How do people lose their native language? (Sgt Bowe Bergdahl spoke English for 23 years...)

BBC News ^ | 3 June 2014 Last updated at 19:07 ET | no byline

[a fool in paradise]

Sgt Bowe Bergdahl 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 professor 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 or they use odd grammar structures. 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.

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.

Have you or your friends lost fluency in your native language? Tell us using the form below and we will publish a selection.

[bergmeid]

Baloney. I have lived in this country for well over 30 years and am still fluent in my native language. Total hogwash.

[ustheliving]

English is my third language, and has been my primary language for the last 50 years, but I can still understand and speak Portuguese and Ukrainian.

When I am speaking those other two languages, I compose my thoughts in English.

It is just a convenient excuse.

[WildHighlander57]

So the “signal” was being sent to those whose primary language IS Arabic.

Unless its standard practice to recite the “bismillah” in Arabic.

[Kenny Bunk]

Do many Ukrainians speak Portuguese? Are there Portuguese rebels in the Ukraine who are demanding territory?

Just what is going on in your family that the Obama authorities should know about?

[21twelve]

That was my thought too. I guess that is why Perot didn’t win the presidency - Stockdale did all of his debates in Vietnamese. (Hmm - maybe he would have done better if he had!)

[Kenny Bunk]

Bergdahl is damn lucky to have forgotten English. While he was gallivanting about Afghanistan with his goat-and-boy-buggering buddies on his bomb-making lecture tour, our nation's language became Spanish. Now he won't have any English to un-learn.

Allah Bismallah alraham alraheem works in mysterious ways, O infidel dog.