Daniel sent us this one — he and Hannah were at one of those Jerusalem expat parties where the first question out of everyone's mouth is "what language do you speak," and you end up bouncing between three or four languages before you've finished your drink. And it got him thinking about something we touched on before — language attrition. What happens when you learn a new language so deeply that your mother tongue starts to recede, but you never quite reach native fluency in the new one either? You end up, as he put it, in a linguistic netherland — no language spoken perfectly, several spoken imperfectly. Are these people a recognized phenomenon? Have linguists actually named them?
They have, actually. And the name is wonderfully bleak. Linguists call them "semi-speakers.
almost insultingly clinical.
And it's not even the only term. You also get "terminal speakers" — which sounds like a hospice diagnosis — and my personal favorite, "rememberers," which makes them sound like they're clinging to a language the way you cling to a childhood memory of summer camp. The academic literature is full of these euphemisms that somehow manage to be more depressing than just saying "someone who's lost their grip.
"Rememberers" sounds like a support group. "Hello, my name is Corn and I remember French.
Here's the thing — the prompt is asking about something more specific than just attrition. It's asking about the person who ends up in the gap. Not fully native in anything. And that's a real, documented state. The linguist Nancy Dorian studied this extensively with Scottish Gaelic speakers in the nineteen seventies and eighties. She found people who were fluent but not native-like — their grammar was simplified, their vocabulary was shrinking, but they could still hold conversations. She called them semi-speakers, and the term stuck.
This isn't just expat angst. This is a documented linguistic category.
And what's interesting is that Dorian's work was in a context of language death — communities where Gaelic was being replaced by English generation by generation. The semi-speakers were the generation that got caught in the middle. But the expat version is a different mechanism producing a similar outcome. Instead of a community language dying around you, you're voluntarily walking away from your linguistic community and entering a new one.
The same destination, but one's a shipwreck and the other is... choosing to swim to a different island and then realizing you forgot how to build a boat.
And the research on first language attrition — L one attrition, as it's called — has really picked up in the last twenty years. Monika Schmid, who's probably the leading researcher in this area, has done extensive work on what actually happens to your native language when you stop using it daily.
What does actually happen? Because I think most people assume their native language is permanent — like it's burned into the firmware.
That's the common intuition, and it's wrong in interesting ways. Your native language isn't a fixed object. It's a system that requires maintenance. Schmid's research shows that the first thing to go is usually lexical retrieval — word-finding. You start reaching for words and coming up empty. Then you get grammatical simplification. Then, in extreme cases, you start importing syntactic structures from your new language into your native one.
You start speaking your mother tongue with the grammar of your adopted language. That's the thing where a native English speaker who's lived in Germany for twenty years starts saying things like "I have the book read" instead of "I read the book.
And the timeline varies enormously. Some people show measurable attrition within five years. Others maintain near-native performance for decades. The biggest predictor, according to Schmid's work, isn't time — it's frequency of use. If you're not speaking your native language regularly, the system degrades.
This is where it gets personally uncomfortable for a lot of expats, I'd imagine. You're out here building a life in a new language, and the thing you thought was permanent is quietly rusting.
The really cruel part is that attrition is asymmetrical. Your ability to comprehend — listening and reading — stays pretty robust. Your production — speaking and writing — is what degrades. So you can still understand everything perfectly, which means you're acutely aware of your own decline. You know exactly what you're failing to say.
That's a special kind of torment. You can hear the gap. You can't close it.
There's a term for the psychological experience of this: "linguistic insecurity." It was coined by William Labov in the sixties, originally about speakers of non-standard dialects who felt their language was inferior. But it applies perfectly to attriters. You become insecure about your own native language. You second-guess your prepositions, your idioms, your intuitions about what "sounds right.
The expat semi-speaker isn't just losing language. They're losing confidence in the language they still have.
