Language Reversion Revisited

TLDR

Clyne’s 1970s study examined German‑English and Dutch‑English bilinguals in Australia. This article revises Clyne’s hypothesis by proposing a critical threshold that must be reached to retain a second language. The authors retested 40 of 200 Dutch informants from 1971 in 1987 to obtain longitudinal data on language maintenance and loss. Longitudinal results show little proficiency decline in Dutch and English, reveal that first‑language reversion occurs only among immigrants who did not reach the threshold, and therefore call for a revision of the original hypothesis.

Abstract

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.