The short answer is: not completely, but you can certainly lose your fluency. This fascinating and often disorienting experience is known as first-language literacy attrition. It’s a distinct phenomenon from the more commonly discussed spoken language attrition, and it reveals a great deal about how our brains handle the complex task of reading.
It’s Not Amnesia, It’s Attrition
First, let’s be clear. Forgetting how to read isn’t like developing amnesia where the knowledge is wiped clean. A literate person will almost always be able to decode the letters and symbols of their first language. Instead, what deteriorates is the automaticity of the process.
Think of reading fluency as a well-trodden path in a forest. The first time you walk it, you have to pay attention to every root and stone. After walking it a thousand times, you can navigate it effortlessly while your mind is elsewhere. Reading in your native language is that well-trodden path. It’s so automatic that you don’t perceive the individual letters; you see entire words and phrases, absorbing meaning instantly.
When you move to a new country and immerse yourself in a new language—and especially a new writing system—you start carving a new path. If you spend years, or even decades, exclusively using this new path, the old one begins to grow over. The path is still there, but it’s no longer smooth. You have to push aside weeds and watch your step. This is literacy attrition: the speed, comprehension, and effortlessness of reading decline due to prolonged disuse.
Your Brain on Two Scripts: A Neurological Tug-of-War
The neuroscience behind this is captivating. Unlike speaking, reading is not an innate human skill. Our brains did not evolve to read. To learn how, our brain must “recycle” a region known as the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), located in the left fusiform gyrus. This area is originally wired for recognizing objects, like faces and tools. Through intense practice, we train it to recognize letters and words with lightning speed.
When you become highly literate in a second language, particularly one with a different script, your brain engages in a remarkable balancing act. Let’s explore two scenarios.
Case Study 1: The Cyrillic-to-Latin Switch
Consider Elena, a native Bulgarian speaker who grew up reading the Cyrillic alphabet (А, Б, В, Г…). She moves to Canada for university and builds a career there, living her life almost entirely in English and the Latin alphabet (A, B, C, D…). For two decades, her daily reading—emails, reports, news, books—is in English.
When Elena tries to read a Bulgarian novel, her brain faces a conflict. Her VWFA is now highly optimized for the shapes and patterns of the Latin script. While many Cyrillic letters are familiar, some are “false friends” (e.g., Cyrillic ‘В’ is ‘V’, ‘Н’ is ‘N’, ‘Р’ is ‘R’, ‘С’ is ‘S’). Her brain, accustomed to one set of rules, has to consciously switch gears. This cognitive friction slows her down. The automatic, subconscious process of reading has become a conscious, effortful act of decoding. She hasn’t forgotten how to read Cyrillic, but her neurological “muscle” for it has atrophied.
Case Study 2: The Logographic vs. Alphabetic Divide
The effect is even more pronounced when the writing systems are fundamentally different. Take a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese who moves to the United States. Reading Chinese involves recognizing thousands of unique logographic characters (e.g., 家, 电, 脑), where each symbol represents a word or concept. This relies heavily on visual memory and pattern recognition of complex symbols.
In contrast, reading English is an alphabetic system based on phonetics—linking letters to sounds. After years of reading only English, our Chinese speaker’s brain becomes exceptionally efficient at this phonetic decoding. The neural pathways for rapidly retrieving thousands of distinct visual characters weaken. They might look at a less-common character they once knew instantly and draw a blank, even though they would recognize the word if they heard it spoken. The link between the visual symbol and its meaning has frayed.
What Makes You More Likely to ‘Forget’?
Not everyone who lives abroad experiences this phenomenon to the same degree. Several factors influence the severity of literacy attrition:
- Frequency of Use: This is the single biggest factor. If you continue to read news, text family, or enjoy books in your native language, you are actively maintaining those neural pathways. Even a little regular practice goes a long way.
- Script Dissimilarity: The more different the two scripts are, the more likely the dominant one is to interfere with the less-used one. A native Spanish speaker living in Italy (both Latin scripts) will have a much easier time than a native Arabic speaker living in Korea (completely different scripts and reading directions).
- Level of Immersion: How totally are you living in the second language? Someone who works in their native language or lives in an expatriate community will be less affected than someone completely isolated from their mother tongue.
- Motivation and Identity: A person who feels a strong connection to their heritage and actively seeks to maintain it is more likely to engage in activities that preserve their native literacy.
A Skill Weakened, Not Erased
So, can you forget how to read your first language? The comforting answer is no, not in the way you might forget a historical fact. The foundation remains. What you lose is the grace, speed, and intuition that makes reading feel like breathing.
The good news is that this skill is highly recoverable. The brain’s plasticity, which allowed the new reading system to become dominant, also allows the old one to be revitalized. By consciously deciding to read in your native language again—starting with simple articles and building up to complex novels—you can retread that overgrown path. With a bit of practice, the weeds will clear, and you can once again navigate the beautiful, familiar landscape of your mother tongue with the ease you thought you had lost forever.