vocabulary was involved - mixed Portuguese and Japanese. This speaks to limitations of learning a language exclusively in a familial setting: some topics just never come up, especially considering age-appropriate subject matter.
I think the educational and social-outside-home components are extremely important to learning a language - most of what I remember from Japanese comes from spaced repetition from nihongakkou (Japanese school) or self study.
>However there's now significant research showing to not do that. Here in Sweden immigrant parents are actively encouraged to speak their mother tongue at home and not try to help their children by speaking Swedish, because it's counterproductive.
Won't this cause the situation Estonia has with the Russian-speaking minority? Enough immigrants banded together to create Russian-speaking communities. Many of them never learned any Estonian as a result, because they didn't feel they needed to. Most people in stores spoke Russian, they put their kids into a Russian speaking school etc.
The end result is that there are many people in Estonia that have lived here almost their entire lives, but cannot speak Estonian at all. This makes their lives more difficult: from finding a job to getting a better education to dealing with bureaucracy.
Even if you send your kids to an Estonian speaking school it causes issues. They'll suffer academically - imagine doing school effectively in a foreign language. It would make a kid want to go to school even less. In that case you're effectively handicapping their future.
I'm not sure that some minor cognitive advantages are worth the risk of not assimilating.
The studies are about parents speaking one language but fully integrating their kids in the local language.
What you are talking about is development of communities in a language different than the local language with their own stores, schools etc... That's a different subject altogether.
Plus, the Russians in Estonia came there during Sowjet occupation. They saw Estonia as a colony of Russia and their kids went to Russian-speaking schools.
It’s hard to generalize about the immigrant experience. While there are indeed many cases where immigrant children benefit from continuing to speak their mother tongue at home, there are also families who want to integrate with their new home countries quickly and aren’t interested in maintaining their earlier language and culture. People who were members of an oppressed ethnic minority in a country that they had to flee as refugees, for example, might prefer to focus on settling into their new country rather than trying to maintain the language and culture of a country that they may never be able to return to.
The issue isn't one of preference, it is one of intellectual development. When you speak your native language to your children, it is easier for you to teach them how to think. And if they can think in your native language, they can transfer that skill to a new language.
By contrast if you speak a language that you struggle with, your lack of fluency gets in the way of supporting your children's cognitive development. And a child who has never learned to think in any language, has a cognitive deficit that is hard to fix.
The thing, though, is that "nativity" can get fuzzy depending on a variety of circumstances. I think a lot of new bilingual parents assume that all bilingual parents are like them: strong speakers of a native tongue who had kids shortly after a recent move to a new country. That's not always the case: there are bilingual parents that moved to the new country as children and may have varying degrees of mother tongue attrition, there are second/third generation parents and there are multilingual parents (e.g. immigrant parents whose parents speak a dialectic variation of the official mother tongue, or even completely different languages altogether)
For many parents, the primary goal for promoting bilingualism is purely practical: speaking w/ grandparents and other family. For the most part, the child will still need formal complementary studies later in life if they want to truly master the parents' mother tongue to a grown adult's level of proficiency, especially for languages with little or no overlap w/ english.
IMHO, the benefits of nurturing a mother tongue are largely coincidental: e.g. romance language learners get an advantage over pure english speakers from understanding latin-based radicals (especially for stuff like scientific nomenclature). But for many languages, maintenance comes with an opportunity cost aspect: my wife speaks Mandarin and actively maintains it, but that comes at a cost that her English vocabulary is not as well developed/polished as mine (as a romance language speaker who doesn't need to do virtually any upkeep wrt writing/reading skills and who enjoys vocabulary overlap between english and latin-originated words, etc)
Sometimes I feel like a broken record for saying this, but know the individual child and decide upon a course of action from there.
I have seen everything from the heartbreaking circumstances of the author, where the child is unable to communicate with their own parents, to children who steadfastly refuse to learn the language of their peers. Both extremes result in social and intellectual development being stifled. In both cases, there is a need to help the child navigate a middle road in order to aid their social and intellectual development. That is before you even consider the typically cited benefits of being multilingual since it is only considering being functional in their communities.
As someone who falls into that bucket, I like to think I don't have any (abnormal) cognitive deficits. I do regret not learning the language of my parents, but I have friends who are much less adapted to western culture than I am because their parents weren't so keen to assimilate.
But who knows really? Perhaps I'd be even smarter if I were trilingual?
For some years I trained with a man in his 60s who fled from Hungary in 68 to The Netherlands. He married a Dutch wife. He never learnt to speak proper Dutch, he still had limited vocabulary. In his professional life he had worked as a sailor, which means he would work with people from all over the world speaking a little English. And he also was no longer able to speak Hungarian anymore as he was no longer using that language. So he spoke many languages, but none fluently. I thought that was really depressing!
> parents are actively encouraged to speak their mother tongue at home and not try to help their children by speaking Swedish
I married into an Armenian family, and can attest that you don't have to teach your kids English if you live in America. I know several families who spoke Armenian exclusively at home and their kids still found themselves fluent in English by 5 years old. It's everywhere and they are sponges.
The only challenge is writing: English is awful to learn, compared to other languages because of how obtuse and irregular it is. (Chinese & Kanji aside I'm sure, due to memorization). It's hard for kids who learn say, Spanish in school then at home struggle to master also the English language. Still, I suppose English is hard for most people regardless!
I think that neglects how much children can help their parents learn the host country’s language. There are several variables involved, as the parents doing well economically will also help their children in a different way.
First, this somehow assumes that immigrants aren't doing well enough. And what - poor people should speak the local language at home just in case it improves their economic standing, even though it would lead to missing a lifelong benefit for the children. But if you are already doing well, don't?
