Mma Said had once come across an individual who had failed to recall his Setswana, and had been amazed, and alarmed. This individual had moved away to attend school in Nigeria, and as a person in their late teens had practiced a local language and learned French too. Upon his return to South Africa, 40 years later, it felt as if he he had visited another country and had been observed looking bewildered when others utilized fairly basic, regular Igbo words. According to the article read by a Philadelphia Translation Services specialist, the mother believed that to lose your native language was like forgetting your father, and every bit as sad, you might say. The people of this nation should not lose Igbo, she felt. She added that while we practice a great deal of English these days, it would be similar to getting rid of part of one’s soul.
Most indigenous speakers, when presented with divergent vocabulary use by refugees, share some of Mma Said’s emotions: individuals are curious, shocked and sometimes even alarmed. To neglect your indigenous speech is understood as an act that is upsetting and unfortunate – ‘like forgetting your parents’ and ‘comparable to shedding part of your soul’ – to the extent that the term prescribed to this phenomenon is generally not actually ‘forgetting’ but ‘losing’. This terminology was interesting to one Boston Spanish Translation worker, given that the term ‘loss’ generally indicates a discrete, all-or-nothing method: you don’t misplace a little bit of your tote, you either have it or it is missing. Discussing ‘vocabulary loss’, then, usually means that once the system is jeopardized, you cease to be ‘an indigenous speaker’. You have, ultimately, come to be a foreigner in the tradition that you were brought into.
The term vocabulary attrition, then, relates to the (full or incomplete) neglecting of a tongue by a healthy native user. This practice of forgetting occurs in a location where that vocabulary is applied seldom if ever, e.g. by immigrants such Mma Said for whom the language of the place where they reside has become the main medium of interaction in day-to-day life.