French as a Heritage Language in Germany

Abstract

Research on child heritage speakers (HSs) has shown successful language acquisition, comparable to monolinguals, whereas research on adult HSs often claims incomplete acquisition. This seems to be an evident contradiction in the current state of research, which may be explained by a possible language shift during adolescence or adulthood, but which does not necessarily have to be equated with a lack of competence. In an overview of the existing studies on child and adult HSs of French in Germany, we show that HSs are not incomplete acquirers of French and we suggest theoretical and practical implications following these findings. Our aim is to show, first, that HSs of French in Germany are not unanimously disadvantaged compared with French speakers in countries where French is a majority language, and second, that complete acquisition is independent of language dominance, a notion that has received particular attention in studies on multilingual and HL acquisition.

AAiMLL: Acquisition Advantages in MultiLingual Learners: The Case of the Multilingual Child

“…On top of that, Meisel (2007) draws the following conclusion from empirical studies on multilingual children with a 'weak' language: these multilingual children may be delayed, but they do not show acquisition failure-and they are able to control language use (Eichler 2011;Patuto et al 2014). In sum, balanced as well as unbalanced multilingual children can separate and control their languages and become competent in all of their languages (Stahnke et al 2021). But is there a multilingual linguistic advantage?…”