If you don't keep poor people suffering like folks do in the US, being poor isn't as big of a detriment and the adults are perfectly able to improve on their own time. And it isn't like being an immigrant means you are poor.
Poor people in the US are remarkably well-off. According to [0], if you’re in the 20th percentile in the states ($25k income), you’d be in the 80th percentile of Germany. 20th percentile and lower is the OECD definition of working/lower class.
Personally I found the 80% figure hard to believe. According to something else I saw online, it was 20th percentile in the US = 50th percentile in Europe. Which still shows how dominant the US is!
I can't prove this but I suspect this comparison is reflecting the relative price of goods and services which is a hyper-competitive market in the USA.
Other differences between the USA 20th percentile group and the Euro 50th percentile group is that one of them has healthcare and a longer lifespan.
Europe has far greater inequality between countries than US between states. People talk about EU/Europe but they mean developed/rich Europe, they gloss over that poor parts are way worse than underdeveloped parts of US. For all that egalitarianism and social policies they sure like to use cheap labor from underdeveloped countries and box them out of their systems for years/exclude from residential markets with rent contract requirements.
Shit is looking up in backwards south-east Europe, too. Perhaps not all that much and all that fast, but still, the direction and speed seems better than the poorer bits of the US. So how much worse off than Mississippi is Albania really today?
That’s wonderful for Albania et al, more prosperity is always a good thing. My point is just that people should compare apples to apples, especially with US vs Europe, or US vs city states/tiny countries like New Zealand
I agree with this and yet i never speak to my child Russian and we don't speak Russian at home so prevent child from picking up Russian language, Russian speaking contacts or absorb Russian/Soviet culture on the internet, to get away from it fully as soon as possible, because i see it as evil.
Well, i'm a political emigrant. I left Russian because i believe it's a bad country. Obviously i don't want my child o grow up Russian (and it works, at the age of 10 she can't read Russian at all and speaks it as a so-so foreigner, but has fluent English and Greek).
That's a strange mindset to actively deny this culture and heritage to your kid, much of which has nothing to do with modern Russia or the Soviet Union.
My parents fled Communist China but they still made sure I learned Chinese language, history and culture.
Nowadays I disagree with much of US and UK politics but I still want my kids to learn English and be well versed in classic literature, etc.
Well, in your case you have another "good" country to identify with: Taiwan (although i'm sure learning Traditional writing system solely for this end is too much). We have no "good" Russia.
Moreover, we are not descendants of any "good" culture (such as those who brought us famous Russian classics): they were all either brutally killed or pushed out of the country. We are the descendants of illiterate peasants who came to power in 1917 and killed everyone else - we have no good heritage behind us, apart from the heritage of Communism, which while did some cool things to be proud about, was inherently evil - to be proud of Soviet achievements is like being proud of Nazis because they built cool autobahns.
It would be nice if there was a Russian-speaking community with Western values, out of reach of Russian government. But realistically, if you taught your kids Russian, it would probably just expose them to Russian values and propaganda of Russian government. I guess you did the right thing, but it's sad that you had to.
I suppose the "White Russian"[§] emigré / exile community of the 1920s and 30s in cities like London and Paris kind of died out... Most of them were nobility anyway, so at a guess their descendants might be too snobbish to mingle with GP in any case.
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[§]: Not "White Russia" as in Byelorussia / Belarus; "White" as opposed to "Red".
Exactly, most Russian-language content is the pro-Putin one because he's supported by almost everyone. Imagine U.S. where the MAGA crowd was not ~45% but about 85% of society, and kept that way for generations - would you be still proud to be American?
I'm even glad Trump got to be a thing. At least it's not difficult to explain what's going on in Russia anymore.
And it's not about reach of Russian government. It's about being Russian itself. I have nothing against Putin - he's just riding the wave (just like Trump did not invent the "American idiot" - he's just riding him). I see the very essence of being Russian as evil.
Just take Communism: it's not a Russian invention. It's invented in Germany by a bunch of mostly Jews. But it didn't stick in either Germany of Israel - Russians wholeheartedly embraced it as an excuse to destroy their pre-existing society (which was mostly ran by foreigners - Germans mainly - Russians been mostly in lower classes - and yet it was evil, too), set on a path to destroy the world.
This is something I've always wondered about Mexican families that emigrate to the US: Why do they push their kids to forget Spanish? English will be spoken in their every day environment. But they have an additional language for free...
You have people spending years learning a second language, why throw away that "advantage"? Forget about preserving heritage or any other political motives. Just as pure pragmatic benefit, I would prefer my kid to have 2 languages.
My sister came back home from UK to Croatia for a couple of years but didn't want to teach her kid Croatian insisting he should speak English (as they eventually went back to UK).
This was a terrible choice - he couldn't socialise with local children (preschool age) and is severely underdeveloped in that area, plus his vocabulary isn't that developed as the only place he heard English was at home.
Maybe the Swedish policy works for school age children, but preschool - I very much doubt it without special education programs.
He moved back right before preschool (at 5 years), I guess I shouldn't have used that term - it means both "younger than school age" and "preschool program age" which is a year before school here.
Problem was he couldn't even go to kindergarten as he would be completely unmanageable for them and couldn't socialise well - in large part due to language issues.
Thousand times this. The biggest mistake my parents made, was giving up on their mother tongue to help me learn a language they were not fluent in. I did not learn the new language from them, I learned it from school, reading books, movies and all sort of others things which were present everywhere. Their decision only made socialising with other cousins and family members difficult for me, made unnecessary overhead for our inter-family communication, made me in fact segregated.
If you have kids, let your kid master their parents mother tongues and flourish.
For what is worth in UK immigrant parents are also encouraged to speak their native language at home with their kids.
