Linguistic portrait of aRussian-German speaking woman with dementia : Longitudinal observations from aGerman language nursing home

Abstract

The advantages of an individual use of the linguistic resources of multilingual persons in need of care are obvious, but quite often an implementation is hardly possible. This leads to areduction of the linguistic abilities of those concerned. This case study shows the differences in the abilities of aRussian-German bilingual woman suffering from dementia in expressing herself in two languages and traces the longitudinal changes. Data material from 4years of observation (including conversation recordings, linguistic tests and interviews with nursing personnel) was used to create the linguistic portrait. The expression abilities and changes in the languages were different. In German, the receptive abilities at word level and sentence level and productive abilities at word level remained unchanged over the entire period. In Russian, the situation was less stable; at the beginning, she was an interested interlocutor who could express herself fluently at all levels. Over time, her syntactic complexity and willingness to interact decreased; nevertheless, better and productive Russian skills remained. The asymmetrical distribution of the two languages entails the danger of aone-sided assessment of the general abilities of the person concerned. This underlines the need for adifferentiated view of the languages.