language forgotten??

This morning the guests came. They spoke the northern dialect. I too spoke...but what came out at the beginning was this wrong usage of words..mixture of words n languages in a sentence...my mind had a shock....my out of practice oral malay language and the malaysian northern accent were pathetic..the perfect laughing stock material. It took several hours before my faculty of language reappeared as it used to...i am somehow speaking the nothern accent as i used to. The same thing happened the last time i went back to Malaysia...the words jumbled in arrays of polluted sentences as i struggled to convey my mind.

This is what happens when u acquire a language n not practise it. I mean ooo come on... a very short call every week to one of my family members in Malaysia cant actually be called real conversation right? Practise makes perfect...n that perfection was lost to me for a while in my effort to speak the language i know...its really embarrasing really....well.. i did get back my language after some time..the CPU in my brain just needed a bit of energy to be as it used to..

This reminds me of a colleague in Sarawak when i was teaching there years ago... She is from Kedah. She studied in Sarawak for her tertiary education n got married to a local guy. After several years living there...she spoke a perfect Sarawakian accent n could not utter the nothern dialect she was born into at all.. Now that is an interesting thing to study...

Me.. living in a foreign country..speaking a foreign language in my daily life..my lack of use of my first language or my first accent resulted in my difficulty to speak the language, the dialect or accent for a few hours. But the faculty returns after some time.

My colleague ..living in her present accent..speaking that accent n forgetting her old accent with no return ticket.

Do we blame the brain or the person as the main reason of such *inability?*


I personally think that once a language is acquired..it will never be gone. It may get a little bit rusty n all..but if one is willing to dig the back of his or her brain...the ability to speak the acquired language will return..sooner or later..what do u think?