That confidence loss can actually accelerate the attrition. Schmid has documented cases where speakers avoid using their native language because they're embarrassed by their perceived decline, which reduces their practice, which accelerates the decline. It's a vicious cycle.
Like avoiding the gym because you're out of shape. The linguistic dad bod.
I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that phrase. But yes, the mechanism is similar. And here's where we get to the specific condition the prompt is describing — the person who's degraded in their L one and not yet native in their L two. Schmid and her colleagues have actually studied this. They call it "incomplete acquisition" on one side and "attrition" on the other.
So you're half-baked in both directions.
The term that's emerged in the last decade or so is "multi-competence," which was originally Vivian Cook's term for the idea that a bilingual isn't two monolinguals in one brain. It's a different kind of linguistic system entirely. But more recently, researchers have started talking about "language dominance reversal" and "heritage speaker outcomes" in contexts that go beyond immigrant communities.
Heritage speaker — that's the term for someone who grew up hearing a language at home but never fully acquired it, right?
And the interesting thing is that adult attriters often end up with a linguistic profile that looks remarkably similar to heritage speakers. Same kinds of errors. Same grammatical simplifications. Same hesitation patterns. The mechanism is different — one is incomplete childhood acquisition, the other is adult erosion — but the outcome is eerily similar.
An American who moves to France at thirty and lives there for twenty years might end up sounding, in English, like a second-generation immigrant kid who grew up hearing English at home but speaking French everywhere else.
And that's the "linguistic netherland" the prompt is describing. You're not a native speaker of anything anymore, but you're functional in multiple languages. Which, by the way, is not necessarily a tragedy.
Right — there's a whole body of work on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism, even imperfect bilingualism.
Even imperfect bilingualism. Ellen Bialystok's research at York University has shown that the cognitive benefits — delayed onset of dementia, better executive function, improved attentional control — don't require native-like fluency in both languages. The mere act of managing two linguistic systems, even imperfectly, produces measurable cognitive advantages.
Your brain is getting a workout even if your French is embarrassing you at dinner parties.
Your brain doesn't care about your dinner party shame. It just knows it's juggling two systems. But let me add a wrinkle here that I think gets overlooked in the expat self-flagellation narrative. The idea of "perfect" native fluency is itself a bit of a myth.
Say more about that.
The monolingual native speaker as the gold standard — that's an ideological construct, not a linguistic reality. Every native speaker has gaps. Every native speaker has domains where their language is weak. You put a monolingual English speaker in a courtroom or a medical consultation or an academic conference in a field they don't know, and suddenly they're not so fluent. Their vocabulary shrinks. Their comprehension drops. They make errors.
The "native speaker" benchmark is partly a fiction we've built to make expats feel bad about themselves.
It's a fiction that serves a lot of purposes, not all of them benign. In language testing and immigration policy, the native speaker standard has been used to exclude people. In linguistics, the idealization of the "ideal native speaker" was a methodological convenience that hardened into an assumption. But real language use is messy. Everyone is a semi-speaker in some context.
Which means the expat who speaks three languages imperfectly might actually be closer to the normal human linguistic condition than the monolingual who speaks one language "perfectly.
Historically, that's almost certainly true. Mass monolingualism is the historical anomaly. For most of human history, most people lived in multilingual environments and spoke multiple languages at varying levels of proficiency. The nation-state project of one language, one people, one territory is very recent. The linguistic netherland might actually be the ancestral human condition.
This is deeply reassuring and I hate it because I wanted to feel special about my linguistic decline.
You can feel special about other things. But on this point, the data is pretty clear. The expat semi-speaker isn't a linguistic refugee. They're a linguistic normie who happens to live in an era that pathologizes them.
Alright, so we've established that the condition is real, it has names — semi-speaker, rememberer, multi-competent bilingual with dominance reversal, which I'm not going to say twice — and it's probably the historical human default. But let's get practical. What actually degrades first, and why?
