How to Get Away with Losing a Language

‘Learning is Practice’ is a vivid mainstream reality. In today’s global world, where mobility and dynamism have reached nearly all spheres of human life, formal education had to be reconsidered from its statute of main learning avenue. When the usage-based approach is taken into consideration, usage and experience are the main factors that determine the learning process. Transposed to a linguistic context, without these key factors, the language can be partially lost.

I remember my first days at Tilburg University, late August 2016. The one thing that was constantly and self-brought to my attention was that ‘there is no other Romanian here’. Not in my class, not in my house. Not in the entire university? Was I the only one to speak Romanian in this city? After a while, I noticed that I actually share a nationality with another colleague, let’s call her Maria for the sake of protecting anonymity, but she spoke what I thought it was a clear-as-a-fairy-tale-river Dutch. Not slight was my surprise when, after she started using our mother-tongue, I noticed that her Romanian isn’t.... very Romanian anymore. She used long pauses, some English words from time to time and had this peculiar accent. She explained that she moved to The Netherlands five years ago and that she has been breathing Dutch and English ever since. So her Romanian got bad, Maria said. It seemed unlikely for me at that point, but it also got me intrigued: can someone partially lose their mother-tongue so quickly by not using it so often? I mean...can one really experience that?

Episode 1 - Understanding Maria

According to the usage-based approach, a language is acquired through Usage, Experience, and, ultimately, through Frequency of Usage. But what happens if the repetitiveness variable does not apply anymore? Can it be the case of partially language loss what Maria experienced?

A brief explanation of the matter is offered by Ibbotson (2013): “for usage-based theories, the complexity of language emerges not as a result of a language-specific instinct but through the interaction of cognition and use”. 

Thus, language representation is essentially constructed by use and generalizations that characterize those usage circumstances. Additionally, according to Tomasello (2009), the knowledge of a language is designed on a backbone of cognitive skills and experience, which places the usage and repetitiveness as the primary factors in learning. Maria’s case is one to prove all these - reduced frequency leads to a conventionalization of her mother-tongue.

University of Essex

Episode 2 - Maria experiences language attrition

If we were to consider language attrition as the reversal of language acquisition, the Decay Theory could explain Maria’s situation. According to this theory, information 'evaporates’ or declines gradually in memory through lack of use. "The assumption implies that the frequency and recency of use of the structure are crucial for the maintenance and access of the information in memory” (Ecke, 2004). since Maria did not use Romanian anymore, she experienced language attrition.

Further, according to Ecke’s last theory, the lack of using/frequency of a certain language in older adults “cause deficits in the transmission of information (from the semantic level to the phonological level in word production) resulting in a decrease of retrieval speed and an increase of retrieval failure rates”. As mentioned in the introduction of this article, Maria used English words when talking Romanian and, sometimes, was trying to find the Dutch translation for some structures in order to express herself using Romanian. 

Daiana Stoicescu

Season finale

Finally, the usage-based approach, grounded on experience and, thus, the use of a language, represents an outstanding avenue for language acquisition. In this particular Tilburg University context of the student Maria, the usage-based theory’s frequency of use is linked to the phenomena known as language attrition, which is determined (even though not exclusively) by the reduced usage of a language. The information ‘evaporates’ and eventually declines in memory because of the lack of use and, as mentioned above, the continuous activation of the information (in this case, the language) occupies a prime role both for the maintenance, and for the accessing the information in the memory (in this case, the words and syntagms). Thus, in a reversed way, the usage-based theory proves once again the pivotal role that the usage has in language maintenance and also shows how, like Maria experienced, even a first language can be partially lost if the usage is reduced.

And a short epilogue

Maybe, in the end, I jumped to the wrong conclusion about Maria. At that time, I had no idea that your mother-tongue language, which you have been used for the most part of your life, can be affected by the lack of usage. I now know that it can. As an abroad student, I shall keep an eye on the matter. Not that I blame Maria, now I know that it is simply a result of a linguistic process, but boy, do I want to maintain my mother-tongue. ‘Practice is winning’, they say. After working on this article, I will allow myself to say that ‘The lack of practice is losing!’ 

And here's a video to additionally prove my point.

References

Ibbotson, P. (2013). The Scope of Usage-Based Theory. Frontiers in Psychology, 4. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00255.

Tomasello, M. (2000). The item-based nature of children’s early syntactic development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(4), 156-163. doi:10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01462-5.

Ecke, P. (2004). Language attrition and theories of forgetting: A cross-disciplinary review. International Journal of Bilingualism, 8(3), 321-354. doi:10.1177/13670069040080030901.