For expat parents, passing on their native languages can be painful.

Children are linguistic sponges, and this doesn’t mean that cursory 【M1】__________

exposure is enough. They must hear a language quite a bit to understand

it—and use it often to be able to speak with it comfortably. This is 【M2】__________

mental work, and a child who doesn’t have a motive to speak a

language—either a need or a strong desire—will often avoid. Children’s 【M3】__________

brains are already busy enough.

So languages often wither and die if parents move abroad. Consider 【M4】__________

America. The foreign-born share of the population is 13.7%, and has

never been low than 4.7% (in 1970). And yet foreign-language speakers 【M5】__________

don’t accumulate: today just 25% of the population speaks another

language. That’s why, typically, the first generation born in America is 【M6】__________

bilingual, and the second is monolingual—in English, the children often

struggle to speak easily with their immigrant grandparents. 【M7】__________

In the past, governments encouraged immigrant families from 【M8】__________

keeping their languages. They worried that America would become a

“polyglot boarding-house”. These days, officials tend to be less

interventionist; some even see valuable resource in immigrants’ language 【M9】__________

abilities. Yet many factors conspire to assure that children still lose their 【M10】_________

parents’ languages, or never learn them.

【M10】