You know, Herman, I was thinking about how we speak. Not just the words we choose, but the actual rhythm, the cadence, the underlying architecture of it all. Have you ever noticed that when you spend enough time with someone, you start to borrow their vocal tics? You start to mirror their pauses or adopt their specific way of emphasizing certain syllables. It is almost like a social contagion, but for syntax.
Oh, absolutely, Corn. It is a well-documented phenomenon called linguistic mirroring, or more broadly, Communication Accommodation Theory. It was pioneered by Howard Giles back in the nineteen-seventies. The idea is that we subconsciously adjust our speech to minimize the social distance between ourselves and the person we are talking to. It is a very real, very human thing. But what is even more fascinating—and what we are diving into today—is when that mirroring happens not just between two people, but across entire languages. Herman Poppleberry, at your service, and I have been diving into some really dense, really interesting research on this lately. It is a field that is constantly evolving, especially as our world becomes more interconnected.
It is perfect timing because Daniel’s prompt today is about exactly that. Daniel is a long-time listener who has been living in Israel for a while now, and he is noticing something unsettling. He is noticing that his native English—the language he grew up with, his first language—is starting to shift. It is not that he is forgetting English, but it is being reshaped. He is picking up Hebrew structures, even when he is speaking English to other native English speakers. He mentioned things like saying or-or instead of either-or, or using the word relevant in ways that make perfect sense in a Hebrew context but sound just a little bit off in standard English.
That is such a classic, textbook example of what linguists call linguistic attrition, specifically first-language attrition. It is this fascinating, sometimes distressing process where your primary language starts to erode or change because of the constant, high-pressure influence of a second language. It is not a sign of cognitive decline or that you are losing your intelligence. It is more about the fact that these two languages are starting to compete for space in the same mental real estate. Your brain is a finite resource, and when you are immersed in a second language, that language starts to demand more resources, often at the expense of the first.
Right, and Daniel’s question really gets to the heart of the mystery. He was asking why the mother tongue seems to have this lifelong, indelible imprint. Why is it so incredibly hard to truly lose your first language, even if it gets a bit rusty or weirdly shaped, while a second language can seemingly vanish into thin air if you do not use it for a few years? He used a great analogy—he said it is like the first language is written in permanent ink on the brain, while the second one is just sketched in pencil.
That is a wonderful way to frame it, and it is actually quite scientifically accurate. The answer really lies in the way our brains are wired during those very early, critical years of development. We have talked about brain plasticity on the show before, but the linguistic aspect is truly unique. When you are a child, from birth until roughly puberty, your brain is in a state of hyper-plasticity. You are not just learning a list of words; you are building the actual neural architecture for language itself. You are laying down the foundational tracks that every other thought will eventually run on.
So, it is not just about memorizing a vocabulary list or learning where the verbs go. You are setting the fundamental rules for how thoughts are structured and how reality is categorized.
Exactly. There is a concept called the Critical Period Hypothesis, which was famously championed by Eric Lenneberg in the nineteen-sixties. It suggests that there is a biological window where the brain is uniquely suited to acquiring a first language. During this window, the language you are exposed to becomes deeply integrated into your cognitive framework. It is not just a tool you use; it is part of how you perceive the world. By the time you reach adulthood and that window closes, those neural pathways are so well-established, so heavily myelinated—which is the brain's way of insulating and strengthening connections—that they are incredibly resilient. They are the bedrock.
But Daniel is noticing that even that bedrock is being moved. He gave the example of the word relevant. In Hebrew, the word relevanti is used much more broadly than we use relevant in English. If an Israeli asks, is it relevant? they might mean, are you still interested? or is the job still open? or is this still a possibility? Daniel finds himself using the English word relevant in those specific Hebrew ways. Is that still considered attrition if he is still technically speaking English?
