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The text is interesting, and it confirms a suspicion that I had that L1 is not written in stone, or that your languages are not like a swamp ogre, full of layers. I wish that I could contribute more to this topic but language acquisition and attrition is rather far from my "turf".
Does anyone who speaks more than one language, or is social with people who know more than one language, actually think that your first language is just stuck in there?
I know the stereotype of people from the USA is that they only speak one language, but they should at least know someone who's first language isn't English, right? Or do most only socialize with people who are very similar to them?
The vast majority of my social circle is bilingual, with French being the language they spoke at home growing up and English because it's the more common language in my area.
I know plenty of people who have moved to quasi-exclusively anglophone areas, working jobs in English, who have found themselves surprised to start losing their French. The idea can seem absurd when you're in a situation where you get to speak your first language on a regular basis.
The article is really mainly about how language ties in to identity, and IMO was a really interesting read. This is something monolingual anglophones can sometimes have a bit of a blind spot for; when your language is so dominant, it can be hard to see how it's intertwined with culture and identity. Many people I've talked to, even if mostly sympathetic, have struggled with the idea of French being important to my sense of self. Language can be just seen as a tool when you speak the "default" language of an area. I've been asked "Why do you bother keeping French alive here? Wouldn't it just be easier for everyone if we'd do everything in English?" Note, plenty of francophones in the 1940s and '50s did switch to English out of social pressure, shaming, prejudices, economic prospects, not bothering to teach their kids French. I know so many unilingual anglophones with French last names who can't have a full conversation with their grandparents because neither of them can fully speak the other's language.
Sorry if that became a bit of a ramble, but the stuff the article explores is very interesting and very relevant to my experience as a member of a linguistic minority. I mostly wanted to clarify to anyone reading your comment that it pertains more to the headline than the content of the article.
I'm natively German but nowadays I consume almost everything in English and barely ever speak German, which causes me to slowly forget my native language. I can feel my vocabulary getting more and more limited and I often have to think hard for certain words that I know immediately in English. So yeah, if you don't use a language, native or otherwise, then you'll slowly unlearn it over time. Shouldn't be too surprising, it's like this with a lot of mentally related skills, like math for example. I couldn't do most of the shit I've learnt in school at some point because I never really had a use for it and consequently forgot all about it.
Duh.
I lived in Germany for two years, and when I returned I visited the mother of one of my high-school girlfriends who'd been living in the States since she'd moved there from Germany when she was 20. So, she was around 40 at the time. Anyway, me, fresh from DE and pretty fluent in German tried to have a conversation with her in German and, after a couple of minutes she switched to English and said, "I'm sorry. I've just forgotten too much German to have a conversation in it." She seemed sad about that.
But oddly, the reverse had been happening to me off and on since I'd gotten back. I'd been living with a German girl over there who didn't know much English, and I hadn't spoken English much in the past 18 months. For about a year after I returned I'd occasionally be unable to remember the English word for common things, like "trash can," and have to ask whoever I was talking to to remind me what it was.
Doesn't take much, honestly.