Heritage-language speakers: Theoretical and empirical challenges on sociolinguistic attitudes and prestige

Abstract

Migration brings people into situations where languages other than their native tongues are dominant. Their mother tongues often therewith become minority varieties, for young people and later generations what are now called 'heritage languages'. This particular kind of multilingual setting appears to correlate with consistent (but variable) processes of change. In the last few years, heritage-language research has been developing rapidly across subdisciplines as varied as heritage language education (Trifonas & Aravossitas 2015; Kagan et al. 2017), language attrition (Köpke et al. 2007; Schmid 2011), and structural linguistics (see notably Benmamoun et al., 2010; 2013). While these research areas provide broadly detailed and comprehensive overviews on grammatical knowledge and grammatical change in the heritage-language context, less attention has to date been dedicated to sociolinguistic approaches and the role that specific external-linguistic factors play. In this special issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism, we foreground the role of external factors in heritage-language variation and change. More precisely, we are concerned with the questions of (a) what effect the prestige of related minority languages/language varieties has in the heritage-language context, and (b) how heritage-language speakers view and evaluate their own linguistic practices, notably also in relation to other languages/language varieties. Relatedly, the following considerations 1 also frame the collection of articles presented herein: 1 These considerations reflect current debates in the field, see e.g. Polinsky & Kagan (2007); Potowski (2013); Polinsky (forthcoming).

Understanding heritage languages

“…As the time balance shifts in favor of one language (i.e., the dominant language of the broader speech community), the other language (i.e., the heritage language) will receive even less time. Here we set aside the sociolinguistic factors that can lead to this imbalance (but see, e.g., Gathercole & Thomas, 2007; Kasstan, Auer & Salmons, 2018; Lynch, 2014) and focus instead on its implications: less time leads to reduced input, which is likely to be a primary trigger for the divergences observed between baseline and heritage grammars. That input matters to language-learning outcomes is by now uncontroversial: however much innate, domain-specific knowledge we might want to posit for language, nobody will argue that children born in Moscow come pre-wired for Russian and those born on the coast of Maine come pre-wired for English.…”

The Study of Heritage Language Development From a Bilingualism and Social Justice Perspective

“…Several research communities in the last 20 years have turned their attention to HL speakers, each taking up different questions regarding their linguistic development, sociolinguistic experiences, and educational needs (e.g., Kasstan, Auer, & Salmons, ; Łyskawa & Nagy, ; Montrul, ; Pascual y Cabo, ; Polinsky, ; Potowski, ; Trifonas & Aravossitas, ; Wiley, Peyton, Christian, Moore, & Liu, ). A burgeoning community of researchers investigates, specifically, the linguistic development seen in the heritage language (henceforth HLD) and asks: How does the linguistic fate of the home language change when it shares time, space, and resources with the societal language in the life of a child?…”

Attitude Towards Language in Sociolinguistics Settings: A Brief Overview

“…. In the same way, appeals to language attitudes as an explanatory factor in change remain a wealth of sociolinguistics studies, which rely heavily on social-psychological theories and context in the development of approaches to interpersonal communication and groups (Kasstan, Auer & Salmons, 2018). Language behaviour is the person's mental attitude in selecting and using language (Chaer & Agustina, 2004).…”