Yes, that is a specific subtype called inter-language attrition or semantic extension. It is not that the word relevant has been deleted from his brain. It is that the semantic boundaries of the word—the "container" of meaning that the word holds—has been stretched to match the Hebrew container. Think of it like a river that has been flowing in one direction for twenty years. That is his native English. If you suddenly start pumping a massive amount of water in from a different angle—that is the Hebrew immersion—the original riverbed is still there, but the current starts to swirl, the banks start to erode, and the water starts to flow into new channels. The river is still the same river, but its behavior has changed.
That is a vivid image. So, the first language provides the bed, but the second language can change the flow. But Daniel also asked a really provocative question about the total loss of a language. He mentioned his time in the Netherlands as a kid, where he was exposed to Dutch but went to an English-speaking school. He was wondering: if he had learned Dutch fluently back then and then moved away, could that language have just... evaporated? Can a second language actually be deleted?
The short answer is yes, absolutely. Second language loss is much more common and much more total than first language attrition. If you learn a language after that critical period has closed, it is often stored differently in the brain. It does not have that same foundational, architectural status. Research shows that without constant reinforcement, the neural connections for a second language can weaken to the point where they are essentially inaccessible. It is like a path in the woods that nobody walks on anymore. Eventually, the brush grows over, the trees fall, and the path is gone. You might know a path was there, but you can no longer find your way through.
Is there a specific timeline for that? Daniel called it a linguistic half-life, which I thought was a very clever way to put it.
It varies based on how well you knew the language and how old you were when you stopped using it, but the concept of a half-life is actually quite accurate. There was a landmark study by Harry Bahrick back in the nineteen-eighties where he tracked people who had learned Spanish in high school. He found that they lost a significant portion of their vocabulary within the first three to five years after they stopped using it. It was a steep drop-off. But then, interestingly, the loss leveled off. He coined the term permastore to describe the knowledge that remains. Whatever they still knew after five years, they tended to remember for the next twenty-five years.
So there is a core that stays? A little survival kit of Spanish?
A very small core, yes. But for a second language learned in adulthood, that core might only be a few hundred words and basic sentence structures. For a first language, the core is almost everything. Even people who have been isolated from their native language for forty or fifty years can usually regain fluency relatively quickly if they are re-immersed. The pathways are dormant, not dead. They are like old, rusty pipes—once you turn the water back on, they might leak a bit at first, but the structure is there. For a second language, the pipes might have been dismantled entirely.
That brings up an interesting point about Daniel’s son, Ezra. Daniel mentioned that Ezra is at the advanced babbling stage. He is literally in the middle of that critical period right now. If Daniel is speaking this hybrid English-Hebrew at home—this "Hebrish"—what does that do to Ezra’s first language development? Is he learning a "broken" language?
That is where it gets really cool, and it is something parents often worry about unnecessarily. Ezra isn’t experiencing attrition; he is experiencing acquisition. To his developing brain, there is no such thing as a "pure" language or a "hybrid" language. He is just learning the language of his environment. If his environment uses the or-or structure and uses the word relevant in a broad way, his brain will treat that as the standard. He is building his neural architecture based on the input he receives. He will grow up with a very specific, unique linguistic identity that perfectly reflects his bilingual reality. He is not learning English with Hebrew mistakes; he is learning the dialect of his community.
It makes me think about the melting pot aspect Daniel mentioned. Israel is a fascinating case study because it is full of immigrants from all over the world. If you have thousands of people all experiencing this same kind of attrition—where their native English or Russian or French is being shaped by the dominant Hebrew culture—you eventually get a new dialect. You get a communal shift.
Precisely. That is exactly how languages evolve over centuries. We tend to think of languages like English or French as these static, museum-piece things, but they are living organisms. They are constantly rubbing up against each other, exchanging parts, and merging. English itself is a prime example. It is basically three or four languages in a trench coat—Old English, Old Norse, Norman French, and Latin—all of which influenced each other through centuries of contact and, frankly, linguistic attrition. The "pure" English we think we are protecting is actually the result of a thousand years of people "messing up" their original languages.
