A little boy runs up to one of them, shouting: “Abdullah is being rude to me!” “Listen.” his mother begins in English, before switching back to Arabic. In a playground, three women are sharing snacks and talking in Arabic. Suddenly, one of them gives a start and exclaims: “I forgot to close la finestra!” Stretched out on a picnic blanket, two lovers are chatting away in Italian. On a Sunday stroll through the parks of North London, I catch about a dozen of them, from Polish to Korean, all mixed with English to varying degrees. More than 300 languages are spoken here, and more than 20% of Londoners speak a main language other than English. In London, one of the world’s most multilingual cities, this kind of hybrid is so common that it almost feels like an urban dialect. Mingling with other native speakers actually can make things worse, since there’s little incentive to stick to one language if you know that both will be understood. If this control mechanism is weak, the speaker may struggle to find the right word or keep slipping into their second language.
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In an English context, her brain suppresses ‘Schreibtisch’ and selects ‘desk’, and vice versa. When she looks at the object in front of her, her mind can choose between two words, the English ‘desk’ and the German ‘Schreibtisch’ (Schmid is German). “The fundamental difference between a monolingual and bilingual brain is that when you become bilingual, you have to add some kind of control module that allows you to switch,” Schmid says. How well that first language is maintained has a lot to do with innate talent: people who are generally good at languages tend to be better at preserving their mother tongue, regardless of how long they have been away.īut native fluency is also strongly linked to how we manage the different languages in our brain. In most migrants, the native language more or less coexists with the new language. America is my country, and English is my language.” As one of them said: “I feel that Germany betrayed me. The most traumatised refugees had suppressed it. Even though German was the language of childhood, home and family, it was also the language of painful memories. “It seemed very clearly a result of this trauma,” says Schmid. Those who left later, after the 1938 pogrom known as Reichskristallnacht, tended to speak German with difficulty or not at all. Those who left Germany in the early days of the regime, before the worst atrocities, tended to speak better German – despite having been abroad the longest. It was how much trauma they had experienced as victims of Nazi persecution. The main factor that influenced their language skills wasn’t how long they had been abroad or how old they were when they left. Studies on international adoptees have found that even nine-year-olds can almost completely forget their first language when they are removed from their country of birth.īut in adults, the first language is unlikely to disappear entirely except in extreme circumstances.įor example, Schmid analysed the German of elderly German-Jewish wartime refugees in the UK and the US. Until the age of about 12, a person’s language skills are relatively vulnerable to change. In children, the phenomenon is somewhat easier to explain since their brains are generally more flexible and adaptable. Schmid is a leading researcher of language attrition, a growing field of research that looks at what makes us lose our mother tongue. “The minute you start learning another language, the two systems start to compete with each other,” says Monika Schmid, a linguist at the University of Essex. It’s also not just long-term migrants who are affected, but to some extent anyone who picks up a second language.
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Socialising with other native speakers abroad can worsen your own native skills. It turns out that how long you’ve been away doesn’t always matter. In fact, the science of why, when and how we lose our own language is complex and often counter-intuitive. The process seems obvious: the longer you are away, the more your language suffers. Most long-term migrants know what it’s like to be a slightly rusty native speaker. Still, it’s slightly painful to realise that after years of living abroad, my mother tongue can sometimes feel foreign. We speak German to each other, a language that’s rich in quirky words, but I’ve never heard this one before: fremdschämen.
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I’m sitting in my kitchen in London, trying to figure out a text message from my brother.