[antithesis-nl]

From personal anecdata, I can assure you it's entirely possible to 'lose' a language ability. Native tongue? Not so sure, but a closely-related one, definitely!

I'm a native Dutch speaker and used to be relatively fluent in German (which is not a given: despite being close neighbors, the languages are very different). Then, I lived in Cape Town for a while, and had to learn some Afrikaans (also closely related to Dutch, but yet widely dissimilar).

This somehow 'erased' my ability to speak German! Only after moving back to Europe and after many years, I was able to do basic stuff like ordering in restaurants in German again.

TL;DR: the human brain is, like, weird, man...

[billforsternz]

I knew a guy back in the day who grew up in the Netherlands and then South Africa. And somehow the Afrikaans messed up his Dutch, and he basically didn't have a native language. His English was rough as well, I felt sorry for him despite being completely monolingual myself.