Language attrition

Language attrition is the process of decay that a language experiences for lack of use. Attrition may take place at the level of individual speakers, who gradually forgets a language that they used to speak, or at the level of the speech community, which gradually shifts to another language and changes aspects of its original language in that process. Individual speakers whose competency in a language has been affected by attrition may be called semi-speakers, and languages with high rates of semi-speakers have been shown to undergo similar types of language change such as loss of grammatical and phonological complexity and irregularity.

Speakers who routinely speak more than one language may use their languages in ways slightly different from a monolingual. The knowledge of one language may interfere with the correct production or understanding of another. The study of such interference phenomena is the field of applied linguistics.

Interference can work two ways. A person who acquires a second language (L2) after the first (L1) may be inhibited in the acquisition of this second language by the first language. However, interference can also work the other way: the second language can interfere with the correct use of the first. More recently, research has started to investigate linguistic traffic containing L2 interferences and contact phenomena evident in the L1. Such phenomena are probably experienced to some extent by all bilinguals. They are, however, most evident among speakers for whom a language other than the L1 has started to play an important, if not dominant, role in everyday life (Schmid and Köpke, 2007). That is the case for migrants who move to a country where a language is spoken that is a second or foreign language for them. The combination of L1 change and L2 interference that can be observed in such situations is considered language attrition.

The study of language attrition became a subfield of linguistics beginning with a 1980 conference at the University of Pennsylvania that was titled Loss of Language Skills (Lambert and Freed, 1982). The aim of the conference was to discuss areas of second language (L2) attrition and to ideate on possible areas of future research in L2 loss. The conference revealed that attrition is a wide topic covering different types of language loss, and there are many possible reasons for the loss. A related phenomenon is the loss of language because of contact with other, more dominant languages, possibly leading to language death.

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