I want to go back to the idea of losing a second language entirely. You said it can be total. But what about cases where someone learns a second language very early, maybe at age five or six, and then moves away? Is that still a second language, or does it count as a second first language?
Linguists call that a heritage language, and this is where the science gets a bit tragic. If you move away from a language before that critical period is fully closed—say, at age seven or eight—you can actually lose your first language almost entirely. There are documented cases of international adoptees who completely forget their birth language within just a few years of moving to a new country. In those cases, the brain is still so plastic, so focused on efficiency, that it just overwrites the old system with the new one. It is not just attrition; it is a total replacement. The brain decides the old information is no longer useful for survival in the new environment and clears the cache to make room for the new operating system.
That is a heavy thought. The idea that your brain can just decide a part of your history is no longer relevant—in the English sense of the word—and delete it.
It is efficient, but it can be a huge loss for personal identity. However, for someone like Daniel, who moved as an adult, that won’t happen. His English is his foundation. What he is experiencing is more like a decorative renovation. He is adding Hebrew windows and doors to his English house. He might change the layout of the kitchen to match the Hebrew style, but the foundation and the frame are Irish-English. It might look a bit different to people back home, but the structure is solid.
He mentioned that when he goes back to visit family, people look at him like he is a weird hybrid. I can imagine that feeling. You feel like you are speaking your native tongue, you feel like you are being perfectly clear, but everyone else can hear the ghosts of another language in your sentences. They hear a rhythm that shouldn't be there.
That is a known phenomenon called the foreign accent in the native tongue. It is one of the most fascinating aspects of attrition. It is not just about the words or the grammar; it is about the prosody—the intonation, the stress patterns, the music of the language. Hebrew has a very different rhythmic structure than English. English is stress-timed, meaning we linger on stressed syllables and crunch the unstressed ones. Hebrew is more syllable-timed. If Daniel starts adopting that Hebrew rhythm, his English will sound "foreign" to a native speaker in Dublin, even if every single word he uses is technically English.
It is like he is playing an English song but with a Hebrew beat. The notes are the same, but the groove is different.
That is a perfect analogy. And because language is so deeply tied to our sense of self and our sense of belonging, it can be really disorienting. You feel like you are losing a piece of yourself, or at least that the piece of yourself you present to the world is changing without your permission. You go home and you feel like an outsider in your own skin because your "operating system" has been patched with foreign code.
So, what can someone do if they want to fight this? If Daniel wants to keep his English "pure," is that even possible once you are fully integrated into another culture? Or is the "Hebrish" inevitable?
It is very difficult to fight it entirely because it is a subconscious process. To maintain a "pure" version of your first language while living in a second-language environment, you have to be incredibly intentional. You need what linguists call high-quality, diverse input. That means you can't just talk to other English-speakers in Israel, because they are all experiencing the same attrition. You will all just reinforce each other’s new habits. You need to read complex literature, listen to podcasts from your home country—like this one, Daniel!—and have deep, long conversations with people who are still immersed in the original environment.
You have to create a linguistic bubble.
Exactly. But there is also a school of thought that says, why fight it? This hybridity is actually a sign of successful integration. It means your brain is successfully navigating two different worlds at once. There is a massive cognitive benefit to this. Bilinguals, even those experiencing attrition, often show better executive function. They are better at task-switching and ignoring distractions. There is even research suggesting that this constant mental "weightlifting" can delay the onset of dementia symptoms by four to five years.
That is a huge upside. So, Daniel’s brain is actually getting a massive workout every time he struggles to find the "right" version of the word relevant.
A massive workout. Every time he speaks, his brain has to actively suppress the Hebrew word to let the English one out, or vice versa. That inhibitory control is like doing sets of heavy squats for your prefrontal cortex. It is exhausting, which is why people often feel "brain fry" after a day of switching languages, but it makes the brain more resilient in the long run.
I want to dig deeper into this idea of the lifelong imprint. You mentioned the neural architecture. Is there a specific part of the brain where the first language lives? Is it like a hard drive in the back of the head?
