What is language attrition?

June 25, 2024 9:38 AM

"When I moved to the Netherlands a long time ago (I was 33 years old at the time), I was determined to learn Dutch quickly. I did not, of course, expect to become perfect – I knew I would occasionally fumble for words, my grammar would at times be erratic, and many (if not most) conversations with strangers would quickly lead up to the inevitable question “Where do you come from?” This, after all, is what usually happens when you learn a new language later in life – and tons and tons of research are there to support this. What I did not expect was for the same things to happen to my native German." This website created by Dr. Monika S. Schmid, Professor of Linguistics, University of York, shares information about the science of language attrition, what it looks like for adults, children, and other groups, anecdotes, media coverage, celebrity examples, and research tools.
posted by bq (24 comments total)

Another perspective can be found here.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:55 AM on June 25

I don't think I've experienced first language loss, but I have a strong case of second language loss in a way that's quite interesting to me.

I learned French as a child and then learned Spanish in my 30s. While I can still understand French perfectly well, as soon as I start speaking in French, I drift immediately into Spanish before I can even finish a sentence. It's infuriating and I can't seem to stop myself. I know the words in French and can pick most of them out individually given enough time, but I can't get them to flow. It's so odd how the processing of incoming language seems to be entirely separate from forming outgoing language.

I suppose it has something to do with the similarity between the two languages, but I look forward to reading more of this to perhaps learn what might be happening.
posted by ssg at 10:09 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]

ssg, I learned a little bit of Spanish and some Mandarin and when I was struggling to come up with a Mandarin word (i.e. most of the time), my brain would helpfully produce the Spanish equivalent. It would never do that in Spanish class, though. No, that would have been useful. In Spanish class my brain would just sit there with a dumb expression on its face and refuse to come up with anything, but if I try to say "cup" in Mandarin (bei1zi), it immediately trots out "la taza".

I'm sure the similarity of the languages isn't helping in your case, but sometimes our brain just hates us.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 10:56 AM on June 25 [10 favorites]

I'm sure I've experienced language loss while still being immersed in my native American English. As my primary reading has migrated from edited books to internet posts and comments, I've lost some of my ability to spell correctly and write grammatically. The influx of poorly written English is reprogramming my brain.

> my brain would helpfully produce the Spanish equivalent

I took French in high school and college in the late 70s and early 80s. When I tried to learn Spanish in 2003, my brain would helpfully fill in Spanish blanks with French vocabulary. It was maddening.
posted by Wilbefort at 11:13 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]

I was born in the Philippines and grew up speaking both Tagalog and English. We then moved to the US, then Canada, where I also studied French throughout high school. Since moving to the west, my parents encouraged us kids to focus solely on English, to build our fluency and build a more native accent, but they continued to use Tagalog at home when talking to each other and other Filipino adults.

As a result, my ability to comprehend Tagalog is generally intact (albeit at a 12 year old level). I can follow conversations and read signs with little mental effort. However, it's very hard for me to speak the language beyond some stock phrases that essentially exist as atomic expressions in my brain. It's easier for me to speak French, though that also requires effort, but not having lived around a lot of native French speakers, my abililty to comprehend French is quite poor.

10+ years ago, when planning a trip to Argentina, I tried studying Spanish, thinking that between the romance structure of French and the way Tagalog uses a lot of Spanish vocabulary, it would be easy, but instead I had the same issue that others mentioned where the "secondary language space" in my brain got overcrowded and when speaking, I would find myself starting in Spanish but finishing in either French or Tagalog, and thoroughly confusing whoever I was talking to. More recently, I took a trip to Italy and went through three months of fairly intensive Italian; and I found that to be less confusing because the structure is just different enough that my brain could keep them separate (and also, potentially because my French had attrited to the point where it freed up more second language space)
posted by bl1nk at 11:13 AM on June 25 [4 favorites]

That’s been my experience too. I open my mouth to speak (whatever language for the country I’m in) and only French comes out. It’s like my brain has a circuit that says:

If not speaking English
——> French
End
posted by St. Peepsburg at 11:14 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]

I took French in high school and college in the late 70s and early 80s. When I tried to learn Spanish in 2003, my brain would helpfully fill in Spanish blanks with French vocabulary. It was maddening.

Exact same but with German.

On the other hand I once stayed in a German-run hostel in Peru. It was great, I could just open my mouth and whatever language came out was understood.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:18 AM on June 25 [6 favorites]

"While I can still understand French perfectly well, as soon as I start speaking in French, I drift immediately into Spanish before I can even finish a sentence."

I've got a similar situation with Spanish and English. So, I'm not sure how much similarity is a factor. Lately, as I make a point to stick to Spanish more conscientiously, the drift to English is on less of a hair-trigger.

Funny enough my brain fills the lexical gaps in English, Spanish (and my poor, poor French) with Latin words. I think it's because of the roots, but IDK. (it happened just now when I was spelling out "conscientiuosly" my brain inserted "con scienta" as the first approximation.)

(Honestly? I find the odd insertion of Latin into the gaps to be sort of delightful. It's just a funny little quirk and it amuses me!)
posted by oddman at 11:18 AM on June 25 [2 favorites]

@It's Never Lurgi, I feel 100% the same -- I grew up native English-speaking in Vancouver, but my parents are Japanese (mother; near Hiroshima) and Italian (father; near Benevento). My father learned English while in Australia prior to moving to Japan, and when he met my mother, they spoke only English together, and I was born in Kobe 3 years later. We emigrated to Canada 6 months after that.

