Academic Study Origins
Only in the past few decades has the study of language attrition become a sub-field of linguistics beginning with a 1980 conference at the University of Pennsylvania titled Loss of Language Skills ( Lambert and Freed, 1982 ). The aim of this conference was to discuss areas of second language (L2) attrition and to ideate on possible areas of future research in L2 loss. The conference revealed that attrition is a wide topic covering different types of language loss and that there are many possible reasons for the loss. A related phenomenon is the loss of language due to contact with other, more dominant languages, possibly leading to language death.
The field gained new momentum with two conferences held in Amsterdam in 2002 and 2005, as well as a series of graduate workshops and panels at international conferences such as the International Symposium on Bilingualism (2007, 2009), the annual conferences of the European Second Language Association and the AILA W0rld Congress (2008). The outcome of some of these meetings have been published in edited volumes (Schmid et al. 2004; Köpke et al. 2007) and special issues of journals, such as the ' 'Journal of Neurolinguistics (Vol. 17:1, 2004), the ' 'International Journal of Bilingualism (Vol. 8:3, 2004) and ' 'Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Vol. 13:1, 2010) .
Read more about this topic: Language Attrition
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