The Acquisition of Heritage Languages

Abstract

Heritage speakers are native speakers of a minority language they learn at home, but due to socio-political pressure from the majority language spoken in their community, their heritage language does not fully develop. In the last decade, the acquisition of heritage languages has become a central focus of study within linguistics and applied linguistics. This work centres on the grammatical development of the heritage language and the language learning trajectory of heritage speakers, synthesizing recent experimental research. The Acquisition of Heritage Languages offers a global perspective, with a wealth of examples from heritage languages around the world. Written in an accessible style, this authoritative and up-to-date text is essential reading for professionals, students, and researchers of all levels working in the fields of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, education, language policies and language teaching.

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

“…Previous studies have explored agreement in heritage Spanish Alarcón 2011;Montrul 2016), but ours is the first to add linear and structural distance between the agreeing goal and probe while extending the agreement attraction paradigm to heritage speakers. This innovation serves to provide more information about the heritage grammar of agreement while simultaneously suggesting a clear path of restructuring from the monolingual baseline to the heritage grammar.…”

“…We have in mind heritage speakers: (relatively) unbalanced bilinguals who shifted from their first language (their heritage language) to their dominant language early in childhood. 1 According to most definitions, heritage speakers are individuals who were raised in homes where a language other than the dominant community language was spoken, resulting in some degree of bilingualism in both the heritage language and the dominant language (Valdés 2000;Rothman 2009;Benmamoun et al 2013a;Scontras et al 2015;Montrul 2016). This relatively unconstrained definition makes it almost impossible to give a concrete model for a heritage speaker, but this is by design: heritage language proficiency falls along a continuum.…”

“…Increasing analyticity with syntactic structures that allow one-to-one correspondences between underlying features and surface forms would lead to a richer, more rigid morphology (Sorace 2005;Keating et al 2016;Montrul 2016). The research to date suggests that increased analyticity is commonly the trigger for restructuring in heritage grammar.…”

Differences in use without deficiencies in competence: passives in the Turkish and German of Turkish heritage speakers in Germany

“…Although it is not always the case that heritage speaker (HS) bilinguals differ from monolinguals of comparative ages (see, e.g., Kupisch and Rothman 2016), HS deviation from monolingual performances on experimental tasks-potentially representing bona fide differences in mental grammars-is not uncommon (see, e.g., Montrul 2008Montrul , 2016. It is important to define what we mean by HSs from the beginning.…”

VOT in French as a foreign language: A production and perception study with mono- and multilingual learners (German/Mandarin-Chinese)

“…This particularly holds for foreign language learning in migrant children who speak a so-called heritage language (HL, Valdés 2000, Montrul 2016) in addition to their dominant language, which is also the surrounding language and the language of school instruction. The goal of the present paper is to fill this research gap by investigating the production of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in voiced and voiceless stops in French as a foreign language (FFL).…”