First language attrition: Bridging sociolinguistic narratives and psycholinguistic models of attrition

First language attrition has traditionally been studied in individuals who stopped routinely using their L1 following a move abroad. From migrants in the 1980s and 1990s, the settings in more recent attrition studies have widened to expat communities who mostly continue to use their L1 in daily life (cf. Keijzer 2020). Thus, the backstory of attriters and attrition as a field has changed, and Köpke’s (2007) observation that studying the intricacies of attrition is ‘promising for the exploration of links between the brain, mind and external factors that are also of interest in multilingualism’ (10) rings truer than ever before. This chapter departs from individual multilingual narratives but with the realization that those narratives are inextricably linked to the environment in which they move. Furthermore, the chapter aims to show how language pairings and the typological distance between these languages, which has yet to be fully understood as an attrition predictor (cf. Riehl 2019), play a defining role in characterizing individual attriters and their stories and aims to propose how those individual attrition stories can only be done justice by integrating the traditionally separate sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to attrition.