“My Polish is dying, and I'm really upset about it”: First language experiences of the 1.5 generation of immigrants in Ireland

Abstract

Children who immigrated to Ireland in the mid to late 2000s during the largest peak in net-inward migration that the country experienced are now young adults. This group represents what is known as the 1.5 generation (Rumbaut, 1994; Rumbaut, 1997, 2004; Rumbaut & Ima, 1988), a group of immigrants who were born into a language community but migrated to another community where they completed their education. This study explores the language experiences of such immigrants through an exploratory questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The descriptions of the participants’ relationship to their first language indicates a combination of first language attrition relating to, for example, lexical retrieval, interference from the dominant L2, and incomplete language acquisition relating to specific domains of language use. The self-reported effects of this experience of their first language in the 1.5 generation migrant context impact their cultural and personal identity. Participants reported a range of emotions relating to their language loss. The findings of this study can contribute to the emerging field of research in first language attrition and may have implications for the development and implementation of language maintenance policy such as those outlined in Ireland’s Strategy for Foreign Languages in Education 2017-2026: Languages Connect (Department of Education and Skills, 2017).