This is an ABC podcast.

When I was a kid, my parents only spoke to me in Urdu.

They figured once I went to kindergarten, I'd pick up English, and by then I'd know enough

Urdu to be successfully bilingual.

And that's me being that me still both back to talk to.

That's me proving they were right.

I can still speak it.

But the thing is, as soon as I went to school

and learned to speak English,

I never wanted to speak Urdu again.

In fact, I wanted to distance myself from it

and my Pakistani heritage as much as possible.

To the point where my Urdu now is nowhere near as good as it once was.

It's such a common, common story.

One of the reasons why kids are so eager to move into the adopted country's languages,

I think precisely because they get all kinds of cues about what the

dominant language is. This is Julie Sedavie. I'm a linguist and an author. I live in Calgary, Canada.

She's the author of the book Memory Speaks on losing and reclaiming language and self. And she's

intimately familiar with this process where an immigrant child rejects their

language in favor of English. Yeah, I have a very complicated linguistic history. So until the age of about

two years old, the only language I ever heard around me was Czech. I was born in what was then

Czechoslovakia. When I was about to, we fled the country for political

...