How has your native language been affected since you started learning languages?

[Montmorency]

I'm a native English speaker who has always lived in the UK so I reckon my English is hardwired into me. However, I often travel to Germany where I speak exclusively German. My next trip will be over the Christmas and New Year period and I'll be doing lots of socialising with various in-laws, operating in full German mode. When I return home after such trips, I find that German words often pop into my head and sometimes they slip out in speech, but this wears off after a week or so.

What interests me more, is what would happen to my English if I actually moved to Germany (something we are considering) and had to use German every single day. Would my English become a little rusty around the edges? I'd still obviously talk to my family on the phone regularly and would probably continue reading a lot of English material, so I don't think it would be affected to any great degree.

I used to go to a German evening class for several years with a native speaking German tutor who had lived mostly in the UK for about 40 years, was married to an Englishman and seemed to live a fairly traditional English bourgeois life. She obviously kept in touch with her German, if nothing else because of her teaching. But she said that while she wasn't losing her German, her friends & family in Germany noticed that her small talk and slang were a bit "dated" It is obviously harder to keep your finger on the pulse of the living language when you aren't living in its heartland. I think the same can be true of e.g. British expats who come "home" after many years living abroad. Of course their English is still hard-wired, but they are probably a bit cut off from English as it is actually currently spoken in the UK. In the past, this would have been particularly true of those who had made their lives and careers in the various outposts of Empire, and had to come back "home" as the Empire shrank. Probably true of any European ex-colonial power (e.g France, Belgium & The Netherlands).

@Brian It sounds like you have a German spouse. Does that provide a lot of German speaking opportunities for you? From talking to others in this position, I gather that it does not necessarily follow. Depends entirely on the individuals and the circumstances.

[Brian]

@Brian It sounds like you have a German spouse. Does that provide a lot of German speaking opportunities for you? From talking to others in this position, I gather that it does not necessarily follow. Depends entirely on the individuals and the circumstances.

Yes, my wife is from Germany and we have been together for 11 years. Initially, we spoke only English as my German amounted to a handful of phrases dimly recalled from my schooldays. Meanwhile, her English was excellent as she had been making business trips to the UK for years.

The motivation for me to improve my German resulted from travelling to Germany to meet her family. My wife is from a village in a rural area and I quickly realised I had two choices: start speaking German and interact with the locals, or sit in the corner not understanding a word. I chose the former.

Once I began learning in earnest, I found that I enjoyed it and I derived great satisfaction from going to Germany actually using the language in real-life settings. My wife and I speak a mix of English and German at home, maybe 70% English, but this balance shifts somewhat when we are in Germany and surrounded by the German language. Or when we have German visitors, the house often becomes a German-speaking zone for a few days.

Having a spouse from another country certainly gives you a great link to the language via the network of family and friends. But it's not a spouse's job to teach the other half how to speak the language. The motivation and determination must come from within. I know a few British people who are married or in a relationship with Germans and it ranges from not knowing any functional German to being almost native-like. Everyone has different attitudes and living circumstances.

[Ogrim]

What interests me more, is what would happen to my English if I actually moved to Germany (something we are considering) and had to use German every single day. Would my English become a little rusty around the edges? I'd still obviously talk to my family on the phone regularly and would probably continue reading a lot of English material, so I don't think it would be affected to any great degree.

I have lived outside Norway for the last 20 years, my wife is Spanish and I have lived in French-speaking countries and in the UK. Has this affected my Norwegian? Probably somewhat, but not in the sense that I find it hard to talk or write Norwegian, but rather that I have missed out on how Norwegian has evolved over the last 20 years. When I am back in Norway I discover that people use words and expressions which didn't exist when I was living there. This probably makes me sound a bit "out of date" from time to tine when speaking Norwegian. Another thing which some friends have commented on is that I have a slightly "foreign" intonation when speaking Norwegian. That is of course possible, but I don't really notice it myself.

[Brian]

I have lived outside Norway for the last 20 years, my wife is Spanish and I have lived in French-speaking countries and in the UK. Has this affected my Norwegian? Probably somewhat, but not in the sense that I find it hard to talk or write Norwegian, but rather that I have missed out on how Norwegian has evolved over the last 20 years. When I am back in Norway I discover that people use words and expressions which didn't exist when I was living there. This probably makes me sound a bit "out of date" from time to tine when speaking Norwegian.

