I had suspected for some time that my little guy had forgotten all his Russian. But several events of the last few weeks have confirmed that, if it is not gone, it has definitely been packed away in long-term storage.

A bit of background for those of you new to this blog. My little guy was a few months shy of his fifth birthday when he came to America about 18 months ago. His spoken Russian was limited and babyish, in no small part because most of his front teeth, top and bottom, were rotted or missing. Another child in the orphanage did most of the talking for him. (His receptive language was just fine in Russian, and continues to be so in English.) Russian is the worst of the six languages I speak, and when we arrived home, I used it only for safety and comfort. But I did make sure that we spent time around Russian-speakers, who can be found in growing numbers around our home town.

My little guy plowed head first into English, but there were still large chunks of Russian around the edges. A cement mixer was a beetonna meetalka (I'm transliterating a mispronunciation here) for the entire first year. When I pointed out a church dome, he would look at me in puzzlement. "That's not a dom (house, in Russian)," he would say. He would listen politely when spoken to in Russian.

Now he doesn't seem to even listen.

I know we're not alone in this. When I interviewed Pat Scanlon to write about her son, Vo Ford back in February, she told me that Vo and his brother, who were adopted when they were almost eight, both lost their Russian about nine months after coming to America. Katya Lyzhina, an older adoptee whom I wrote about here, told me she still felt in command of her Russian when she traveled back there last year, but it was very difficult for the first few days of her trip.

Earlier this year, I bookmarked a study by a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon conducted with English-speaking college students who were learning Spanish. He found that people who have been immersed in a second language often have difficulty returning to their native language. The professor, Michael C. Anderson, concluded that "repeatedly producing words in a new language inhibits the ability to produce corresponding words in the native language."

So is my son's Russian completely gone? There may be hope. My dad spoke Sicilian as a toddler, but switched to English when he went to kindergarten. Yet decades later, when we were all traveling in Sicily, he was the only one who could understand what was being said.