This book sheds light on the role of mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB MLE) as a means to enhance educational outcomes, creating a space for non-dominant languages alongside more dominant regional, national and international languages. It brings together a number of underlying concerns including the maintenance of non-dominant…

Native language (L1) attrition is ubiquitous in modern globalized society, but its cognitive/psycholinguistic mechanisms are poorly understood. We investigated lexico-semantic L1 attrition in L1 Russian immigrants in Israel, who predominantly use their second language (L2), Hebrew, in daily life. We included Russian monolinguals as a control…

This paper discusses the role of the Catholic Church amongst the Maltese diaspora in Australia, and its impact on the maintenance of the Maltese language, a small community language spoken largely by the first generation of immigrants who left Malta after the Second World War. The study is based on interview data collected among three generations…

This theoretical article reflects on a recent development in adult literacy studies: transnational adoptees relearning their heritage languages. Literacy and adoption scholars have studied the replacement of the heritage language with a second language and reported it as a permanent loss. Returning to the country of origin, return adoptees…

This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in…

In L1 attrition research, it's recognized that a previously acquired language can transform under the influence of a newly acquired one. However, the precise L1-L2 relationship is intricate and warrants further study. Some research suggest that L2 mastery might reduce L1 proficiency, while others show that both languages can be maintained. Age of…

Lexical access and lexical diversity are often assumed to be vulnerable to first language (L1) attrition. They also differ between monolinguals and nonimmersed bilinguals. This raises the question whether lexical attrition can be ascribed to nonuse or to competition between the two languages. We compare two populations of late L2 learners of Dutch…

The study of language maintenance and shift (LMS) has attracted a large body of empirical work in language policy and planning (LPP) contexts, including allochthonous (immigrant) and autochthonous (indigenous) languages. However, some critical ontological questions that relate to the scope and terminology of language maintenance studies remain…

The present work presents a critical assessment of claims in recent literature that moribund language varieties exhibit accelerated language decay, and that attrition in individual grammars has a causational relationship with language shift to the majority language. We show these claims to be unfounded. Based on two empirical points taken from…

Although the terms 'heritage speakers' and 'heritage languages' are relatively new, the phenomena themselves date back to the beginning of migration. In many situations heritage languages do not survive these changes, but in others they are maintained successfully. This research explores the individual factors that promote the maintenance of…

Learning a new language is one of the privileges that a person can get when moving from one place to another and staying there for a longer time. In this paper, I will discuss my journey that resulted to gradual decline of my L1 (First language), Polillohing Tagalog, which is a variety of the Tagalog language, in the Philippines. The result of…

Research on language and cognitive processes in bilinguals over the past few decades has underscored the activation of words in the first language (L1) during comprehension and production of the second language (L2) (e.g., Dijkstra, Van Jaarsveld, & Ten Brinke, 1998; Van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998; Hermans, Bongaerts, De Bot, &…

This article discusses the dynamic nature of childhood bilingualism by analyzing oral speech from returnee heritage speakers (HSs) of Portuguese, who grew up in Germany, but moved to Portugal in childhood/adolescence. The first dataset from 14 speakers showed that the length of exposure to German predicted the rate of (in)accurate production of…

Cross-nationally, urbanization is associated with the decline of minority languages and a shift towards national and official languages. But the processes that link urbanization with language shift have not been adequately documented. In this paper we consider the relationship between cities and language shift from a sociolinguistic perspective,…

The Kafoa language is one of the indigenous languages in Indonesia so that needs to preserve it to be in existed category and reveal it as language assets in Indonesia and local culture identity. Revealing the Kafoa Language vitality can be conducted through many perspectives, one of them is through the use of basic cultural vocabulary mastery by…