Language Attrition: What Happens To Your First Language When You Learn Another One

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Rafaela Strausnagel. I’m calling from Wisconsin.

Hi, welcome, Rafaela.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’m calling because I’ve noticed that my husband and myself,

I should speak more for my husband, and myself rather, he’s not here to defend himself.

We’ve noticed that as we learn Spanish, we’ve been learning Spanish officially since 2008,

It really affects our mother tongue, which is English.

And it creates interesting challenges like I can’t spell as well as I used to.

Or sometimes I find myself transliterating from Spanish to English.

Like instead of saying I’m cold, I’ll say I have cold or something strange like that.

And I was wondering about how learning a new language affects your mother tongue.

So 2008, are you learning this just to have the language?

Is it part of your work or your schooling?

It’s part of our faith.

Your faith, okay, gotcha.

We’re in a Spanish congregation.

So you speak Spanish and English on a daily basis?

Yes.

Okay, good.

So these are two languages that you live in?

Yes, really.

So that’s an important part of the conversation, right?

Because that’s the only way that that really happens,

Where one language starts to intrude upon the other one.

What’s really interesting, you’ve discovered what all new language learners do,

Is that your first language, while it feels at first like this concrete foundation that cannot be moved,

Is malleable or even fragile.

It’s a thing that can easily have holes poked in it.

And that’s kind of alarming when you think about that.

You thought that it was unchangeable, and it starts to feel a little frightening sometimes.

Do you feel that way?

Sometimes, yeah.

Yeah, and then like, oh my word, I was a good speller.

What happened?

But do you feel that it’s worth it?

Oh, for sure.

Yeah, I do too.

Yeah, definitely.

For sure.

I definitely.

There’s a website I want to refer you to.

It’s called languageattrition.org.

That’s languageattrition, A-T-T-R-I-T-I-O-N.org.

And it’s run by Monica Schmid, S-C-H-M-I-D, at the University of Essex in the UK.

And she’s an expert on this stuff.

And language attrition is the idea that when you learn one language, another language kind of goes away or it becomes modified or it changes.

And part of the website talks about what you can do to mitigate that language attrition.

And she debunks some common myths, some of the myths that people persist in believing even though they’re not true.

For example, some people believe that if your family moves to another country, you should only speak the new language in the new country at home.

For example, if you—

Oh, no, I don’t agree.

Yeah, I know.

But a lot of people believe, for example, if you left the United States and moved to Mexico, that you should only speak Spanish at home.

And it turns out in order to keep both languages going strong, you should speak English at home and speak Spanish everywhere else or wherever Spanish needs to be spoken because you need to learn to separate the two.

You need to learn.

You need to practice that.

And that’s the other thing.

You have to make those mistakes in order to situate yourself and situate those language identities.

It’s about those identities.

Anyway, those mistakes are normal, and they’re always going to happen, and they’re not going to go anyway.

So the website is languageattrition.org.

She’s going to offer you some relief, I think, about the situation that you’re in.

The other thing is even after you go to languageattrition.org and you’ve kind of read its material and kind of exhausted what Monica Schmidt has to say,

So search that term on the internet, language attrition, and you’ll find much deeper stuff to look at.

There are other exercises you can do, other material you can do,

And more things that you can do to work on keeping your English strong while improving your Spanish.

I just think language is alive, which I’ve learned a lot from listening to your program,

And it’s always changing and growing.

I speak fairly well in Spanish, but I’m always learning, and I’m always learning from those around me.

And I need to learn better street Spanish, too.

Yeah, the textbook Spanish is one thing and the street Spanish is a whole other thing.

Oh, my goodness.

That’s so true.

That’s so true.

Right.

Right.

Rafael, it’s great to talk with you.

It’s a pleasure talking with you, too.

Okay.

Thanks so much.

Hasta luego.

You, too.

Hasta luego.

Bye-bye.

Ciao.

Bye-bye.

If you have a question about language that you’d love to talk with us about, we’d love

To talk with you.

So call us, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.