The research points to a predictable sequence. Stage one is lexical access. You know the word, but you can't retrieve it quickly. You get the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon more frequently. You start using circumlocutions — describing the thing instead of naming it. "The thing you use to... you know, the metal thing with the...
My entire existence in Hebrew.
Stage two is what's called "cross-linguistic influence" — structural borrowing from your L two into your L one. Word order shifts. Prepositions get weird. You start using the wrong collocations because you're mapping from your new language's patterns.
Collocations being those word pairs that just go together — "strong coffee" not "powerful coffee," "heavy rain" not "strong rain.
And those are deeply arbitrary and language-specific, which makes them especially vulnerable to interference. Stage three is morphological simplification. You start dropping grammatical markers — case endings, gender agreement, verb conjugations. Your grammar becomes more analytical, more like English, even if your native language is highly inflected.
A native Russian speaker living in the US might start dropping case endings because English doesn't have them and their brain has decided they're optional.
There's a famous case study of a Russian immigrant in the US who, after about fifteen years, started producing sentences that a Russian monolingual would find grammatical but odd — like she was translating from English in her head even when speaking Russian. Her case system was intact but simplified. She'd use the nominative where a genitive should go. Things like that.
Is there a stage four?
Stage four is what Schmid calls "complete language loss" in extreme cases — but this is rare in adults. Children can lose a language entirely within months. Adults almost never lose their L one completely. The system degrades, but the core remains. What you get is a reduced, simplified version of the native language that's still recognizably native — just not fully elaborated.
The nightmare scenario — "I've forgotten English entirely" — basically doesn't happen to adults.
There are documented cases of prisoners in solitary confinement experiencing severe language deterioration, and some cases of elderly immigrants who haven't spoken their L one in fifty-plus years showing major decline. But total loss? In a neurologically healthy adult living in society? Essentially unheard of.
That's reassuring. But it also raises a question: if the core remains, can you get it back?
Yes, and this is one of the more hopeful findings in the attrition literature. Re-exposure works remarkably well. Schmid has documented cases of attriters who returned to their home country and within weeks to months recovered most of what they'd lost. The language isn't gone — it's inaccessible. It's like a path that's overgrown but still there. You just need to clear the vegetation.
The linguistic muscle memory is still there.
More like the linguistic road network is still there, but some of the smaller roads have been closed for maintenance and you need to reopen them. The main highways are fine. The back roads are where the attrition shows up.
This maps onto my experience pretty well, I have to say. My English is fine. My ability to produce a complex English sentence about, I don't know, insurance policy terms — that's degraded. I'd have to think about it. Ten years ago I could have done it instantly.
Domain-specific attrition. That's extremely common. The language you use at work, or in your daily life in your new country, stays sharp. The language domains you've abandoned — the vocabulary of your former profession, the slang of your youth, the idioms your parents used — those fade.
You end up fluent in the domains you practice and rusty everywhere else. Which means your native language isn't one thing — it's a collection of domains, and they don't all age at the same rate.
And this is why the whole concept of "native speaker fluency" as a unitary thing is so problematic. Fluency is domain-specific. Even for monolinguals. The expat situation just makes the domain-specificity visible because the domains have been geographically split.
Let me pull on a thread here. The prompt mentions speaking "no language perfectly, but several languages imperfectly." There's a value judgment embedded in that — that imperfect is worse. Is that actually how linguists think about it?
There's been a real shift in applied linguistics away from the deficit model — "what's missing from your language" — toward a resource model — "what can you do with the linguistic resources you have." The term that's gained traction is "translanguaging.
Break that down.
It's the idea that multilingual speakers don't have separate, compartmentalized language systems. They have one integrated linguistic repertoire, and they draw on different parts of it in different contexts. When a Spanish-English bilingual code-switches mid-sentence, that's not a failure to stay in one language — it's a skilled deployment of their full linguistic resources.
The "linguistic netherland" might actually be a linguistic superpower if you reframe it.
