- Is it possible to forget your first language?
Good morning, good afternoon or good evening,
depending on what part of this big
wide world of ours you happen to be in right now.
I am Julian Northbrook and this is Doing English.
Interesting question, is it possible
to forget your first language?
The short, simple answer to that is yes,
it is possible, but it is very, very rare
and it only happens in extreme cases
when the right circumstances converge.
For most of us, however and this is now
the beginning of the slightly longer,
more complicated answer, what we experience
as a forgetting of our first language
is not actually a forgetting at all
but rather a dulling of our first language
because of what is happening in our brain
when we gain proficiency in our second language.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
The study of the forgetting of a language
whether first or second is called language attrition
and we talk of first language attrition
and second language attrition.
And I guess in terms of research and
working psycholinguistics, language attrition
can be considered the polar opposite
But again, as I said, what most people experience
as a forgetting of their first language
is not actually forgetting it at all,
but rather it's simply that their second language
has become stronger in their brain
and relative to that they feel like
their first language has dulled, has slowed down.
The way that people might experience this is
if say they live in an English speaking country
and they are using English, their second language,
all day every day, they're constantly speaking English,
they're always exposed to English,
they live their lives in English,
and they almost never use their first language,
they will find it increasingly more difficult
to recall words in their first language.
And when it comes to having a conversation
in their first language, they might
find themselves unable to recall the word
and thinking, oh, what is that word?
It'll be on the tip of their tongue
but they won't be able to access it.
And the really irritating part is
is that often you'll be able to remember that word
in your second language, for example English for you
or Japanese for me, but you won't be able
to remember it in your first language.
And you'll be stood there like an idiot
thinking what, what, what's that word?
I can remember it in my second language, in English,
but I can't remember it in my first language, what was it?
And again, it'll be like on the tip of your tongue,
but it'll feel like it's missing somehow.
People will also find that their brain
kind of automatically fills stuff in
and they'll be speaking their first language
and they'll want to insert words
and bits from their second language.
This is especially the case when it's something
that doesn't exist in the first language.
Whenever I go back to the United Kingdom
I find myself very, very frustrated
whenever I go to a shop and buy something,
because here in Japan we have a standard expression
and you'll just walk up to the counter
and hand them, I don't know, a bottle of water or whatever
it is that you're buying and say,
we don't have that kind of fixed expression
or this kind of situation and the term,
has no translation equivalent in English.
It could mean anything from please,
to please do this for me to please think favourably of me.
It's used in all kinds of situations.
I want to use that term because it's my habit
and it's frustrating when I can't and my brain
will be like, why can't I say this?
Why can't I use this really convenient bit
of language that I have from the second language?
Well, because we're in England now
and nobody understands Japanese, that's why stupid brain.
Yet another way that you may experience this
although it's not the forgetting of your first language
per se, but rather change based on the way that
your second language affects the first language
transfer from your second language to your first language
is that you may start to use unnatural or non-native like
speaking patterns in your first language
when you are very used to speaking in your second language.
Great example of this that I've noticed several times
with Japanese people who have lived in English
speaking countries for a while
is that they'll start to use the pattern,
one of my, which is very common and very natural
in English, but they'll use it in Japanese
which is not natural, and not common.
For example, one of my friends.
which in Japanese sounds a little bit odd
because again it's an English speaking habit,
not a Japanese speaking pattern.
But what you've got to understand is that
this is not forgetting your first language as such,
rather it's to do with something called activation.
You can watch this video for a detailed discussion on this,
but basically it's a misconception that somebody
who knows two languages is like a monolingual times two.
They're not, when you learn a second language
you are quantitatively different to a monolingual.
This is because when you learn two languages
and have two languages in your head
those languages are always switched on,
always active, and the result is that they are
constantly fighting between each other.
For example say you see a car.
Well, you have two separate words to describe this object,
this thing, so when I see this car, in my brain
but so does the Japanese equivalent
How does the brain know which one to choose?
Well basically the two languages fight between each other
and the one that wins out is the one that gets used,
the one which gets understood.
