The Linguistic Netherland: When No Language Is Native

What happens when you learn a new language so deeply that your mother tongue starts to recede, yet you never quite reach native fluency in the new one either? Linguists have a name for this state — "semi-speaker" — and the research reveals a fascinating, often unsettling picture of how language attrition actually works. Drawing on the foundational work of Nancy Dorian with Scottish Gaelic speakers and Monika Schmid's research on first language attrition, this episode explores the predictable sequence of decline: lexical retrieval goes first, then grammatical simplification, then structural borrowing from your adopted language. But there's a twist: the cognitive benefits of managing two linguistic systems persist even without perfect fluency, and the "native speaker" ideal turns out to be more myth than reality. For most of human history, multilingualism with varying proficiency was the norm — meaning the expat semi-speaker might be closer to the ancestral human condition than the monolingual native speaker.