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Can you forget your mother tongue


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Hi all ! I’m a newbie on this forum, so I dare introduce myself a little : I live in the Vendée. I’m a retired multi-skill builder (artisan en Multi-Service Bâtiment). My wife is Welsh and we have a dog called Maverick (Golden Retriever).

Despite the fact that my wife speaks good French, we speak English at home all the time. I start to realize that the English words come to me more and more easily but sometimes, I struggle to remember French ones if she asks. Am I loosing my mother tongue ?

Is there members here in a similar situation ??
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Years ago, when I was working in Tabriz, the Thai wife of a colleague went to their embassy to get some papers sorted and burst into tears because she had forgotten how to speak Thai.

Subsequently she returned to her home country and, of course, it all came back. But could she have forgotten it completely? Change of environment would bring it all back I suspect, in time. That being said, bilingualism is not a natural state and has to be maintained or it will be lost.
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Well..... as an English person married to a French person, before I had kids I could speak 'reasonable' French. I could get by.

Since having kids (3) I have to speak English at home so they all get immersed in the language. We all speak English at home....but their first language is French.

But by speaking English all the time I am losing my ability to speak French.

As you get older and if you are not a 'language person' it does get hard to switch your brain on for both languages..

I'm struggling.

Thankfully though alcohol is pronounced the same in both English and French. LOL

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It works both ways...when I'm speaking French I occasionally have to revert to an English word to keep the flow going, and find more and more that the French comes more easily and naturally when having to speak English. The worst nightmare is being in mixed company and trying to keep track of what to speak to who! I can't and don't swear in English, but no problem in French. Somehow it doesn't seem so bad :-)
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@Noisette: Knowing that I'm not the only one who struggles reassures me in a way... My wife and I not having the same mother tongue helps a lot as we both go to the essential, forgetting the complex nuances. And the body language helps as well !

In 2006, I renovated a big house here in the Vendée (4 flats) for a French customer who was living and working in the UK for 20 years. I never met him and we were only exchanging mails. He had lost so much of his French that we ended communicating in English ! How weird between 2 French men ... But it worked well...
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I speak to a French friend for an hour or two each week, about half and half Fr and Eng. His English is very good, much better than my French is.

He's in his mid-forties, but he still forgets French words fairly frequently, as I do French words.

I wonder if it's partly to do with getting more fluent in the other language, your brain gets used to thinking in that language.
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I tend to find that now I think in a mixture of the two languages.

There are some things that are 'neater' in French such as 'les élus', but sometimes English is more direct and active.

I do sometimes struggle to find words from both languages when I am speaking, but that might be short-term memory loss..[:D]

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