We have been speaking almost exclusively Italian at home with our son at home, and still his primary language is shifting to English as he started going to school. He even started speaking english with his Italian friends!
"There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." - Phil Karlton
Forgetting is cache invalidation! Especially forgetting the names for things.
This is why it's so important to make our priorities part of our routine, so they stay in cache. Do you love someone? Talk to them regularly (whether that's chatting to parents, spending time in a romantic relationship, or prayer). Thank you lhorie for reminding me to message my parents more often!
Can you still read and listen to Japanese though? I learned German as a child and was (probably) fluent in it. However, after not using it almost at all for more than a decade I find it difficult to speak or write it. Reading and listening aren't a problem though. Is it the same for you?
I found that one particular thing that helps preventing forgetting your native language(s) is reading. Specifically as I get older I rediscovered some absolutely great classical books in my native Hungarian, Russian and Ukrainian languages. Not only did it help me keep my vocabulary rich, but also helped me learn more about the history of my homeland and probably kept the bond alive.
Another thing that may be even more effective is if you have kids then use your native language exclusively with them. My son speaks perfect Hungarian for example, and it just warms my heart when visiting his grandma (who doesn’t speak English at all) I can see him telling her bedtime stories before going to sleep.
What I've found is that if you don't actively speak your native language and your day to day language is different enough from your native language sound-wise, you lose the ability to voice some sequences of syllables smoothly, because your mouth and tongue are not used to it anymore.
Indeed. I should have emphasized above my second point better (instead of the proud parent digression I wrote) - my son is the only one I speak Hungarian with every day (and vice versa). I’m certain that without this I would’ve lost a very big part of my Hungarian language skills over the past 6+ years.
I'm in a similar situation. Living in Germany with a German wife, German neighbors, German speaking friends, my children are the only people I regularly speak Hungarian to. My 6yo daughter speaks well enough when she's around her grandparents for a few days, but with my 3yo son the situation is different: he was born into a family with a German speaking sister, so he barely speaks Hungarian.
The fact that I'm the father, who works more and spends less time with the kids than my wife doesn't help either. I guess it's called mother tongue for a reason.
I have found music to be the key, they absolutely love for example the Sebő Együttes, which is indeed absolutely fabulous music. Their favourite is this: https://youtu.be/H8SY89dSDa8
I only speak German with my children (living in Sweden) and one thing I encountered is that if I don't pay attention I automatically start speaking in German to all children. It has gotten me some weird looks from some of my kids friends over time. Do you notice the same thing?
Keeping up written proficiency in Chinese is a pretty big task, though. It's hard enough for people who live in China: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473 Logographic languages are also a little more disconnected from their written form than spoken form than alphabetic languages, for obvious reasons. You can't sound out 皻, or work out its pronunciation from each radical. The spoken form of each symbol has to be memorized.
If my wife is any indication, reading does work to retain language (she speaks Mandarin, reads Mandarin novels, and has no problem w/ the language ever after more than a decade living in North America). Conversely, I had a japanese friend in college that fully immersed with non-japanese friends and liked to spend free time going to the movies. She realized after a couple years that she had forgotten how to write the name of train stations in Japan. Use or lose it, seems to be name of the game.
Chinese characters (used in Japan as well) are interesting in that you frequently have no idea how to write them by hand, but if you use an IME on your phone/computer and can enter it phonetically, you can trivially recognize and select the right one.
Grew up with immigrant parents where Mandarin was spoken in the household but lived in a area with no other Chinese-Americans. Even though I was exposed to the spoken language daily, I wound up forgetting how to read and write Mandarin by middle school.
Did my best to re-learn it but I rarely ever read/write in Mandarin so I would just regress after a bit - by this point I think I’ve re-learned how to read or write basic Mandarin at least three times and have regressed each successive time. Interesting note is that I seem to be significantly faster at re-learning things each time I go back to it, but that might just be constant repetition more than anything.
> Interesting note is that I seem to be significantly faster at re-learning things each time I go back to it, but that might just be constant repetition more than anything.
This is the phenomenon exploited by spaced repetition learning. “Trying to remember” is when you learn things the best.
Reading something in Mandarin for a couple of minutes every few days will be better than weeks of effort every few years, even though it's less time spent overall.
I've been wondering about this; with logographic languages could you read the language without actually thinking the words. Or in other words could you learn to read e.g. Mandarin without ever learning the language.
In theory you can do that with any language that has a written form (eg. English). Just that it's counter intuitive and nobody does it that way.
I doubt anyone _actually_ learns Mandarin without learning how the common characters are pronounced... Unless you don't have to verbally communicate with a teacher / fellow classmates?
I am learning simplified Chinese without the pronunciation. "It significantly cuts the amount of memorization." I thought. I am primarily interested in Chinese internet which I believe will open a massive new world, and understanding how this completely different way of expressing oneself works.
When I go through a text I understand I either don't sound the words or pronounce broken translation in my mind.
I've doubted this approach a few times because, as you say, it's uncommon, but I'm sticking with it and I'm curious what comes out of it in a year or two.
By the way, AFAIK (not an expert) the Chinese internet often uses pinyin to obscure various "sensitive" words, so you might eventually have to learn some pronunciations :)
It's not that simple. Let's say you memorized the main meanings of all characters in a Simplified Chinese character dictionary - each sentence you read will feel as if you've understand the verbs and very basic nouns in the sentence, but the way they're connected to each other would be quite a wild guess.
For instance, rewriting your sentence above into something somewhat like this:
I finish wonder this; accept word element character language, you not think word ability read language.
