Can bilinguals forget their mother tongue?

Scritto da The Italian Escape Podcast

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Once upon a time, we often hear stories of immigrants who move to another country (like America) and lose their mother tongue as they were forced to assimilate into the new country’s language and culture for decades. Because of globalization, people thought that knowing English would get you anywhere. For better or worse, the geopolitical landscape is changing and knowing English won’t guarantee you a ticket ride to freedom and power.

Being a bilingual (or multilingual), I often feared that I may lose one of the languages I was exposed to. This became a hard pill for me to swallow when I started losing my Mandarin Chinese proficiency after leaving my Chinese school. Nothing was sticking in my mind as I struggled to love the language and had barely used it a home (as my family spoke in Hokkien).  

Now that I am far from my family, I have no one to speak to in Hokkien, a language that is part of my heritage and yet is considered as a dying language today. As mentioned in an article by Noah Tesch, bilingual users begin to lose proficiency of their traditional languages once they begin to pick up a language that has a better social and economic advantage. For many this meant learning English, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, or Arabic.

And so, I asked myself, how can bilinguals strengthen their relationships with several languages, including their supposed mother tongues? Will these strategies work also for people who want to learn new foreign languages, like Italian, for some?

A Singaporean news channel recently released a video on Singapore’s Mother Tongue Struggle. Being a country with four official languages, namely Mandarin Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and English, many of the people communicate in English (even in their homes). In the process, they struggle to keep or maintain their “mother tongue”.

Singapore’s education system tries to address it by requiring students to take 6 hours of “Mother Tongue” education, but it turns out to be disliked by some kids because of the way teachers educate them. Some of the unconventional solutions to maintain their mother tongues include early exposure to the language (as early as age 2), gamification of the languages, and more dynamic participation from the parents. A psychology paper also mentions the positive influence of multimedia input when it comes to maintaining bilingual children’s mother tongues.

Whether it’s a foreign language or a mother tongue, the problems behind people’s resistance to learning are similar. When a language is taught in the classroom, students don’t really pick it up because teachers would often stick to the traditional ways of teaching the language. One cannot pick up any form of curiosity in the process, making language retention less likely to happen.

So, you see, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. If bilinguals can find a way to maintain their mother tongues, anyone can pick up and maintain the languages they acquire. The solutions suggested for tackling Singapore’s bilingual issue can also be applied to any language learner’s routine. By being consistent, finding one’s interest, and keeping oneself exposed to the right environment, one may likely maintain the language one wishes to study or master.

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This journal entry was written by Angelique Lusuan.

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