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Comment by gryson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

My mom who is I her 80s is still fluent in her native non-English language. She does use it regularly though.

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