Cross linguistic influence of the second language on the first: Written production of Iranian immigrants to Australia

Abstract

As soon as a speaker becomes bilingual, the new language will very subtly influence the native one, even if it is not much used. This is how first language attrition may start. Most attrition studies deal with spoken language; however, as in writing people have more time to think and revise, written data is supposed to reflect language competence more clearly. In the present study the purpose is to investigate immigrants’ first language attrition in written texts. Data was a corpus of 71,848 words taken from the weblogs of a number of Persian speaking immigrants to Australia that were written monthly up to the fiftieth month of their immigration. It included lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic deviations of the native language of these immigrants. Their own written production two months before immigration is used as control. The result confirms the vulnerability of lexicon, as in previous research. There is a decreasing, and finally stabilized state in some cases of attrition; this may be explained by the acculturation phenomenon. Lots of interpersonal variations have been detected which may either be gender-related or a matter of personal preference. Hence, this study calls for further psycho-sociolinguistic investigations to explain the language attrition.