It is not quite that localized, but generally, language is processed in the left hemisphere for most people—specifically in areas like Broca’s area, which handles speech production, and Wernicke’s area, which handles comprehension. But research using functional M-R-I scans has shown something really striking. When a native speaker uses their first language, the brain is incredibly efficient. It uses very specific, localized pathways. It is like a well-worn commuter route. But when that same person uses a second language they learned later in life, the brain lights up much more broadly. It is recruiting more areas, working harder, and burning more energy to achieve the same result.
It is like the difference between a professional athlete performing a move they have done a million times and a beginner trying to copy it. The professional is fluid and efficient; the beginner is using every muscle in their body and still looks a bit stiff.
Exactly. And because those first language pathways are so efficient and so deeply etched during that childhood window of plasticity, they never really go away. They are the "default" setting. Even if you cover them with a bit of dust—the second language—the needle can still find the groove if you clean it off. This is why Daniel feels like he can't lose his English. His brain literally doesn’t know how to think without those English structures. They are the scaffolding for his entire consciousness. To lose English entirely, he would almost have to lose his sense of self.
That brings us back to the second language question. If the second language is just a layer of dust, or a temporary structure built on top of the scaffolding, then yeah, it makes sense that it can be wiped away completely. If it never became part of the fundamental architecture, the brain doesn’t "need" it to function.
Precisely. This is why people who study a language for years in school and then never use it can find themselves unable to even order a coffee in that language five years later. The brain is a master of efficiency. It is a "use it or lose it" system. If a set of neural connections isn’t being used to help you survive or communicate in your daily life, the brain will eventually prune them to save energy. It is biological housekeeping.
But with the first language, you are always using it, even if you aren’t speaking it out loud. You are thinking in it, right?
For the most part, yes. Most long-term immigrants report that they still think or dream in their native language for a very long time. Although, as attrition sets in, even the inner monologue can start to shift. That is when you know the second language has really taken root—when you start stubbing your toe and shouting an expletive in the new language instead of the old one. Or when you start doing mental math in the second language.
I wonder if that is happening to Daniel yet. Daniel, if you are listening, let us know if your internal expletives have shifted to Hebrew. That feels like a major milestone.
That is usually the final frontier! But let’s talk about the practical side of his examples for a second, because they are so specific. The or-or example is a classic case of syntactic interference. In Hebrew, the structure for either-or is often just repeating the word for or—o... o... . So, "o nilech le-kan, o nilech le-sham" literally translates to "or we go here, or we go there." In English, that sounds wrong because our brains are primed to expect the word either to set up the binary choice. But if Daniel hears that Hebrew version ten thousand times a year, his brain starts to realize that the word either is actually redundant. It is extra work. And as we established, the brain loves to cut corners.
So it’s not just that he’s forgetting the word either. His brain is actually optimizing his English to match the logic of the environment he lives in. He is becoming a more efficient communicator for the world he actually inhabits.
Exactly. It is a logical optimization. If everyone around you understands the or-or structure, why bother with the extra syllable and the complex grammar of either? The problem, of course, is when you leave that specific environment and go back to one where that optimization is seen as an error. It is like having a specific power adapter for one country. It works perfectly there—it is actually better than the universal one—but you are in trouble when you try to plug it in back home.
That is a great analogy. You are optimized for a specific local environment, but that makes you less compatible with the global one. It is the price of integration.
It really is. And I think it is important to address the emotional side of this. Daniel sounded a bit wistful about it, especially when talking about his son Ezra. There is a sense of loss, isn’t there? Even if it is just a few words or a bit of grammar. It feels like a betrayal of your roots.
There is. It is called linguistic insecurity. You start to doubt your own mastery of the one thing that is supposed to be yours by birthright. You feel like a stranger in your own language. But I think it is important to reframe it, like you said earlier. Instead of seeing it as a loss of English, you can see it as the birth of a new, more complex identity. Daniel isn't just an English speaker anymore; he is a bridge.
