Language Reversion Revisited

In the 1970s, Clyne conducted linguistic research on German-English and Dutch-English bilinguals in Australia. In the course of the study, he found evidence for second language attrition and first language reversion among his elderly informants (Clyne, 1981). In 1987, some 40 of the 200 Dutch informants tested in 1971 were retested in order to get longitudinal data on language maintenance and loss. The data show surprisingly little loss of proficiency in both Dutch and English over the years. This calls for a revision of the language reversion hypothesis as stated by Clyne in 1981. In the present article the hypothesis is modified to the extent that there seems to be some kind of “critical threshold” (Neisser, 1984) that has to be reached in order to retain the second language. First language reversion seems to be a common phenomenon among those immigrants who did not reach this threshold, but not among immigrants who did.