Foreign Language Attrition

Abstract
Compared to research on language acquisition, research on the maintenance and loss of language skills is a relatively recent development. There is, of course, a longstanding sociolinguistic tradition of research on language shift, but work in the field of attrition really started in the US in the late 1970s (Lambert and Freed 1982). Since then, research on language attrition has grown rapidly in different countries, as is witnessed by special issues devoted to the topic in the journalsApplied Psycholinguisticsin 1986,ITL-Review of Applied Linguisticsin 1989 andStudies in Second Language Acquisitionin 1989, as well as by three recent volumes: Weltens, de Bot and van Els (1986), Weltens (1989), and Seliger and Vago (1991).

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