Losing the mother tongue

OPINION: I wonder how people can forget their mother tongue, writes Cherie Sivignon in this week's L'expat.

Surprisingly, it happens. I see it often in this alpine pocket of France I call home.

OK, they don't forget it in its entirety but individual words and phrases disappear from easy recall as the other language dominates.

It's started happening with our eldest son, Hugo, 12.

Hugo lived in an English-speaking environment (England and then New Zealand) for the first nine years of his life. While he learned French quickly after our move here in 2006, he says he prefers to speak English.

He still usually chooses to read English books over French and selects the original English soundtracks on foreign-made DVDs, rather than the French-dubbed option.

However, he watches French television, enjoys online chats with his French friends and spends all day at school in a French-only environment.

Slowly, but noticeably, Hugo is forgetting English words that aren't used in everyday speech. Last week he couldn't remember the English words "black ice" (verglas in French) or how to say confusion in English (ironically, it's the same word in French: confusion).

I expected this dominance in French with our younger son, Tom, 6, who is learning much in his adopted language first. Tom often asks at the dinner table how to say phrases and words in English to describe what he has learnt that day in the classroom or – more likely – the playground.

An English friend is the mother of two teenagers, the eldest of whom is 17 and at boarding school in another French town. My friend's daughter, Jo, can spend weeks with French speakers, and when she sees her parents realises she has forgotten how to communicate solely in English.

My friend says she asks Jo to repeat the sentence in English but use the French words where she has forgotten the English. Between them, they manage to work out what Jo is attempting and the teenager spends time re-learning the English vocabulary that was her only language for the first 12 years of her life.

Bilingualism isn't as easy as you might think and the bilingual adults I know all tell me that it is the written form of the less dominant language that suffers most.

English, like many languages, is more difficult in its written form than its spoken form. Spelling's the obvious dilemma. Unless you're taught or take note when looking at the written word, it's impossible to guess at the spellings of words with silent letters – words such as lamb, thumb, comb and know.

The written form is also less forgiving. When you speak, it passes in a flash and if you're misunderstood, you can correct yourself or explain differently in the next sentence. The written word is permanent, as is its accompanying misunderstanding.So the challenge for us is to help our bilingual kids keep their English in all its forms and be more than just young people who use French in an everyday setting but also speak terrific English. I want them to be able to choose which language they use to complete tertiary education, if that's their path, or choose which country they want to call home.

» Cherie Sivignon is a former Southland Times journalist who has moved to France with her French-born husband and their family.

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