I moved away to different English-speaking countries about 9 years ago, and since then I only ever spoke my mother tongue with my parents over the phone. The rest of the time I speak English only. I don't have any friends who are learning the language or are natives.
Although I can still speak it, I can't remember many words (the list is only getting longer) and the English equivalent is all I can recall. I talk to myself and think in English, and if I try to do otherwise, it just feels foreign. At my best, I end up mixing the two languages together (which is how I usually talk with my sister). When we text, we use the chat alphabet/Franco-Arabic.
I struggle a bit with reading, particularly Modern Standard Arabic, but I have no problems with my dialect, though to be fair, I always struggled with MSA. Overall though, I can still grasp the general idea behind a passage. Writing is perhaps what suffered the most. I get a lot of words wrong even if I can say them right, and my parents have to correct me all the time. I mix up similar sounding alphabets when I type, and sometimes I get the entire word wrong.
I guess the main problem is, I no longer feel comfortable around my native language, and it's the same feeling you get when you're trying to speak with a native of your target language, but you're lost for words all the time. I paid my parents a visit a couple of months ago, and when I went to the pharmacy one day, the pharmacist was surprised that I spoke almost fluent Arabic for a foreigner. He wasn't the only one to say a similar thing.
I'm learning Swedish now, and I'm worried that this will only expedite the attrition process. Anyone else dealt with something similar? If so, how did you handle it?
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