Hardly readable once you start getting long sentences in books. Japanese speakers can't just natively go ahead read and understand 95% of a Mandarin book even if they know all the Simplified/Traditional Chinese characters which are not commonly used in Japanese. They can sometimes understand simple sentences, and can more easily understand, say, street signs.
That's how my Japanese friends get around when in Taiwan. According to them, they understand ~95% of everything that's written, but have no idea how to express any of that verbally.
It's the same the other way round. I'm a from Hong Kong and I have no trouble reading Kanji in Japan. Once I learned Katakana (which usually just transliterates English) I can also decode 95+% of the things written.
And I can't communicate verbally at all...
That said, the voice in my head just pronounces the Japanese Kanji in my native Cantonese...
I've seen this quite a bit- very educated people who forget how to write characters, but can type them and read them easily. I remember reading years ago about how few college students could correctly write "打喷嚏" (to sneeze) without a computer.
That's very interesting, I've never thought about reading as an option to combat "language decay".
I'm definitely going to give it a try, thanks for your insight!
My go-to move: When a piece of literature is in a language I cannot read, I reach for the translation in my native language. Even though - through the process of forgetting - going for the English translation would be more convenient by now.
Role reversal indeed. Somehow he likes telling made up stories, probably took it from me when he was younger - I didn’t know any fairytales, so had to improvise them every night, eventually settling on a series about ‘Jeffrey the genius goat’, it was kinda funny, we both enjoyed it.
It is exceedingly rare for an adult to undergo true attrition of their first language when it is the dominant language throughout childhood.
On the other hand, it is very easy for children to completely lose their first language (sometimes in as short as 6 months when exposure is entirely removed).
In this case, it seems that the author was not a Cantonese-dominant speaker from school age, and their Cantonese input was limited, so I imagine the attrition really occurred during childhood. Now, they just retain some slowly fading scraps of the language.
Such speakers are termed heritage language learners, and they're the focus of a huge body of research, especially focused on the Spanish-speaking communities in the US.
This mirrors my experience, everyone I knew who could speak Spanish well when we were around 4-5 years old, still can 30+ years later even if they rarely speak it with anyone at all.
Now nieces/nephews who might pass for fluent to some when they were 4-6 yr, after only 2-3 years after going to school can hardly form the most basic of sentences and cannot communicate with their parents/grandparents at all. All of this is under an environment where only Spanish is spoken at home. They can still understand it but will probably forget that aswell in time.
The conclusion seems to be that those that are fluent do not forget but those who werent do. I suspect the author considered being able to communicate with her parents as proof she knew the language. Parents can communicate with their children perfectly fine where others would struggle to understand a single word.
To add, her brothers also lost their Cantonese. I am presuming she was very young when they immigrated or perhaps she was born in the US, which would make the brothers about 10 when first going to school: “My brothers are further along in this process — they have more trouble communicating with my parents than I do. They’re both older than I am by nearly a decade.”.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_attrition :- “Various case studies show that children who emigrate before puberty and have little to no exposure to their first language end up losing the first language.”
I’d say ops statement is false from direct experience of diaspora. It’s common enough to forget your mother tongue or at least relegate your competence in it to a second language.
Lots of foreigners try hard to fit in. It has consequences.
There are many studies that document adult immigrants and language attrition. Those who experience the most attrition are the ones who fully integrate - they entirely cease using their native language and eventually shift their dominant language to the new one.
Even then, attrition doesn't result in complete ("true") language loss. First, there is a decline in vocabulary, and eventually a loss of accurate phonology so that native listeners no longer judge them to be native speakers. However, they generally retain the ability to comprehend and communicate in their native language, even if they haven't used it for many years.
The point is simply that it is VERY difficult to completely lose your native language as an adult, assuming it was your dominant language throughout childhood.
It doesn't help that Beijing is actively discouraging the use of Cantonese and all other non-Mandarin dialects of Chinese.
Schools in mainland China are allowed to only teach in Mandarin, not the local dialects and almost all TV media is Mandarin. Even in HK, most local schools don't teach Cantonese formally anymore and it's hard to find Cantonese specific written materials like textbooks etc especially for kids.
To the author's point, in US cities with large Chinese populations like SF or NYC, there are many bilingual English-Mandarin or Mandarin immersion schools to pass on the language to kids, but few or none Cantonese ones.
Without that supporting academic ecosystem, it's just a oral language spoken by less and less each generation.
> most local schools don't teach Cantonese formally anymore
You probably already know the nuances, but just to be clear, schools have probably never taught Cantonese "formally" at all - instead, schools taught "Chinese" (i.e. a localized version of written Mandarin) using Cantonese. And now some schools in HK are teaching Mandarin using Mandarin.
> it's hard to find Cantonese specific written materials like textbooks etc especially for kids.
True. Please consider supporting one of the few projects out there trying to fix this problem: https://hambaanglaang.hk/
> Without that supporting academic ecosystem, it's just a oral language spoken by less and less each generation.
Cantonese has been "taboo" for various reasons. Learned people traditionally shunned it for Classical Chinese (pre-1950s) and for Written Mandarin (post-1950s). We're trying to fix that. It's crazy to think that a language spoken by at least 20+ million people never had any proper monolingual dictionary (until we made one...)
That seems completely irrelevant to the story at hand.
It is also pretty easy to see why the Chinese would wish to have a standard national language that everyone understands and not just people speaking a hodgepodge of mutually unintelligible ones, if you give it honest consideration. Japan, their model for building a modern state, as well as Europe, just had the good fortune to get through this process before modern sensibilities made it taboo. Even US states have taken action to prevent bilingual education and education in nonstandard English dialects such as AAVE.
Speaking a national common language and another mother tongue doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.
Singapore is a good example of this: they adopted English as the common national language, while having a bilingual education system that preserves the mother tongues.
