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One of the most memorable trips of my life took place in 1994 and involved traveling as a graduate student to Prague in the company of some of the most formidable linguists of North America and Europe. It was my first return to the country of my birth since I’d left Czechoslovakia as a small child in 1969—given that my family had emigrated illegally, virtually Sound of Music style, a visit back wasn’t possible until after the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

Barbara Partee, who had spent a good deal of time in Prague, served as our tour guide. I was impressed with her fluency in Czech and charmed by her accent. I’d never heard Czech spoken with an American accent before, but it sounded exactly as I would have imagined it. My own Czech was in ruins. Like many immigrants, I’d learned my heritage language as a child within rather constrained domestic spheres and had never used it to negotiate cab fare or discuss existential concerns, let alone describe my professional activities. But the first time I shyly dusted it off and uttered a few sentences, protesting that I had forgotten the entire language, Barbara turned to me with perhaps a tinge of envy and exclaimed, “You’ve probably forgotten more Czech than I’ve spent years learning! And, there’s still a lot left.”

As it turns out, a language is rarely truly forgotten, merely submerged.

A number of intriguing studies reveal the cognitive remnants of previously-learned languages that have fallen into disuse. “Forgotten” languages appear to make their continued presence known primarily through re-learning; even when initial testing suggests that a language has been lost, those who have been exposed to it earlier in life often show dramatically accelerated re-learning. This has been observed in the domains of grammar, vocabulary, and particularly, phonology.

One of the most remarkable examples of the language “reactivation” effect can be found in a paper by Leher Singh and colleagues; the researchers compared American-born native English speakers with a group of Indian adoptees who had been raised from a young age (between 6 and 60 months) in English-speaking families with no further meaningful contact with their language of origin. The children were between the ages of eight and sixteen years old at the time of testing, and initially, neither group could reliably discriminate between dental and retroflex consonants, a distinction that’s exploited by many Indian languages, but not English. However, after listening to the contrasting sounds over a period of mere minutes, the adoptees, but not the control group, were able to discriminate between the two kinds of consonants. (A disclaimer: individual results may vary! Variation appears to be highly characteristic of language attrition and reactivation.)

These studies mesh with my own impressions from my visits back to the Czech Republic that significant parts of the language are still there, awaiting excavation. Speaking Czech is for me like living in a pervasive tip-of-the-tongue state, struggling to give phonetic shape to words whose meanings—and even nuances of use—I’m aware that I know, if only I could pronounce the damn things.

Like many language attriters, I’ve retained a rather uneven profile of language abilities, which makes for some interesting social interactions. Unlike those who learn a second language in adulthood and retain a telling accent even after they’ve achieved complete fluency, I can often pass for a native speaker, at least briefly. I’m unfazed by the “ř” sound (as in the name of the Czech composer Dvořak), a phoneme so perverse that not even the neighboring Slovaks attempt it (it has sensibly been dropped by the Poles in recent years). I can also competently pronounce the name of another Czech composer, Janáček, whose form demonstrates the marked phenomenon of dissociating primary word stress from vowel length, so that stress is placed on the first syllable even though the second vowel is long. (North Americans inevitably place stress on the second syllable, which, come to think of it, they often do as well in pronouncing my own last name.) My prosody is close to perfect, and I’m a pro at sprinkling my speech with idiomatic discourse markers, accompanied by native-like shrugs, gestures and facial expressions. So, it can cause some consternation for my listeners when I sail through several sentences with a show of mastery that few foreigners achieve, only to trip over some elementary morphology in a way that would (and does) make a four-year-old snicker. Or, with utter confidence, substitute one word for another phonetically similar word that has a completely unrelated meaning. I once bewildered a stranger by politely inquiring “Would you suddenly know where the train station is?” An easy mistake (I thought), confusing the words najednou (suddenly) and náhodou (by any chance). On another occasion, I replied to a query about my occupation by claiming to be a savior (spasitelka). Alas, in reality, I am a mere writer (spisovitelka).

But as the studies suggest, one of the most remarkable aspects of language “attrition” is the resilience of the language even in the face of profound neglect. I’d experienced this on previous visits, including that first one in 1994, but never before as dramatically as I am now, part way through a six-week stint in my father’s home town in Southern Moravia (Moravská Nová Ves, population approx. 2500), where I’ve gone to spend some time kick-starting a new writing project while getting to know my relatives.

For the first time, I’m immersed in a Czech environment with no English speakers around to provide relief from the effort of conversing in Czech, and no bilingual speakers to turn to for rescue in moments of catastrophic lexical access.

Southern Moravia, like many rural areas of the Czech Republic, can be a punishing environment for non-native speakers. English speakers typically have daily encounters with adults whose command of English is imperfect. But very few people choose to learn Czech as a foreign language, and those who do rarely gravitate toward the small villages. In the experience of the local villagers, the world divides up into those who know the language, having learned it from birth, and those who don’t. I’ve routinely been mocked for making errors in Czech, especially if I’ve been corrected before for the same error, as if I were unusually dim or inattentive for making the same mistake twice after having been set right the first time. (Perhaps this mindset also accounts for the fact that young people, who learn English in school from the early grades, absolutely refuse to speak English with me, claiming they don’t know the language.)

There can be a striking lack of accommodation or cooperation on the part of listeners. Once, when traveling with my brother, I watched him flounder in Czech at a small town gas station, trying to convey which pack of cigarettes he wanted to purchase—he had forgotten the brand name, and was trying to describe the appearance of the package. Ignoring his pointing gestures, the cashier sat stone-faced through his attempts. When she finally identified what he wanted, she tossed the cigarettes on the counter, saying contemptuously, “As you can see, the package is red, not pink.” My brother apologized, “I’m sorry, my Czech is very bad.” “I can see that,” she replied without cracking the slightest smile.

With exposure to my mangled grammar and fumbled words, my Czech relatives have learned to hide their amusement and now make a sincere effort to contribute helpfully to my attempts at communication. Even more miraculously, I’ve seemingly progressed through several months’ or years’ worth of language acquisition in days. To my astonishment, words that I haven’t used in years suddenly roll out of my mouth, though a week ago, I couldn’t have successfully rummaged through my lexicon to find them. The outlandish case-marking system of the language, which surely is responsible for the sturdy moral character of the Czechs, is beginning to seem less murky. I happily string clauses together, sometimes more than two at a time! Re-learning the language feels like having linguistic superpowers.

There’s a deep lesson here for me as a lapsed speaker of a heritage language: it has taken remarkably little time and effort for that language, which I’d thought was largely lost even back in 1994, to be nudged out of its dormant state and flower once more. And there are so many of us lapsed heritage language speakers. As aptly described by Robert Lane Greene in his book You Are What You Speak, the heritage languages spoken by immigrants to the U.S. typically whither in just a generation or two. Had I fully realized, at the time that I was raising my own children, how easily I could slip back into my mother-and-father tongue, I might have made greater efforts to provide some meaningful exposure to Czech for my own children. As it is, they’re going to have to learn the language the hard way, should they summon the courage to learn it at all, and will likely never be mistaken for native speakers, even for a few sentences.

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