I love that. And it is something that millions of people around the world are going through right now. It is a very modern, globalized phenomenon. We are seeing the rise of these "third-space" languages. Think about Spanglish in the United States or Hinglish in India. These aren’t just "broken" versions of two languages; they are vibrant, rule-governed systems that reflect the reality of the people who speak them. They have their own poetry and their own utility.
So, Daniel isn’t losing his English; he is participating in the creation of a new Israeli-English dialect. He is a pioneer of a new way of speaking.
Precisely. And that dialect has its own beauty. That word relevanti, for instance, fills a gap. It covers a range of meanings that English doesn’t have a single, concise word for. By adopting it, Daniel has actually expanded his expressive range, even if it feels like he is losing something. He has a new tool in his belt that his family in Ireland doesn't have.
That is a really powerful takeaway. It is not a zero-sum game. You can lose a bit of the traditional structure while gaining a new kind of depth and a new way of connecting with the people around you.
Absolutely. But to answer Daniel’s second question again, about the Dutch—just to give him some peace of mind. If he had become fluent in Dutch as a second language and then never spoke it again, he could absolutely lose it to the point where he couldn't even form a basic sentence. The brain is brutal when it comes to second languages. It sees them as luxury features, not essential systems. If the budget gets tight—meaning, if you aren't using the language—those features are the first to go.
Is there any way to get them back faster, though? If he decided to move back to the Netherlands tomorrow, would his previous knowledge help him relearn it faster than a total beginner? Or is he starting from zero?
Oh, he would definitely have an advantage. This is the concept of savings in relearning, which was first studied by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the late nineteenth century. Even if you think you have forgotten everything, the neural pathways are often still there in a very faint, ghostly way. They are "dormant." You will relearn the vocabulary and grammar much, much faster than someone who has never been exposed to it. It is like a path in the woods that has been overgrown with weeds. You can’t see it, but the ground is still packed down underneath. It is much easier to clear those weeds than to hack a brand new path through the dense brush.
That is encouraging. So nothing is ever truly, one hundred percent gone, even if it feels that way when you are trying to remember the word for "bicycle" in Dutch.
In the brain, almost nothing is ever truly deleted. It is just moved to deep storage. But the first language? That is not in deep storage. That is the operating system. You can’t delete the operating system without crashing the whole computer.
I think Daniel can rest easy knowing his English operating system is safe. It might have a few Hebrew plugins installed now, and the interface might look a little different, but the core code is still there.
Exactly. And those plugins are actually making the system more versatile and more powerful. He should embrace the "Hebrish." It is a sign of a life well-lived and a brain that is working hard to bridge two different worlds.
This has been such a deep dive, Herman. I feel like I understand my own speech patterns better now. It makes me want to pay more attention to the little tics I have picked up from you over the years. I think I’ve started using the word "fascinating" about ten times more often since we started this show.
Oh, I am sure there are many! And I have definitely picked up some of your thoughtful pauses. That is the beauty of it. Language is a social act. It is meant to be shared, and in the sharing, it is meant to be changed.
Well, before we wrap up, I want to remind everyone that if you are enjoying these deep dives into the weird and wonderful prompts Daniel and others send us, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Whether it is Spotify or Apple Podcasts, those ratings really help other people find the show and join our weird little community.
It really does make a huge difference. We love seeing the community grow and hearing how these topics resonate with your own lives.
And if you want to get in touch, you can always find us at our website, myweirdprompts.com. We have an R-S-S feed there for subscribers and a contact form if you have your own weird prompts you want us to tackle. You can also email us directly at show at myweirdprompts.com.
We are also available on all the major platforms, so you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. We are everywhere!
Thanks for joining us today for episode seven hundred and eighty-six. It has been a blast exploring the permanent ink of the mother tongue.
Always a pleasure, Corn. This has been My Weird Prompts.
We will see you next time. Goodbye!
Goodbye!