Ofelia García, who's the leading theorist of translanguaging, would argue exactly that. The person who speaks three languages imperfectly has access to communicative resources that a monolingual doesn't. They can code-switch for nuance. They can borrow a word from one language that captures something untranslatable in another. They can navigate multiple cultural frames.
The counterargument, I imagine, is that in any given language, they're operating at a lower ceiling than a native speaker. There are things they simply can't express as precisely.
That's true in the abstract. In practice, most communication doesn't happen at the ceiling. Most communication happens in the middle ranges of linguistic complexity. The attriter might struggle to write a literary novel in their native language. They're probably fine ordering coffee, making small talk, and conducting business.
Depends on the business. If you're a lawyer or a diplomat, the precision ceiling matters a lot.
And that's where the real anxiety lives — among professionals whose identity and livelihood are tied to linguistic precision. Journalists, writers, lawyers, academics. These are the people who feel attrition most acutely because their professional self-concept is built on language mastery.
Which describes a lot of the expat community in Jerusalem, honestly. You've got people who were serious professionals in their home countries and are now navigating life in a language they'll never fully command. The gap between their professional self-image and their linguistic reality is enormous.
That gap produces real psychological distress. There's research on "L two anxiety" — the stress of functioning in a non-native language — but there's less on what we might call "L one grief." The mourning for your lost native fluency. The sense that you're becoming a diminished version of yourself.
L one grief. That's a term that should exist if it doesn't.
It's not formalized in the literature, but the phenomenon is widely observed. Schmid's interviews with long-term expats are full of expressions of loss. People describe feeling like they're "losing themselves" or "becoming someone else." Language and identity are so tightly bound that linguistic attrition feels like identity attrition.
Which brings us back to the party that sparked this prompt. You're at a gathering where everyone is asking "what language do you speak" — and the honest answer for many people there might be "none of them, fully." That's an existentially strange position to be in.
And it's also, I think, an increasingly common position. We're living in an era of unprecedented mobility. The number of people living outside their country of birth has never been higher. The expat semi-speaker isn't a fringe case — they're a growing demographic.
There was a UN report on this — the international migrant population hit something like two hundred eighty million a few years back, and that was before the various displacement crises of the last few years.
That's not even counting the people who are functionally expats without officially migrating — digital nomads, remote workers, people who spend half the year in one country and half in another. The linguistic netherland is getting crowded.
If this is an increasingly common human experience, what do we actually do with it? How should someone in this position think about their linguistic situation?
I think the first step is to abandon the monolingual native speaker as your benchmark. That's a standard you'll never meet, and it's a standard that doesn't reflect how human language actually works. The second step is to recognize that your linguistic repertoire — even if it's patchy and domain-limited — is genuinely valuable. You can do things that monolinguals can't.
The third step?
Maintenance is possible if you want it. If your native language matters to you, you can protect it. The research is clear that active use is the key variable. Speak your native language regularly. Read in it. Write in it. Don't just passively consume — produce. The people who maintain the best L one fluency are the ones who keep using it in demanding contexts, not just casual conversation.
The expat who only speaks their native language when they call their parents once a week is going to attrite faster than the one who's in a book club or writing professionally or arguing about politics with friends from back home.
Frequency matters, but so does intensity. Low-stakes, formulaic conversation — "how are you, I'm fine, the weather is nice" — doesn't do much to maintain complex linguistic abilities. You need to use the language in cognitively demanding ways.
Which is a problem, because most expats' native-language interactions are exactly that — low-stakes catch-ups with family. You're not debating philosophy with your mom. You're not writing legal briefs to your childhood friends. The high-complexity domains are exactly the ones you're doing in your new language.
That's the structural challenge. Your work life is in L two. Your intellectual life is increasingly in L two. Your native language gets relegated to the emotional and the casual. And emotional-casual is not where complex syntax lives.
You end up with a native language that can say "I miss you" but can't explain why, exactly, you miss them — the nuance, the ambivalence, the layered feeling. You've got the Hallmark vocabulary but not the essay vocabulary.