I’d also say it’s not like they’re really going around saying you can’t speak Cantonese at home. The issue is that there is natural attrition when school and official things are in one language (not that different from what the article describes).
There is no preservation of mother tongues. Languages are assigned along ethnic lines in the name of nation building.
yellow → standard Chinese
native → Malay
brown → Tamil
If the father is a Fujian Hakka, the children will learn standard Chinese in addition to English. If the father is from New Delhi, the children will learn Tamil in addition to English. If the father is from Lisbon, the children will learn English only.
> Japan, their model for building a modern state, as well as Europe, just had the good fortune to get through this process before modern sensibilities made it taboo.
Can't speak for Japan, but most European countries still have regions where minority languages are spoken. Take Catalonia for instance.
Yes, of course they do, but everybody must be educated in the national language. There aren’t really many monolingual speakers of Aragonese walking around. Consequently it’s less important than Castilian Spanish and probably many people have a worse command of it than their grandparents did. Catalan is unusually strong in this sense but still something like half of Catalonians consider themselves native speakers of only Spanish. And in the relatively recent past measures like punishing students for speaking minority languages in school were commonplace.
You might even make an analogy between Catalan and Cantonese, in the sense that it’s mostly historical circumstance that makes Cantonese have such a privileged position compared to most other Sinitic languages. Wu and Min languages each have almost as many speakers as Yue languages but you wouldn’t know it by English-language coverage of the topic.
India is a example of a country that has a national language (actually two, Hindi and English) but still recognizes the 20+ other regional languages spoken. Schools in India are allowed to teach the local language in addition to Hindi/English.
As a result a educated Indian from a non-Hindi speaking state is generally trilingual in English, Hindi and their mother tongue.
Well, true. But there’s a difference between being allowed to teach a language and making it the primary language of instruction. And India’s current government also seems to favor policies to promote Hindi at the expense of local languages. Consider: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-langua...
> China has for the majority of it's history been a northern Mandarin Chinese oriented country.
That claim is incompatible with historic records and linguistic scrutiny. Northern Mandarin developed only in the recent ca. 500 years, so that cannot be a majority. Middle Qing until early Republican era was oriented around eastern (i.e. Nanking) Mandarin. The process of displacing eastern with northern started in ca. 1850 and was complete a hundred years later.
...There was about 4000 years of Chinese history based around the Yangtze river valley, particularly north of it, as well as the main hub of the Qin dynasty. China has been a northern focused entity for almost it's entire existence, especially since Qin. That also includes the Qing and Yuan. Even the Ming were centralized in Beijing for a large portion of it's existence.
> Schools in mainland China are allowed to only teach in Mandarin, not the local dialects
This is not exactly true.
Core subjects, like math, history, and science must have a unified curriculum taught in Mandarin. However, there are language, art, and humanities classes that teach and preserve other Chinese dialects/languages.
What a heartbreaking story. However, I believe it didn’t result from “wanting to be successful in America“ but from the estrangement from his parents and family. Millions other immigrants, who are successful in America, don’t lose their first language.
I feel like I read a different article than you! I thought she was saying that she had a pretty good relationship with her parents overall (other than some teenage resentment about their not learning English), that she lost her fluency unintentionally just from not being around other Cantonese speakers, and that the story had a fairly happy ending, as she was now re-learning enough to have more meaningful conversations with them again.
> hat she lost her fluency unintentionally just from not being around other Cantonese speakers
But how does this happen? If your mom and dad only speak Cantonese, then if you're having real conversations with them, you're maintaining that language.
The original poster must be right, she must have not cared to have deep conversations with them for a long long time to let things get this bad. Because he's right, plenty of people immigrate to the US and maintain their native language even if they never use it outside the home.
Is that how it works? Deep enough conversations, periodically, prevent language attrition? I don't know anything about this phenomenon, so that could be how it works. But the fact that she seems to have love and gratitude for her parents and the fact that her brothers are in the same boat makes me not jump to blame it on a bad relationship.
Yes, to be 100% crystal clear, I'm saying the thing that feels so obvious to you that to deny it would be pure stupidity does not appear to be true.
There's a quick summary at https://languageattrition.org/use-or-lose/, from where you can get links to decades of research on language attrition. Apparently, for people who speak multiple languages, there's some kind of interference effect between languages that's very counterintuitive, which means there's not the correlation between time spent per language and fluency that you would think there would be.
That's a very impressive achievement, but I think this is one of those classic examples of the post hoc fallacy, "I succeeded by doing this, therefore those who do this will succeed." That logic is unsound.
Yes, that logic would have been unsound. It was not my reasoning, just a data point, and not a very impressive one :)
Deep enough conversations, periodically, prevent language attrition. How can I convince you? It's really just like anything else: practice helps. Is that a controversial claim?
There’s often a significant difference between someone own perception/admission and reality. The fact that her parents have to call her and not vice versa in the context of Asian culture speaks volume. Also the typical content of the conversations she cited doesn’t suggest a rich communication.
Anyway, if you speak a language regularly - in any language - you can’t lose it, not to mention your first language.
My interpretation was similar to yours as I also thought that this resulted more from her estrangement from her family rather than... anything else to be honest. It is indeed sad.
I recall being thoroughly disturbed when I first started dreaming in English. This happened after only having lived in the US for 5-6 years. It was part sadness and part shame for betraying my mother tongue as a grown-ass man.
That was almost two decades ago. The article brought back some memories.
Presumably it's conversations in your dream that are in English; or do you narrate your dreams or something? Prior to that would you dream of situations (ie inspired by things) that happened in an English language context but translated?
