Language attrition and code-switching among US Americans in Germany

Abstract

The use of two or more languages in conversation is very common in immigration contexts. When immigrants learn a second language (L2) in their host cultures, the acquisition of the L2 often influences their native languages (L1s). This influence often manifests as language attrition, the non-pathological loss of the native language due to emigration and the related lack of exposure to the mother tongue (Kopke and Schmid 2004:5). Native language retrieval problems can then arise on lexical or structural levels since the L2 lexicon and structure are more readily available to the immigrant speaker. In addition to L1 attrition, L2 language items often get inserted into the L1 speech for socially motivated reasons. Code-switching in immigration contexts is the simultaneous use of, for example, L1 and L2 in discourse, where cultural and social meaning is often attached to the language choice immigrants make (Schely-Newman 1998:97; Scheu 2000:133). The differentiation and combined investigation of code-switching, which is socially motivated, and language attrition, which is predominantly a psycholinguistic issue, is a new and important approach to the analysis of bilingual data. In research so far the one area has hardly taken note of the other (Walters 2005). This article attempts to close the gap identified here as it investigates, in a connected way, functional aspects of code-switching and identifies selected socio-demographic factors that affect immigrants' lexical attrition. It reports on a study that applies a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods on a corpus of multilingual interviews with thirty people who had immigrated to Germany from the United States between 1964 and 2001. This paper discusses the overall distribution of occurrences of code-switching and lexical attrition across the corpus and sheds light on how code-switching and lexical attrition correlate with identity-related factors such as English language-related professions, social contact with other Americans and the length of residence in Germany (quantitative approach). On the other hand, it shows how intercultural identities are constructed through the employment of code-switching (qualitative approach). In this paper, I firstly provide a brief theoretical discussion of code-switching and lexical attrition. Secondly, I give a functional analysis of the bilingual language use among Americans living in Germany. Thirdly, I show how extralinguistic, identity-related factors correlate with the bilingual data and I discuss the relevance of distinguishing between code-switching and language attrition in intercultural identity research.