Heritage languages

Abstract

Heritage languages, such as the Turkish varieties spoken in Berlin or the Spanish used in Los Angeles, are non-dominant languages, often with little prestige. Their speakers also speak the dominant language of the country they live in. Often heritage languages undergo changes due to their special status. They have received a lot of scholarly attention and provide a link between academic concerns and educational issues. This book takes a language contact perspective: we consider heritage languages from the perspective of their history, their structural properties, and their interaction with other surrounding languages. The chapter on Bilingual language use has been co-authored by Anne Verschik; the chapter on Processing has been co-authored by Gerrit Jan Kootstra; and the chapter on Papiamentu has been co-authored by Bart Jacobs.

You Can’t Fix What Is Not Broken: Contextualizing the Imbalance of Perceptions About Heritage Language Bilingualism

“…1 As has been pointed out in recent work (e.g., Kasstan et al, 2018;Aalberse et al, 2019), it should follow that much of the noted HS individual variation can, at least in part, be explained in sociolinguistic terms. Indeed, the study of language variation, contact and change as influenced by social factors offers great promise for illuminating key factors contributing to how and why HLB reports such a wide spectrum of individual differences while providing a theoretical backdrop to make sense of, if not predict, apparent individual differences.…”

Map Task Corpus of Heritage BCMS spoken by second-generation speakers in Switzerland

“…Although they are brought up in the same household, siblings can have great differences in heritage language proficiency (Aalberse & Muysken, 2013 , p. 6). While Baker ( 2007 , p. 56) argues that a younger child is simply integrated in the decisions about language that are already established in the family, Kheirkhah & Cekaite ( 2018 ) challenge that by claiming that siblings may have different experiences of the heritage language related to factors such as the age of migration, social environment and their aspirations.…”

“…While Baker ( 2007 , p. 56) argues that a younger child is simply integrated in the decisions about language that are already established in the family, Kheirkhah & Cekaite ( 2018 ) challenge that by claiming that siblings may have different experiences of the heritage language related to factors such as the age of migration, social environment and their aspirations. It is often argued that the eldest child speaks the heritage language most native like (Aalberse & Muysken, 2013 ; Jarovinskij, 1995 ; Shin, 2002 ; Wong Fillmore, 1991 ) since they receive more speech input from the parents. The school entry of the eldest child usually implies the introduction of the dominant language in the family.…”

“…50 However, it could also be the case that they tried to avoid exclusively Ikavian features because this variety is not encoded in any BCMS standard language and it has low prestige in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in contrast to Ijekavian. 51 For that reason, speakers might have adapted to their non-Ikavian interlocutors by avoiding the forms that are marked dialectally or geographically (see levelling in Aalberse & Muysken, 2013 , pp. 8–9).…”

The interpretation of syntactically unconstrained anaphors in Turkish heritage speakers

“…Putnam and Arnbjörnsdóttir, 2015). Typically, simplification results in the heritage language converging with the dominant language model, usually the national language of the country of residence (Aalberse and Muysken, 2013). For example, Russian heritage speakers in the United States collapse the six-case system of Russian into a simpler nominativeaccusative contrast, the two cases most commonly attested in English and other languages with reduced case systems (Leisiö, 2001;Polinsky, 2006;Zemskaja, 2001).…”