Facets of native-likeness: First-language attrition among German emigrants to Anglophone North America

According to the United Nations, there were 244 million international migrants in the world in 2015. Many of them live in places where their native language is not widely used. This can bring about changes to their proficiency in that language. Linguists refer to these changes as ‘attrition’. Even after decades of research on this phenomenon, there is still a lot we do not know. For this thesis, I have investigated the native language proficiency of German emigrants to Anglophone North America. In none of the areas I focused on, these emigrants – called ‘attriters’ – performed the same as German native speakers in Germany. The attriters pronounced some sounds of German differently, approaching similar sounds of their ambient language, English. Many attriters sounded foreign to native listeners and spoke less fluently than other natives. However, the more attriters used familiar expressions (e.g., ‘when all is said and done’), the more they were able to remain fluent – probably because these expressions can be retrieved as a whole from memory and do not have to be pieced together on the spot. We have also conducted one of the first experiments in which the brain waves of attriters were investigated using EEG recordings, showing that attriters processed some types of grammatical errors differently from natives in Germany. All in all, there was clear evidence for attrition effects, but it has to be emphasised that many of these effects were subtle rather than dramatic. Despite all these differences, the attriters remain highly proficient speakers of German