A few months ago, I taught my parents a gesture known as the “finger heart.” To make it, you gently cross your thumb and index finger. Selfies featuring this gesture have become a staple of our text conversations, and I hoard a precious collection of screenshots that document this phenomenon: My dad finger-hearting while driving, my mom performing the pinch on the couch. In each photo, I respond with a proud heart-shaped token of my own, my amused grin in the photo’s corner.
As my fluency in Mandarin worsens, this mute sign, as silly as it seems, sometimes feels like a more effective bridge than language. Like a secret handshake I taught to them, a shared creation, its meaning feels specific to the space between me and them.
Since I grew up in Canada, my grasp of Mandarin has never been at the level of a native speaker’s. But using it with my family, taking nightly language lessons, and consistently watching Chinese dramas throughout my childhood meant the language always felt close to me. It held a comfortable place in my mouth.
During my first semester at McGill, however, apart from a few FaceTime calls with family, I didn’t speak Mandarin for months. I didn’t notice how much I had regressed until I visited home for winter break, when words for both mundane things and more complex emotions started to feel out of reach. Pauses punctuated my sentences as I spoke.
This unintentional forgetting, a common experience for immigrants, is known to linguists as first language attrition. The process typically occurs when a person is removed from their first language community, and then immersed in a community that uses a second language. Each time the second language is used, the brain has to suppress the first language, explained Debra Titone, the lab director of McGill’s Language and Multilingualism Lab, in an interview with the //McGill Tribune//.
“All these little cognitive events accumulate,” Titone said. “Like how the Colorado River, very slowly, drip by drip, created the Grand Canyon.”