First Language Attrition, Use and Maintenance: The Case of German Jews in Anglophone Countries (review)

Monika S. Schmid’s book First language attrition, use and maintenance: The case of German Jews in Anglophone countries explores language attrition with respect to factors such as age, use, and identity. These factors are particularly relevant to the subject group, making this book an important contribution to the study of language attrition.

The book is divided into two main parts: the background section and the empirical study itself. Ch. 1 (7–43) discusses what language attrition is and the relevant variables that affect it, including extralinguistic factors like age and education, and community factors like identity and ethnicity. This chapter also includes a short introduction to data collection and linguistic levels of analysis. Ch. 2 (45–62) provides a historical overview of the situation of German Jews before the Nazis’ rise to power, during their rise, and leading up to the holocaust. Emigration is an important part of this chapter—the problem of emigration is discussed in terms of how easy it was to leave Germany and where German Jews were able to seek asylum, which became increasingly difficult. This is a very important chapter as attitude and identity are major factors in language attrition and seem especially relevant to the subject group in this study.

The empirical section starts in Ch. 3 (63–83) in which the data collection and resulting corpus are discussed. The corpus consists of free speech of fifty-four native German speakers who are now living in English-speaking countries. The extralinguistic and community variables discussed in Ch. 1 are revisited and three hypotheses of language attrition influence are outlined according to variables of age, use, and identity.

The corpus was analyzed according to morphology, syntax, and ‘native-like’ quality of speech. These analyses are discussed in Ch. 4, ‘Morphology: NP-inflection’ (85–125), Ch. 5, ‘Morphology II: VP-inflection’ (127–48), and Ch. 6, ‘Syntax’ (149–68). In each chapter, the relevant aspects of the German system are described and compared to those of English and the stages found in German first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition. In turn, these are compared to the stages found in German L1 attrition. Ch. 7 (169–90) returns to a discussion of the variables that were introduced in Ch. 1 based on the corpus data. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the influences of age, use, and identity.

The book ends with some conclusions (191–92), mainly that attitude is a major influence on language loss and attrition, and the author proposes that the German speakers in the study have not permanently lost their German, that is, that full proficiency could be reactivated; thus in this study, language attrition is due to impaired access to the L1, rather than a permanent loss of the L1.

The book also contains appendices (213–51), which present some data tables as well as the original questionnaires that were sent out to the participants. An audio CD is included with the book so that readers may assess for themselves how native-like the speakers sound, and for those who are not proficient in German, transcripts and English translations are provided.