That's a painfully good way to put it. The Hallmark vocabulary but not the essay vocabulary. And that's where the identity loss comes in, because complex interior life requires complex language. If you can't do complexity in your native language anymore, and you can't yet do it in your adopted language, where does your interior life go?
That's the frightening question. You become a person without a language for your own complexity.
Yet — I want to push back on the bleakness here — people are remarkably adaptive. The brain finds ways. The translanguaging research shows that multilinguals often develop rich interior lives that draw on multiple languages. Your inner monologue might be in mixed code. Your emotional processing might happen in one language while your analytical processing happens in another. The system reorganizes.
You don't lose complexity. You just lose the ability to express it in any single language.
Which is, when you think about it, a pretty good description of the human condition even before you add multilingualism into the mix. Nobody has full expressive access to their own interior life. Language is always an approximation.
Alright, so we've covered the phenomenon, the terminology, the research, the psychological dimension, and the reframing. Let me ask one more thing: is there a point of no return? After how long does attrition become irreversible?
The research doesn't support a clear point of no return. What it supports is a distinction between accessibility and permanent loss. The language is almost never permanently lost in adults. But re-access can take longer the longer you've been away. Someone who's been abroad for five years might recover full fluency in weeks. Someone who's been abroad for thirty years might need months of intensive re-exposure.
Recovery is possible.
Recovery is possible, with a caveat. You may never sound exactly like you would have if you'd never left. There's some evidence that very subtle phonetic shifts — accent changes — can be persistent. And some grammatical patterns may remain simplified. But functional, near-native fluency is achievable for most returnees.
What about the person who never returns? The permanent expat who will live the rest of their life in their adopted language?
Then the question becomes not "can I recover my L one" but "what kind of linguistic life do I want to lead." And that's a values question, not a scientific one. Some people decide that maintaining their native language at a high level is important to them, and they do the work. Others accept the attrition as the cost of full immersion in their new linguistic community. Neither choice is wrong.
The prompt frames it as a "fantastic sort of linguistic netherland" — and I think the word "fantastic" is doing double duty there. It's fantastic in the sense of strange and remarkable, and maybe also fantastic in the sense of... not ideal, but interesting.
That's exactly the right reading. It's a liminal state. Liminal states are uncomfortable, but they're also where interesting things happen. The semi-speaker, the rememberer, the multi-competent bilingual with an asymmetrical dominance profile — whatever you want to call them — they're living in a linguistic border zone. And border zones are where languages have always evolved, where new forms emerge, where the rules get rewritten.
Border zones are also where people get shot.
The border zone is not comfortable. Linguistic insecurity is real. The sense of loss is real. I don't want to romanticize this. But I also don't want to pathologize it. It's a human experience that millions of people are having right now, and it deserves to be understood on its own terms rather than as a failure to be a proper monolingual.
To answer the actual question — yes, this is a thing that happens. Yes, linguists have named it, though the names are various and mostly depressing. And yes, you can end up speaking no language perfectly and several languages imperfectly. You're not broken. You're just a semi-speaker in a world that's increasingly full of them.
If that feels like a demotion from "native speaker," consider that the native speaker ideal was always a bit of a con. You were never as perfect as you thought you were. You just hadn't been away long enough to notice the cracks.
That's either deeply comforting or deeply unsettling and I can't decide which.
That's the right place to land.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the late eighteen nineties, the Danish colonial administration in Greenland maintained a ceremonial office called the Royal Inspector of Northern Greenland, whose formal installation required him to sit alone in a darkened room for exactly one hour while a choir of Inuit catechists sang Danish hymns translated into Greenlandic — a ritual that converted roughly four thousand Danish kroner of administrative expense into about seventeen minutes of actual governance per year of tenure.
...right.
That's disorienting.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find every episode, show notes, and the full archive at myweirdprompts.If you enjoyed this, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps people find the show. We'll be back soon.
