Heritage Speakers as Part of the Native Language Continuum

Abstract

We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. (1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. (2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. (3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.

A Plural Indefinite Article in Heritage Greek: The Role of Register

“…101-2;Chevalier 2004). Evidence concerning register levelling in heritage languages has recently been discussed in Wiese et al (2022) for a variety of phenomena and heritage languages (see also Rothman 2007 andPolinsky 2018); one such phenomenon presented in Wiese et al is the overgeneralization of the indeclinable complementizer pu for the introduction of relative clauses in Greek. Another is the use of light verb constructions for the expression of the perfective Aspect instead of lexical verbs (Alexiadou and Rizou Forthcoming).…”

Exploring individual variation in Turkish heritage speakers’ complex linguistic productions: Evidence from discourse markers

“…Studies like ours allow to regard bilingual heritage speakers as native-like too and include them as part of a native speaker continuum, as has recently been suggested by Wiese et al (2022). It is important to stress, however, that nativeness is always a construct and many speakers who have years of experience in a language can also be part of that continuum.…”

“…In order to secure data sustainability, reproducibility, and to harvest the synergistic quality of collaborative annotation, we decided to use the openly available corpus of the 'Research Unit Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations: A Comparative Approach' (RUEG, Wiese et al, 2022). All code and the processed data will be made accessible for publication on GitHub and OSF.…”

“…The role of the group factor, which is often the main object of focus in studies of heritage language bilingualism, will be questioned allowing room for a continuum of fluent (first) language proficiency. This continuum allows bilinguals to stand on equal grounds as monolinguals, as suggested by Wiese et al (2022).…”

Eyetracking evidence for heritage speakers’ access to abstract syntactic agreement features in real-time processing

“…HSs are native speakers in their own right, by virtue of the nature of their acquisition process (for discussion seePascual et al, 2012;Kupisch and Rothman, 2018; Polinsky, 2018, Chp. 2.3;Wiese et al, 2022).…”