"When I moved to the Netherlands a long time ago (I was 33 years old at the time), I was determined to learn Dutch quickly. I did not, of course, expect to become perfect – I knew I would occasionally fumble for words, my grammar would at times be erratic, and many (if not most) conversations with strangers would quickly lead up to the inevitable question "Where do you come from?" This, after all, is what usually happens when you learn a new language later in life – and tons and tons of research are there to support this. What I did not expect was for the same things to happen to my native German." This website created by Dr. Monika S. Schmid, Professor of Linguistics, University of York, shares information about the science of language attrition, what it looks like for adults, children, and other groups, anecdotes, media coverage, celebrity examples, and research tools.

Earlier Tuesday, Chomsky was trending on X as false reports of his death abounded.

"Dismantle All of This Stuff: A Conversation with Noam Chomsky," from back in 2021, when he was also still alive. " One Planet, One Language: How Realistic Is Science Fiction Linguistics?" is from 2014, when Chomsky was still alive, prior to 2021.

The European Union has twenty-four official languages, but, according to Jeremy Gardner, a senior translator at the European Court of Auditors, the real number is closer to twenty-three and a half. Gardner has compiled an anthology of offenses committed in what has come to be known as Eurenglish—an interoffice dialect that, as he writes in "A Brief List of Misused English Terms in E.U. Publications," relies upon "words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the E.U. institutions." Lauren Collins for the New Yorker (2013). A PDF version of Jeremy Gardner's report from 2016 is available here: "words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the EU institutions and often even to standard spellcheckers/grammar checkers ('planification', 'to precise' or 'telematics' for example)"

Previously includes a link to this useful Mental Floss article.

A linguist shares the story of his study with the last remaining speaker of South Tsimshian As shared to r/linguistics in 2013: "Today, Violet Neasloss, aka Nanny Violet, passed away. she was the oldest resident of Klemtu BC, 99 years old, and also one of the happiest, quickest, and most caring. With her death, the South Tsimshian, or SgüüXs language is now sleeping, but because of her, and the hundreds of hours of exhausting mental work she committed to over those months, at some point in the future, members of her community will have the option to wake it up again, and some have already started.

here is a video link of us recording - she upbraids me for my lack of knowledge about the kitchen, and finishes by showing the care she took over what knowledge she shared with the recordings, always careful that never a bad word was said about anybody, though she wasn't so careful when talking about things she felt were hurting her community"

Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? After moving abroad, I found my English slowly eroding. It turns out our first languages aren't as embedded as we think. Madeleine Schwartz for the NYT: "For a long time, a central question in linguistics was how people learn language. But in the past few decades, a new field of study called "language attrition" has emerged. It concerns not learning but forgetting: What causes language to be lost?"