language loss
Forgetting mother tongue
Language loss is the decline or disappearance of a language, either in an individual or a community.
A person may experience language loss through disuse—immigrants often lose fluency in their native tongue over generations.
On a larger scale, language loss describes languages dying out as their last speakers age: Linguists race to document endangered languages before language loss becomes permanent.
The term also applies to losing language ability through brain injury or dementia.
- extinctionComplete vanishing of a species
- endangeredAt risk of extinction
- forgottenNo longer recalled
- mother tongueLanguage acquired from birth
- native tongueLanguage acquired from infancy
heritage · silence · erosion · fading · indigenous · revitalization · assimilation · displacement · generations · intergenerational trauma · boarding schools · elders · grief · colonization · cultural erasure · dormant · memory · first words
- language losscritically endangered
- globalizationglobalization, free trade, global village, global trade, multinationals
- endangered languagesrevitalization, UNESCO
- immigrant identityimmigrant experience, immigrant identity, dual identity, hybrid identity, hyphenated identity
- immigrant literatureimmigrant stories, displacement, cultural memory, belonging, assimilation
- Vietnamese diasporaLittle Saigon, Vietnamese American, boat people, refugee, first generation
language losslanguage acquisition
Developing communication ability
language learning · second language acquisition · language development · multilingualism · language proficiency
language, loss, languages, linguistic, linguistics, linguist, lingua, lingual, bilingual