The Strange Persistence of First Languages (2015)

In the late 90s I was on a US project which included a small Dutch software company. The founder told me about Dutch people who had been living in the US for thirty plus years, speaking perfect English, now in nursing homes, who with age or dementia or whatever, can lose their ability to speak English. They revert to their native language only. I've never heard of this as an issue again, but I wondered how this might turn into a serious problem caring for many immigrant people who lose the ability to speak English in their later years.

There are also studies that suggest that people's morality changes depending on the language used. In particular, they become less utilitarian with a foreign language: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-morality-chan...

From the article title I thought this article would be why FORTRAN, LISP, and COBOL still survive after over 60 years of use. First, these computer languages started with a lot of good ideas and evolved to incorporate ideas from subsequent decades like structured programming and objects. Second, there are massive institutional code bases in these early languages that are too difficult to rewrite. These languages might even make it into the 22nd century.