Reflecting on my own dreams I don't recall ever speaking/reading in them (and I don't narrate/monologue in general; my thoughts are neither primarily language- nor pictorially-based).
It was a long time ago. But I definitely speak in English in my dreams now. What is more curious though is that non-English speakers (in real life) also speak in English. I guess we don’t know so much about our brains. Would be fun to talk to someone who specializes in these matters.
This article maybe explains why my grandfather would get so angry when us cousins would ask him to speak in Italian, his childhood language, when we were small. We thought it was so neat that he had this whole other world, but at most he would say a few words for us, then lapse into a stony silence. In later years he wouldn't even say the few words. We all knew he wasn't mad at us, but he was definitely angry, definitely upset, maybe somehow embarrassed too - but why? As kids we'd think, maybe he's getting forgetful in his old age. In fact his mind was tack sharp until his final year, in his 90s. I had no idea there was a name for this. But it makes a lot more sense now.
I'm Norwegian, but have lived in the UK closing in on half my life now (25 years in Norway, 21 years in the UK).
I have by no means forgotten my first language, but over the years I have certainly noticed loss of vocabulary, or more frequently more effort to switch over to thinking in a different pattern and finding the right words.
Sometimes I'll catch myself about to inject an English word when speaking Norwegian to my mother.
I don't think my fluency will ever disappear as they did for the article writer, in part because I used it daily for much longer than the writer did, and in part because I still read a reasonable amount of Norwegian, but it drives home how much of fluency depends on regular use.
I left for university in an English-language country, where I now live. Similar to you, I've spent half my life abroad. I've since realized that if I went back, I would not be able to properly comprehend business contracts or the fine print on things like my internet bill. 25 years ago, we didn't even have home internet where I lived!
There are parts of this article that I relate to deeply and there are parts that sound absolutely insane to me.
Like the author, I immigrated to the US as a child, in fact to almost the same neighborhood in Brooklyn. Like her, I also made a point of learning English well, of looking at assimilation / "becoming American" as a really important goals - which I believe was right. I do have embarrassing memories of pretending to be American and not speak my native language in public -- it was a stupid idea to try to pretend to be something I wasn't, but I can see why the 11 year old version of myself that had just moved across the ocean would act that way.
The thing that's a little weirder to me is the loss of the first language (as compared to refusal to use it at times.) I suppose there may be a genetic component since the author and her brothers have all lost their Cantonese - I don't think this is common. Most times, people get rusty in their native language but it comes back easily with immersion. I do believe the author that this is a problem for her, it just seems like a rare one.
Two things felt crazy to me in the article.
First, I think the author's experience of allowing the sole language she had in common with her parents dilapidate - is extremely uncommon. You can pretend to be American all you want (as I did) but at the end of the day, if your dad doesn't speak English (mine still struggles) then you're "forced" to speak to him in your own tongue so you don't lose it. The author and her brothers must be weird birds indeed to have spent years not being able to communicate with their parents and somehow think that's fine.
Second, the author is clearly lamenting this but she's not talking about action until the very end. Cantonese speakers are extremely common in the US, as is media and opportunity to take classes etc. She's taking advantage of some of that, and I have to imagine that it must be easier for her to relearn the language than for someone studying it for the first time.
My point being, is if this is really important to her (as it should be) she should focus less on lamentations of the past and go whole-hog into fixing the problem today.
The author never really learned Cantonese, her only "teachers" were parents and other immediate contacts. No school, no media, no books, articles, current events. After starting school there was less time and need to speak Cantonese so it is clear that her vocabulary and ability will be extremely limited. Its not forgetting, in this case it was never really learned like a first language.
Without being fully immersed in a Cantonese environment (which, depending on your definition, basically only includes Hong Kong and some parts of the Guangzhou area), it's almost impossible to really "learn" Cantonese outside such environments, since there's actually very few resources for intermediate/advanced learners of Cantonese...
There isn't a proper Cantonese dictionary (yet). The existing ones either assume you are already familiar with Mandarin Chinese, or are just simple translations to English.
There (almost) aren't any children's books in Cantonese.
There is very few literature, and serious books written in Cantonese.
The reason being Cantonese being traditionally considered a 'slangy spoken dialect of Chinese' not fit for writing serious work.
We're trying to fix that, but it will take some time.
I have many friends who grew up in India who never learned how to read their mother tongue. They can’t read media, books, articles, current events as you say but they can communicate with all other Tamil speakers. They might not be able to write words in the Tamil script, but they get by writing the words in English. “ivan laam adikaraan”, a friend complained yesterday about a sports event. This is pretty common among my friend groups.
What I’m saying is, our understanding and knowledge of language is complex. It’s possible to speak a language without reading it. It’s possible to read a language without speaking it. It’s not as simple as you make it out to be.
So people who can’t read don’t have a first language? Education is not a prerequisite for speaking a language. For thousands of years people learned from speaking with family, even in remote communities or distant farmhouses.
How did that conclusion, from “no books” only? The point is not literacy per se or something. It's more about how much you use a language in your daily life. If it's only limited to talking to just your parents on occasional basis then you miss out on a lot of language skill development. If you use Cantonese for 1 hour in a given week total and the remaining 110 hours of your waking time are filled with English, it's not much of a surprise what language ability gets developed more. Cantonese is still your first language – you learned it first, in limited capacity – but it can cease being your primary language.
This is to be expected, as it doesn't seem to have ever set in as a real language in their life. My wife and daughter are foreign, and of obviously different ages. My wife speaks English perfectly but with an obvious accent, but still dreams in her native language. She'll never forget it. The kid just had exposure as a child and was learning when she came, and today speaks English without an accent and has no memory of her first language.
She shares the author's pain in that she can not speak to her grandparents, at all.
