Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics

Abstract

Native speaker competence is typically the result of normal first language acquisition in a predominantly monolingual environment, with optimal and continuous exposure to the language being acquired. In this article, we discuss the case of heritage speakers: receptive bilinguals, speakers of an ethnic or immigrant minority language, whose first language does not reach native-like attainment in adulthood. We present a brief overview of the heritage speaker's linguistic system and discuss competing factors that shape this system in adulthood. We examine several theoretically relevant notions from the standpoint of their representation in heritage language (including case and interface phenomena). The connection between theory and heritage language studies underscores the potential this population offers for linguistic research.

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

“…The outcome is a more general decline in morphological richness, eventually leading to the loss of agreement. This latter outcome is also a hallmark of heritage languages (Benmamoun et al 2013b); now we have a better understanding of how this loss transpires.…”

Language Mixing and Diachronic Change: American Norwegian Noun Phrases Then and Now

“…On the one hand, the heritage language is their native language, but compared to monolinguals of the non-heritage variety of the language in question, they often do not reach the same level of competence. On the other hand, their competence might resemble that of L2 learners of the language, but HS will typically outperform L2 learners in many areas (see [14,15]). This tension has been discussed in several works and attributed to incomplete acquisition [16,17], or attritio [14,18].…”

Focus in Dutch reading: an eye-tracking experiment with heritage speakers of Turkish

“…Differently from most other bilinguals, the L2 of heritage speakers is often the dominant language, and the L1, which is commonly not the school language, is subject to incomplete acquisition or attrition (e.g. Benmamoun et al, 2013). Research on heritage speakers mostly concerns how the heritage language is affected by the stronger L2.…”

“…Second-generation heritage speakers are a special type of bilinguals, because, although they acquired their heritage language as their first language (L1), they are dominant in their second language (L2), which is the language of the society in which they were born (e.g. Benmamoun, Montrul, & Polinsky, 2013). Whereas most studies on heritage speakers concentrate on how heritage languages are affected by the dominant L2 (e.g.…”