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Languages at play: The relevance of L1 attrition to the study of bilingualism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

MONIKA S. SCHMID
MONIKA S. SCHMID*
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
*
Address for correspondence: Monika S. Schmid, English Department, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, P.O. Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands[email protected]
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Extract

Speakers who routinely use more than one language may not use any of their languages in ways which are exactly like that of a monolingual speaker. In sequential bilingualism, for example, there is often evidence of interference from the L1 in the L2 system. Describing these interference phenomena and accounting for them on the basis of theoretical models of linguistic knowledge has long been a focus of interest of Applied Linguistics. More recently, research has started to investigate linguistic traffic which goes the other way: 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). This is the case for migrants who move to a country where a language is spoken which, for them, is a second or foreign language. We refer to the phenomena of L1 change and L2 interference which can be observed in such situations as language attrition.

Type
Introduction
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 13 , Issue 1: New perspectives on L1 attrition , January 2010 , pp. 1 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Barbara Köpke, Esther de Leeuw and particularly Chris McCully for comments on earlier versions of this text. The present volume was made possible through the generous support from the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO) and the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW). I am deeply indebted to the anonymous reviewers who generously invested their time and expertise in order to improve the papers presented here. Last but not least, I am very grateful to Farah van der Kooi, Teodora Mehotcheva and Gulsen Yilmaz, who were kind enough to help with the copy-editing and reference checking of the papers collected here.

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