Could I ask for an advice? For the last years I haven't read or watched movies or interacted with people in my native language, just my mom and a couple of close friends.. I'm thinking in English a lot now and I'm scared that I can lose my language, that I'll have to think about words or their meaning instead of just naturally picking them from somewhere. And I don't know what to do :/
You’ve woken the linguist in me. Hi.
What you’re referring to is called (first) language attrition. As a scientific field it has developed especially since the 1980′s and analyses what happens when knowledge of language decreases or dies. It’s very interesting and I suggest you go on a Google Scholar hunt on that subject.
To the good news: It is highly improbable that you “lose” your native language completely if you’ve learnt and used it past puberty (and you still use it now, even if only sporadically). It’s pretty much ingrained in your brain and you won’t forget it completely. What you describe - difficulty to recall words or express finer shades of meaning - is a very common phenomenon in L2/X interference. Browse #langblr or #polyglot problems for a bit and you’ll see how many people who learn or speak different languages have trouble keeping them apart. I’ve lived in England for a year, still using German almost every day, and even I have trouble sometimes (see this post and this post, for example). I dream in English, I count in German, I spell in English and most of the time I don’t make the switch consciously. It gets annoying, but it’s also pretty cool.
To quote someone from the field: “It’s rare to totally lose command of a first language, she says. Instead people have “language attrition” - trouble recalling certain words or they use odd grammar structures. Age is a factor. Once past puberty, Dr Schmid says, your first language is stable and the effects of attrition can reverse themselves if you are re-immersed.” BBC News: How do people lose their native language?
So, once you return to an environment where your native language is used, your brain “rewires” and you’ll see how much you remember and how quickly that will happen.
But why do we get these problems in the first place? “The difficulties in recalling your first language are greater the more immersed you are in a second language, says Dr Aneta Pavlenko at Temple University in Philadelphia, because cognitive resources are limited.” (same source as above.) In other words, your brain automatically keeps the resources you need most (in this case your L2/English) at the surface and lets the others (your L1) relax somewhere in the background, which is why it takes longer to retrieve them and you have trouble thinking of seemingly easy and obvious words and structures. Once you relocate (mentally or physically) to an environment where your native language is more important than your L2/X, that information will slowly but surely come back to the surface whereas others “sink” further down, to stick with that metaphor. If you use two languages equally as much, two will be kept at the surface, but it might increase interference effects (the typical “bilingual problems”, aka retrieving a word in the “wrong” language by accident, not being able to think of synonyms, code switching etc).
tl;dr: Don’t worry, you won’t lose your native language. Your brain just sent those resources to take a nap because they’re not needed right now. As soon as you start using it more again, you’ll remember everything very quickly.
