Forgetting My First Language
I have a weird language history, so let me chime in. I was born in Brazil to Japanese parents. My first language as a young child was japanese. As I entered school, portuguese became the predominant language in my life and both my parents decided to focus on that, speaking portuguese at home. Once I grew up, I went to college in Canada and have lived in North America ever since.<p>I have lost all fluency in Japanese. Japanese culture had always been a part of my life as a child, but despite my family (cousins, etc) growing up on misoshiru and jpop and anime, we all spoke portuguese, so Japanese-the-language never felt like &quot;home&quot;.<p>These days, I also occasionally forget portuguese vocabulary. I do still &quot;speak&quot; with family, but mostly by text via WhatsApp, and conversations are usually pretty casual and don&#x27;t involve nearly as much eloquence as, say, a good book. The vast majority of my life now revolves around english-speaking culture: my job is full of english technical jargon that I&#x27;ve no idea how to translate, english is the language I share w&#x2F; my wife, and it&#x27;s the language I use to consume information and entertainment. English is now my &quot;home&quot;, so to speak.<p>I think the author has a similar experience: she learned english in primary school and lived a primarily english-oriented life, so english became &quot;home&quot;. The phenomenon of wanting to reconnect with one&#x27;s roots later in life doesn&#x27;t strike me as particularly unusual either. In retrospect, I did unintentionally distance myself from my own parents during my 20s (partly because that&#x27;s sorta the whole point of becoming an independent adult and discovering new things) and only really started to regain that level of touch after having kids.<p>My point is: loss of language can have a lot to do with prioritizing things one feels are impactful in their lives (though those things may not necessarily be <i>important</i> - parents are certainly <i>important</i>, but it&#x27;s the sort of thing that one can easily take for granted). Having had such a weird life experience wrt &quot;first language&quot;, I&#x27;m keenly aware that the first-ness or even the familial aspect don&#x27;t necessarily correlate with the cultural surface area that a person interfaces with the most. In some rare cases, your second - or third - language is what feels like home.