I feel there's a point in life where language gets imprinted and you're stuck with it, probably by age 10 or so. People older will forever have varying degrees of accents, and people younger will happily accept whatever is current. I find it truly fascinating myself, especially because those older learning hear themselves speaking it perfectly.
I learned German as a kid, but I forgot most of it when I started learning English in elementary.
Nowadays, (I'm living in the Balkans) I forgot words of my own language, and I (and most of my friends) mix English and my mother language quite often, creating a language similar to that in the "Clockwork Orange". Still don't know if that is a good thing or not. I'm trying to 're-learn' German and it is a lot harder than when I was a kid.
There is also a funny story about a baby in Serbia, whose first words were in English due to the media/cartoons the family gave to baby to watch.
Are there examples of successful communities where second and third generation immigrants didn't adopt the dominant language in their region, or country?
Coming from South Africa, where there are eleven official languages [1], but English is the de-facto language for communication, it seems like having people not able to have a common language for communication is a recipe for balkanisation, ghettoisation, fragmentation and general strife.
[1] South Africa has eleven official languages, mostly because that was part of the cost of getting conservative Afrikaans speakers to accept the end of apartheid. Even today, they are the firmest proponents of multilingualism.
The descendants still lose their Spanish though. There's a steady influx of new immigrants that keep things going, but the pattern of first-generation=limited English, second-generation=bilingual, third-generation=English only/limited heritage language still holds.
There are 41 million Spanish speakers in the US, and I've personally seen areas in the US where the first language is Spanish, and not English. Based on that, it seems likely to me that further generations would continue to speak Spanish rather than assimilate to English language. What are you getting your assertion on?
Of that 41 million, 24.6 million "Speak English only or speak English 'very well', which is 58.9%. Of those under 18, that fraction goes up to 81.1%
For comparison, other Indo-European languages has 69.3% and 81.5% for those under 18. Asian and Pacific Island languages: 54.1%/75.4% Other languages: 69.0%/78.7%
It's not a perfect proxy for the claim about the loss of language with each generation, but it's a good approximation. The pattern is similar across all languages (and the difference between Spanish and other Indo-European languages is negligible). I've read about research that has more explicitly found that there is no unique pattern for Spanish in the U.S.
What you're seeing is not an indication that Spanish has a different pattern, but that there are more Spanish-speaking immigrants and are a more visible immigrant community to outsiders. My great-grandparents settled into communities of Czech and Slovene speakers and had children who were fully bilingual while of my parents' generation, only my father has any facility with Czech, which his mother credited to his being effectively raised by his grandmother in his early years. My own Czech knowledge doesn't extend much behind, Promiňte, prosim, rozumite anglický?
You can find communities where the first language is Chinese in almost any sizable urban area. There are parts of Chicago where the first language is Polish, but as the community is smaller and less visible to outsiders, most people don't even realize it. Los Angeles has numerous linguistic enclaves. When Pope John Paul II visited Los Angeles, what most excited the pope was that the Archdiocese offered Mass in more languages than any other diocese in the world. (Non-English church services are a big indicator of these linguistic communities).
I think the comparison is not fair, due to economic, ethnic and historical factors that make Switzerland not a fair metric for any other country to measure up to.
If we take just the language, we're comparing (French, Italian, German) against (Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venḓa, Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans). We're comparing the official languages of 3 world powers with very good life prospects for their speakers and those that kinda can do it, against 11 languages that have no value outside of 'talking to grandpa' or being able to read ancient texts.
Maybe I'm biased and perhaps I'm coming off a bit racist, that is not my intention. I just want to point out what I'm seeing here.
We don’t really mix that much though. I’m from the French speaking side, when you live there you basically don’t go to the German or italien speaking side outside of vacations or specific events (also, transports are really expensive, that doesn’t help). And for young people it’s common to speak in English as an intermediate language between regions. I can also say that I had a decade of German courses in school and got absolutely nothing from them.
The experience is a bit different if you live in a bilingual canton but people are still mostly speaking one language.
I am a Hong Kong immigrant in Canada. I spent a part of my childhood in HK and the rest of my time in Canada.
There was an era that the parents insisted on communicating with their kids in English so that their kids didn't fall behind in school. Speaking not in English was a taboo at school: Kids raised their eyebrows. Some kids were punished for not speaking in English. (Circa 70s and 80s English speaking Canada)
Now we realized the attitude has been damaging. I've met some adults cannot hold deeper conversation with their parents just like what the author said. In addition, these adults may not know or understand culture subtitles why some trivial matters (such as number 4) being inappropriate.
My high school was great in celebrating all world cultures and the indigenous people. In addition, some of my teachers in Canada spoke other languages at home and understood well how kids would not fall behind by speaking their native tongue at home. Nowadays, many parents would like to send their kids to French immersion school so that the kids can appreciate working in other languages.
I am lucky enough to have enough vocabulary in Cantonese to understand grown-up topics with my parents. Occasionally, I helped the Canadian born Chinese to order proper food in restaurants. They thanked me profusely. I also have early elementary school level Mandarin so I can navigate in many Chinatowns around the world without a hitch. During some occasion, I feel like I have an adult body but think like a kid since I never lived as an adult in any predominantly Chinese speaking (Cantonese or Mandarin) nations.
Something like this is a huge problem with the young Vietnamese generation in Germany. They speak flawless German but bad Vietnamese - so they can't talk to their parents.
Vietnamese is also a difficult language to learn. I'm a European living in Vietnam and find it hard to get resources such as textbooks. I hope at some point a standard can be established for learners including textbooks and exams. Sadly, I feel like there's not enough demand for it currently.
