A few days ago, I was reading this article in The Atlantic called “Forgetting and Remembering Your First Language.” In it, Olga Khazan talks about how she returns to Russia after 25 years and is struck by how much Russian she’s forgotten when she tries to hold conversations with family members and train conductors. The idea of forgetting your first language struck me as absolutely terrifying. When I was about 9, and we had skipped a summer of going to Poland, cuz we had to pay for my Communion that year, I noticed myself forgetting some very basic words in Polish. Things like “butterfly” or “umbrella” only showed up in English when I was struggling to tell my mom about my day without scaring her that I had forgotten her culture. I believe that memories are very strongly tied to the language in which they are encoded, which means that if I lost my ability to speak Polish, much of the authenticity in those memories would be lost as well. In other words, for me, losing a first language would be like slowly losing a past identity. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. After years of speaking to my parents only in Polish, I still consider myself fluent.

However, there’s a more subtle attrition that Khazan talks about in her article. It’s partial language attrition that comes out when you’re trying to express a thought or opinion that you cultivated in your dominant languge, and struggle to find the words in which to represent it in your first language. Khazan says,

“Eventually I’d take the linguistic back seat, allowing others around me to talk as I nodded politely along. Do I have an opinion about something? My opinion is “da.”

This vocab-delimited apathy led to some uncomfortable outcomes. Touring a church with a family friend, I asked what a certain icon represented. He seemed surprised I didn’t know.

“I don’t know, I’m not a believer,” I said, without thinking about how many complicated sentences of explanation this admission would prompt.

“What do you mean?!” he asked, aghast.

“Surely you don’t think the earth was created from nothing? Surely you see that there’s a divine mind behind all of this!” he said, sweeping his hands past the brightly painted walls, which depicted saints mid-torture.

I scrambled for the words for “Big Bang” or “evolution” before realizing it was hopeless.

I shrugged and smiled, as if to say, “you’re probably right.”

There are times in Poland when I have no idea how to express my opinions on education, diversity, feminism, and most things because none of the relevant words exist in my vocabulary and even if they did, I’d have no idea what they mean if embedded in a Polish cultural context. In my Second Language Acquisition class, we were talking about how language acquisition is just the flip-side of language attrition, but for bicultural bilinguals, it can definitely apply to cultural attrition as well. It’s interesting to think about if you lose touch with a culture, does your version of its language become outdated?