CLINICAL LINGUISTICS
Individual and social loss
What this allows us to do is to link individual language loss with social loss, that is loss by groups, both L1 and L2. Those who lose their L1 do so usually through contact with some (politically) dominating language group. This may happen through in-migration (e.g. Celtic language speakers, Australian aborigines, American Indians) or by out-migration (e.g. Singaporean Chinese, Guyanan Indians). But of course, it may also happen through disappearance of all L1 speakers, although this usually takes place not in isolation but in the context of the earlier example. In other words, it is not that the people themselves die out; their children and grandchildren survive, and may indeed multiply, but they have shifted language to that of the more politically powerful group (Irish to English in Ireland, Latvian to Russian in Latvia).
Why do speakers shift language, and does this have any bearing on the clinical linguist’s concern with individual language attrition?
Where there remains a rising generation who have the choice of continuing with the traditional language and shifting to the new, the unwelcome answer is expediency: the old is regarded by the young as lacking utility against the challenge of modernism, not having the prestige associated with consumerism and technology, having outmoded cultural values and so on. Of course there are always counter positions whereby a strong challenge can be made to such a movement for change from traditional religion and culture (for example in Islam), But the opposition needs to be very strong indeed to have a more than marginal influence and it is difficult to think of any compelling force other than a fundamentalist religion which is strong enough to do so.
The reasons for social loss may not be informative about the reasons for individual impairment, although the attempt to look more carefully at the cover-all explanation of expediency and subject it to analysis does relate to the wider scope now attributed to clinical linguistics which ‘may be said to encompass the functional effects of impairment on communicative adequacy and social interaction, and includes the study of emotional factors and normal interaction’ (Kerr 1993: 105).
But it is in the areas of just what is lost socially and individually through impairment that we do find common ground.
What is lost as language shifts is that the L1 becomes increasingly influenced by the L2. Thus there is the acculturation of proper names, whereby, for example, Chinese Christian children may be given Christian (that is Western) proper names; there is the loss of productive word formation so that borrowings (and even more new formations) are based not on the morphology of the L1 but on that of the L2; there is lexical loss leading to a lexical creep of L2 words into the L1; there is phonological loss such that new formations are given L2 phonological shape (Dorian 1981, Craig 2007, May 2005).
To what extent does this mirror loss in impairment? In loss brought on by old age in the L2, there is some similarity, in particular in the well-known area of naming, if only because there is somewhere else (the L1) to go, although of course it is in the reverse direction from language shift. However, both with the monolingual elderly and with those suffering from acquired language problems such as aphasia, there is typically nowhere else to resort to (even if the aphasic patient is bilingual since the impairment is not language specific) and so the damage is as much psychological as linguistic and treatment must adjust accordingly.