I learned Japanese while living there in the '90s. Moved to Italy in 2003, and had the problem of Japanese words popping into my head when I needed the Italian. Very frustrating...

Visited Japan last fall, 30 years later. For the first 2 days, Italian would pop out when I needed Japanese.

_sigh_
posted by northtwilight at 11:31 AM on June 25 [2 favorites]

> The influx of poorly written English

awesomely written english
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:57 AM on June 25 [2 favorites]

I got to the edge of fluency in German and Finnish at different times in my life and have lost most of both, but I definitely get the a hodgepodge of both whenever I do try to use my limited ability in either out in the wild.
posted by ursus_comiter at 12:00 PM on June 25

This happened to a fried of mine's father. He was British and moved to Denmark, where he married and had children. Both his Danish and English were middling, despite having been a fluent speaker. It was very strange and slightly sad to behold.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:13 PM on June 25

It’s terribly frustrating. I learned Spanish earlier in my life and later took up French. The French vocabulary replaced all the words in Spanish I once knew. When I see a crossword clue for a Spanish word, the French one usually comes to mind.
posted by borges at 12:16 PM on June 25

> awesomely written english

The ordinary mistyping is only occasionally inspirational and a source of longterm corrosion to my ability to spell. But yes! it can much more expressive. I'm also on tumblr a lot and that's just a joyous stream of constant word bending.
posted by Wilbefort at 12:44 PM on June 25

I still remember that taking German classes in college completely messed with my ability to use correct prepositions in my native English for years.
posted by Pedantzilla at 12:59 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]

It is funny to see this with Dutch and German, since in my experience Dutch is half German and half English.

My default second language has switched. I learned French in school and when I moved to Germany, any German word I didn't know, my brain would offer French. Now, I go to France a few times a year, and when I grasp for French, my brain offers German.
posted by dame at 2:39 PM on June 25

I highly recommend the book Memory Speaks by Julia Sedivy. It's partly a memoir and partly a popular treatment of topics in linguistics related to multilingualism. I remember a lot of discussion about the way that different languages can crowd each out out in a person's brain.
posted by jomato at 4:12 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]

Yeah crosswords were real hard until I lost a lot of vocab.
posted by bq at 9:29 PM on June 25

As someone who lives in Japan and works as a translator, this is an issue I'm acutely aware of — it's very easy to fall into certain habits when talking with other English speakers who live in Japan (these include things like using Japanese-invented "English" words and phrases like "coin parking" to mean a paid parking lot, or expressing prices especially using the Japanese words for numbers, especially because Japanese uses a four-place system rather than a three-place system for when number words "reset"). I have to kind of make a concerted effort to remember not to use certain bits of shorthand and ESPECIALLY not to use English-shaped words and phrases that aren't used in the English-speaking world, like "SNS" to mean "social media."

It's tricky at times! And at least it's easy enough to live a lot of my life in my own native language through things like the internet and entertainment media that I don't have too much trouble staying in touch with how native speakers talk. I have to imagine it's way harder if you are just 100% fully immersed 100% of the time in a language you do not speak natively.
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:36 PM on June 25 [4 favorites]

i don't know what to say about this
posted by HearHere at 3:23 AM on June 26

Moving back to the UK from France after 11 years, I have definitely noticed this. Mostly with unused vocabulary and some slang words.
posted by ellieBOA at 6:01 AM on June 26

For me, it’s not so much a deterioration of my first language as a lack of growth and updating. I haven’t been reading, consuming media, or having more involved discussions with adults in my first language for nigh on two decades, missing out on the corresponding expansion of vocabulary and refinement of expression compared to my non-emigrated contemporary compatriots. I don’t think my first-language skills are much worse than they were twenty years ago in absolute terms, but for sure in relative terms compared to people who stayed in my first-language environment.

My language brain looks like this: 3 separate boxes for my first and second language, as well as my native unwritten dialect version of the first, a box with holes on the sides for my current local language nestled in between the others, and then one joint junk drawer for the handful of languages I’ve accumulated along the way. When I need to speak any of those, then I rummage around in the drawer and am most likely to fish out words near the top, so most recently acquired or used. But the rummaging itself results in a more jumbled junk drawer and I may come up with a word from a language I haven’t spoken much for years. I’d like to DIY some more containers for organizing, no decluttering wanted.
posted by meijusa at 7:01 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

I knew a German woman who married American, came here, raised the family, then sought work at the UN as translator. Her English was the tops. Her German....

(Given her general background, personality, and CV, I am perfectly willing to credit attrition.)

Tagalog uses a lot of Spanish vocabulary,

Never knew that! Interesting. Sort of like Maltese having a bunch of Italian, and even a bit of English.
posted by BWA at 12:48 PM on June 26

I study and speak to varying degrees of fluency (including German and Dutch) and while I occasionally run into this I don’t think it’s that big of an issue. While I might search for a word, I think that happens to monoglots just as often. My brain might prefer a German word over a Dutch word for example, but it’s not going to go looking for an Irish or Korean word instead.
posted by misterpatrick at 5:20 PM on June 26