How do people with amnesia still remember how to speak in their language?

Haven't you ever thought about this? Aren't they supposed to forget everything? But they still know how to communicate in language and know how to move on in their daily lives. I'm just saying this based on what iv'e heard of or seen on t.v of a documentary on amnesia, but it never answered this question, so again, HOW?How do people with amnesia still remember how to speak in their language?
There are several reasons.



1) Amnesia doesn't mean that a person forgets everything. Often it's more of an access problem, where the information is still in storage but the person can no longer find it. Like if you were trying to find someone's house in a new town, but you forgot the address. The house doesn't disappear just because you're lost.



2) There are different kinds of memory, and they are not all stored in identical ways. These include procedural, episodic, declarative, and semantic memory, etc. Since these are (probably) handled differently by the brain to begin with, when something interrupts the process of retrieval, certain types of memories might be accessible while others are not.



3) There IS a kind of "amnesia" for words, called anomia, and there's also aphasia - the inability to use or understand language following some kind of damage to the language centers. This is sort of like amnesia, since it's typically an access problem (although sometimes the centers have actually been destroyed). It's pretty much never psychogenic, whereas amnesia often is.



4) There are different kinds of amnesia. There's the inability to form new memories (this tends to follow damage to the hippocampus), and there's the inability to access old ones. If you get hit on the head or are traumatized or whatever, you will probably have amnesia for the event that caused your amnesia, too, because your brain was too confused or distracted to encode the information coming in.



Hope that all made sense :)How do people with amnesia still remember how to speak in their language?
Amnesia is short term memory loss, speech fuctions are long term