This is why occasionally, it's rare but it does happen,
you will be speaking, say, your first language
and you'll accidentally slip in a word from
your second language, or vice versa.
I remember once when I was teaching in secondary school
and I was telling the students about how I went
to the zoo at the weekend, and I said something like,
yeah at the weekend I went to the,
and all the students were just like,
And then I realised, oh shit, I said,
It happens, but it doesn't happen that often
and the reason why is because the languages aren't just
fighting between each other and which ever one wins, wins.
The brain has a suppression mechanism called, activation
which makes these languages stronger or weaker
depending on what we are currently using.
So if you are constantly speaking English,
your second language, you're constantly exposed to English,
your second language, it's like a seesaw.
You will get better, and better, and better at English
because your English will become
stronger, and stronger, and stronger,
and as your English becomes stronger it suppresses
And then of course if you are then exposed to your
first language and using your first language
the seesaw goes the other way,
and it's constantly going up and down, up and down,
up and down depending on what language
you are currently using and exposed to.
So anybody who ever learns a second language
will experience some kind of dulling of their first language
because again we are adding more cognitive processes
to speaking and understanding the language,
this competition between the two.
But if you are living in your home country
and almost never use your second language, English,
and you're always using your first language
you will probably never notice the difference.
But if you are always using English, your second language
because you work in an English speaking company,
you go to an English speaking school
or you live in an English speaking country
and you don't need to use your first language much.
Because of this seesaw effect, this balance between
the two languages and activation,
you will find increasingly you get this effect
where you feel like your fist language has slowed down,
become dull and you start to forget words,
The tip of the tongue effect gets more pronounced
This said there are rare and quite extreme cases
where people do forget their first languages.
It does happen with brain damage,
we're not gonna talk about that here
that is a conversation for another day,
Usually it happens when someone has left their home country
and with it their first language as a child.
Their first language wasn't fully developed anyway
and often there is some kind of psychological need
to get rid of the first language
and fully integrate into the new country,
the new culture, the new language.
For example, a kid going to school
and getting bullied because they are different,
because they have a different first language for example,
a different culture and that kid desperately wanting
to fit in so they kind of shed their original identity
and try as hard as they can to fully integrate
it's debatable whether you ever actually
forget that language or not though.
This is something that people have been arguing
in the research literature for ages.
But some people, and I'm inclined to agree,
believe that you never actually forget language
or indeed anything that has been learned
but even if it becomes completely inaccessible,
we have no recollection of the language whatsoever
it is there, buried somewhere in the brain,
For example there's very interesting research,
extremely controversial, but very interesting research
that's been done with Korean adoptees who left Korea
at extremely young age, completely forgot Korean,
but when as adults they were put under hypnosis
they were able to bring that Korean back to an extent
and this was supposed to provide the evidence for again,
language learned always being somewhere in the brain
even if it's been forgotten and inaccessible.
Again, that research is extremely controversial,
but that's a story for another day.
But most of us though, far from worrying about
forgetting our first language,
we are really struggling just to use and speak English
as a second language without our first language
If that's you, check out my kindle book,
where I go into detail about why we end up translating
from our first language to our second language
or as we are talking about here,
sometimes from our second language to our first language
and how you can stop doing that as a second language speaker
to speak English more smoothly, more naturally,
and think in the language whilst you are doing it.
If you found this video interesting
and you want me to talk about topics like this more
And if you'd like to hear more about first,
or indeed second language attrition
which is what most of us are concerned with,
let me know about that in the comments too.
Personally I find this subject absolutely fascinating
and I would be more than happy to make more videos
about it in the future if you are interested.
Right, I think this is the time to end this video,
I've actually got a research paper that I've got to go and
finish writing, so this is me, Julian Northbrook,
signing off from another video.
See you same time, same place tomorrow for the next one.
Before I go if you are stuck thinking in your first language
when you want to speak in English,
watch this video for three reasons why,
and watch this video for more about activation
and answering somebody's about why English