There are a great many accounts of people having lost or trying to regain their first language online, many of them deeply personal and touching. Here is a random collection, if you know of any others, please let me know.
- First of all, here is an account by the great linguist and psychologist, Francois Grosjean, of the loss of childhood languages.
- Melissa Lozada-Oliva performs a poem about her Spanish language attrition.
- Jenny Liao tells about the difficulties she has communicating with her parents.
- Céline Gracieton on her experience with the attrition of her native French while living in the UK
- Sylvia Hoffmann on a multilingual interpreter beginning to lose her native Polish
- Olga Khazan on her problems with accessing her native Russian
- Writer Ece Temelkuran describes the struggle to maintain her Turkish language while writing in English.
- Joseph Luzzi on the dilemma of children whose parents are speakers of endangered or dying dialects
- Aamna Mohdin on the journey of learning, losing or reclaiming your mother tongue
- Agnieszka Murdoch on her problems with her native Polish
- Jacomine Nortier on the different levels of language maintenance and attrition among different groups of speakers
- Ellie Mae O’Hagan on losing her childhood language, Welsh
- Malachi Rempen on developing problems with English as a first language
- Yaldaz Sadakova on “The Shame of Forgetting my Mother Tongue” and what Turkish meant and means to her life as a member of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria
- Tamara Salman recounts how she got stuck in the UK with her English mother and away from her Arabic-speaking father on a holiday from Iraq, and subsequently began to experience attrition of her L1 Arabic.
- Julie Sedivy’s story of trying to recover her native Czech
- Sushma Subramanian on her quest to re-learn her childhood Tamil
Language Attrition 