I had a co worker who grew up in NYC to Chinese speaking parents. When I asked her how her weekend went on time she said, her parents bank was bought and she needed to go there and help out as her parents didn’t speak English well enough. “When you live in a country for 40 years you should try to learn the language”. Having visited I can see how you could get by without English, though it would limit you.
To be fair learning a new language as an adult is hard, perhaps they know basic English but when you are dealing with a bank its better to have someone who is fluent in English to be on your side.
what I infer from the article is that the author doesn't talk to parents much. It is the frequency that keeps our memory cells charged.
After driving a four-wheeler for a decade, without touching a bike, people tend to forget balancing. Although it takes very little effort to revive it. Just a session or two may be.
Same should be true for languages. Start talking frequently and it will revive all your language skills.
First thing I thought was she should watch some more Wong Kar Wai movies. Then she gets to the end and I'm like yaaaaas.
I wish I knew Cantonese. It's such a beautiful language. One of my dreams is to go to Hong Kong. Hopefully it won't be too pillaged by the Chinese before I get to visit.
Looking at my family history, in the last 4 generations we have leaped from German to Spanish to Portuguese. As a child I lived in England for several years and then had a hard time coming back to Portuguese (I couldn't understand if people spoke too fast).
This has been my experience too. My family moved from Chennai to Mumbai and lost my first language Tamizh. I can speak but cannot read and write with speed. I feel deep sadness because it feels like I lost something that was very close to me once.
This happened to my great grandmother, I thought it was unusual, but I guess not.
Came to the United States as a teenager not knowing English, but quickly picked it up. Eventually her french speaking elders all died off so she stopped speaking french out of circumstance, she never taught her kids french and french materials were not available at the time. In her 90s she said she didn't remember how to speak french. I thought it was sad but it actually didn't bother her because she didn't need to speak french anymore.
Some people who didn't know her thought she was senile if she mentioned this to them.
Eerily similar experience here. I came to the US from Russia at the age of 9 and slowly watched my Russian slip away. 23 years later my vocabulary sucks and I have a strange accent.
I have made an effort though by reading a few books in Russian, including Crime and Punishment.
The author saying “I have so much to say, but not the words to say it” is the heartbreaking reality of my conversations with my parents. Luckily, my ability to understand is still sharp, so I get them talking and hear stories about their lives.
I consider myself really lucky that my parents spoke to me in different languages. Quite a few of my cousins regret only learning how to speak English. I can still speak 2 of the languages they taught me but I've almost completely forgotten Italian. Like the author, I guess my parents didn't really see the need to speak it when they moved to Canada but I can kind of understand it still.
Seems to be much more common as a thing with children who haven't finished acquiring both their L1 and L2 (as in multilingual) while still going through the biological sensitive period where you have to acquire language.
My first language is Danish, but my mother married an American when I was 6. He said I shouldn't speak Danish so I lost the language, when I came back to Denmark in my 30s I had to learn the language all over again, which I still speak with an American accent.
When I began to relearn Danish I started to remember German which I spoke from 6-10 and also had a year of in high school.
What a heartfelt article, and one I can identify with well despite English being my first and only language. I'd tell the author that this affects all of us, not just those struggling with forgetting a first language (although that must throw the situation into even starker relief). I still wish that I could relate to my parents on a deeper level, although their English is fluent and near perfect. Perhaps their fluency in general has slowly declined with age, which could be a factor. But there are certainly times where I feel stuck in small talk with them.
I hope the author has children one day. It's the ultimate gift of being able to relate to your parents. Suddenly you understand the biggest and most important event of their entire lives: the birth of you, and perhaps your siblings. That can't be described fully in any spoken language, and it adds a beautiful layer to your relationship that you'll both understand so well. Even if you are never once able to speak about it.
Honestly can relate. I grew up learning Hindi, and while I can still speak it, I can’t read it (don’t really see scripture outside of India.) Not to mention my vocabulary is restricted to an 8 year olds. I just consider myself a “Westerner” now and that’s about it.
I used to work with a Polish guy who told me he had similarly forgotten his mother tongue. I had never heard of such a thing at the time, and it seemed such a bizarre and sad phenomenon that it felt rude to pursue my curiosity as to the circumstances.
I wonder how similar this process of language attrition is for peoples primary language(s)? Could this be related to other forms of cognitive decline and disease?
I have lost all fluency in Japanese. Japanese culture had always been a part of my life as a child, but despite my family (cousins, etc) growing up on misoshiru and jpop and anime, we all spoke portuguese, so Japanese-the-language never felt like "home".
These days, I also occasionally forget portuguese vocabulary. I do still "speak" with family, but mostly by text via WhatsApp, and conversations are usually pretty casual and don't involve nearly as much eloquence as, say, a good book. The vast majority of my life now revolves around english-speaking culture: my job is full of english technical jargon that I've no idea how to translate, english is the language I share w/ my wife, and it's the language I use to consume information and entertainment. English is now my "home", so to speak.
I think the author has a similar experience: she learned english in primary school and lived a primarily english-oriented life, so english became "home". The phenomenon of wanting to reconnect with one's roots later in life doesn't strike me as particularly unusual either. In retrospect, I did unintentionally distance myself from my own parents during my 20s (partly because that's sorta the whole point of becoming an independent adult and discovering new things) and only really started to regain that level of touch after having kids.
My point is: loss of language can have a lot to do with prioritizing things one feels are impactful in their lives (though those things may not necessarily be important - parents are certainly important, but it's the sort of thing that one can easily take for granted). Having had such a weird life experience wrt "first language", I'm keenly aware that the first-ness or even the familial aspect don't necessarily correlate with the cultural surface area that a person interfaces with the most. In some rare cases, your second - or third - language is what feels like home.