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.
Yes, that is exactly how it works. The logic in the article is that the author lost Cantonese because she wasn't speaking it. Atrophied.
The post we're replying to makes a good point. How do you not use the only language your parents speak? It means you're not talking to your parents.
Just so I am clear, you're saying it's not an accepted fact that people don't lose a language they actively speak?
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.
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?
The article admits that she
• rebelled and for a time would not speak (shout) to the parents other than English
• moved to the other side of the continent.