My wife says the same thing about the vernacular when we go back to Germany. Not just teenage slang - which probably changes on an almost yearly basis - but regular expressions which have entered the language over the last couple of decades.

[pir]

What interests me more, is what would happen to my English if I actually moved to Germany (something we are considering) and had to use German every single day. Would my English become a little rusty around the edges? I'd still obviously talk to my family on the phone regularly and would probably continue reading a lot of English material, so I don't think it would be affected to any great degree.

As @Montmorency said, you might miss out on new colloquialisms. Slang changes so much that even older people don't know the latest youth slang, but there are other expressions that enter mainstream consciousness that you might not acquire yourself even if you hear them from family and friends. IMO if you want to remain current you will have to study them just like vocabulary in a foreign language.

I was really shocked to find that after nearly 30 years of not speaking German, the vernacular is littered with English words now; in some contexts it feels more like Germlish than German. I wouldn't have expected that -- there was the occasional loanword when I still spoke German, but nothing like what happened in the 1990s; it became extremely fashionable to simply adopt English words wholesale, across the board. Before that most loanwords were actually more loan translations (eg. skyscraper became Wolkenkratzer). And what's ironic is that, heck, i know all those words, but using them in German feels dead wrong. Oh, and some of them are pseudo-English and don't actually have the same meaning, which is really disconcerting ("Bodybag" is a messenger bag; "Handy" is a mobile phone).

So that's also something to consider, though maybe less so for English, which is more specific with the loanwords it adopts (they're most often from cultural contexts).

[Montmorency]

pjr's post encourages me to post a link to this song from the brilliant Die Prinzen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-w0-lZldWA

"Be Cool - Speak Deutsch with me"

[WingSuet]

I woudn't say that my native language has been permanently affected, apart from maybe not evolving it as much as I would have if I didn't learn other languages. When I was studying German at University though, I sometimes experienced after having been reading German for a while, I found it really hard to write something in my native language Swedish. I had to really think about the word order, because I would first want to write with German word order, but felt that sounded wrong, and then write it again with Swedish word order, but again thinking it sounded wrong because my brain was wired to German word order. In the end I would force myself to write with Swedish word order even though it made me constantly cringe. This effect would wear off after only an hour of speaking Swedish again though. Now that I've lived in Berlin for a week and spoken German everyday, and don't notice any problem switching to Swedish though, except for maybe temporarily forgetting some words, but maybe it will get worse the longer I stay here.

[Chilled]

Learning Spanish hasn't impacted my English at all, in some respects it's improved it, as I've been look deep into grammar. Every once in a while, I will slip in a spelling error with some leaked Spanish into my English!
However my Spanish isn't anywhere past intermediate at the minute!

[PeterMollenburg]

I often put spaces before my question marks an exclamation marks in English because of my French studies. If only I knew this was gonna (I'm Aussie, let it go) happen I would NEVER have taken on French.

I'm really bad with English idioms. I'll mix them up or make them sound weirdly off the mark and say something like "yeah and that happened when the cows got home" or something really odd like that. Having parents who rarely use(d) English idioms. My father being of Dutch origin, so he grew up in a Dutch family, my mother ummm well just not having a wide array of idioms up her sleeve) and I had a tendency to avoid literature and a bad habit of ignoring expressions that made no sense to me..,

...and I don't think foreign languages helped

I never knew what a pronoun was even at the age of 20 when I tried my hand at French and Spanish. Yes I openly admit all this

[tomgosse]

I often put spaces before my question marks an exclamation marks in English because of my French studies. If only I knew this was gonna (I'm Aussie, let it go) happen I would NEVER have taken on French.

I started doing the exact same thing ! Now, if I put only one space before a question mark or exclamation point it looks strange. From what I've read, in French, any punctuation mark that has two parts ( : ; ! ? « » ) should have two space in front of it. Full stops have one space.

I never knew what a pronoun was even at the age of 20 when I tried my hand at French and Spanish. Yes I openly admit all this

I found this book, English Grammar for Students of French, really helpful.