Heritage Languages: In the 'Wild' and in the Classroom

By Maria Polinsky, Olga Kagan. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2007

613 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Heritage speakers are people raised in a home where one language is spoken who subsequently switch to another dominant language. The version of the home language that they have not completely acquired – heritage language – has only recently been given the attention it deserves from linguists and language instructors. Despite the appearance of great variation among heritage speakers, they fall along a continuum based upon the speakers’ distance from the baseline language. Such a continuum-based model enables researchers and instructors to classify heritage speakers more accurately and readily. This article discusses the results of research on lower-proficiency speakers, identifying recurrent features of heritage languages in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Preliminary results indicate that different heritage languages share a number of structural similarities; this finding is important for the understanding of general processes involved in language acquisition. The article also presents implications of the main findings for language education and identifies areas needing further study.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df1f9aafe3144c8b0fc567a4cfa68f7a6f460b21

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Language and Linguistics

Citations in the corpus

Current Issues in Heritage Language Acquisition (2010, background): “the emergent linguistic knowledge consists of local associations and memorized chunks; for Goldberg (1999) and Tomasello (2003), it is constructions; and for O’Grady (2005), it is memorized processing routines.”
REANALYSIS IN ADULT HERITAGE LANGUAGE (2011, background): “Second, the pool was also limited to speakers whose rate of speech, as measured using their frog story narrative, was under 100 words per minute (see Polinsky, 2008a ; Polinsky & Kagan, 2007 , for evidence that rate of speech is a reliable predictor of profi ciency in heritage speakers).”
The Heart of Heritage: Sociocultural Dimensions of Heritage Language Learning (2010, background): “…an HL means not merely to command the phonetic, lexical, and syntactic forms in both speech and writing, but also to understand or embrace a set of continually evolving norms, preferences and expectations relating linguistic structures to multifaceted, dynamic contexts (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007).”
Understanding the nature and outcomes of early bilingualism: Romance languages as heritage languages (2009, background): “…unites pedagogical concerns and empirical linguistic studies in that one motivation for understanding heritage language competence is that The International Journal of Bilingualism determining how to best deal with them as adult (re)acquirers of the heritage language (cf. Polinsky and Kagan, 2007).”
Is the heritage language like a second language (2012, background): “Although the field of Heritage Language Acquisition has emerged in the United States and Canada as a “new” field (Brinton et al., 2008; Polinsky & Kagan, 2007; Kondo-Brown, 2006; Montrul, 2008a), the study of 2nd generation bilinguals and what we today call heritage speakers is not new, but has…”
Terminology matters! Why difference is not incompleteness and how early child bilinguals are heritage speakers (2018, background): “This definition is relatively uncontroversial, according in several domains with other available definitions (e.g. Benmamoun, Montrul, & Polinsky, 2013; Montrul, 2008, 2016; Polinsky & Kagan, 2007), but one crucial difference consists in its purposeful avoidance of the term incomplete acquisition.”