Heritage language

A heritage language is a minority language (either immigrant or indigenous) learned by its speakers at home as children, and difficult to be fully developed because of insufficient input from the social environment. The speakers grow up with a different dominant language in which they become more competent. Polinsky and Kagan label it as a continuum (taken from Valdés definition of heritage language) that ranges from fluent speakers to barely speaking individuals of the home language. In some countries or cultures which determine a person's mother tongue by the ethnic group they belong to, a heritage language would be linked to the native language.

The term can also refer to the language of a person's family or community that the person does not speak or understand, but identifies with culturally.

Definitions and use

A heritage language is a language which is predominantly spoken by "nonsocietal" groups and linguistic minorities.

In various fields, such as foreign language education and linguistics, the definitions of heritage language become more specific and divergent. In foreign language education, heritage language is defined in terms of a student's upbringing and functional proficiency in the language: a student raised in a home where a non-majority language is spoken is a heritage speaker of that language if they possess some proficiency in it. usually when they start school and talk about different topics with people in school, or by exposure through the media (such as written texts, the Internet, or popular culture). As exposure to the heritage language decreases and exposure to the majority language increases, the majority language becomes the individual’s dominant language and acquisition of the heritage language changes. whereas they are so classified by others.

The label heritage is given to a language based principally on the social status of its speakers and not necessarily on any linguistic property. Thus, while Spanish typically comes in second in terms of native speakers worldwide and has official status in a number of countries, it is considered a heritage language in the English-dominant United States Outside the United States and Canada, heritage language definitions and use vary.

Speakers of the same heritage language raised in the same community may differ significantly in terms of their language abilities, yet be considered heritage speakers under this definition. Some heritage speakers may be highly proficient in the language, possessing several registers, while other heritage speakers may be able to understand the language but not produce it. Other individuals that simply have a cultural connection with a minority language but do not speak it may consider it to be their heritage language.

Proficiency

Heritage learners have a fluent command of the dominant language and are comfortable using it in formal setting because of their exposure to the language through formal education.

One factor that has been shown to influence the loss of fluency in the heritage language is age. Studies have shown that younger bilingual children are more susceptible to fluency loss than older bilingual children. This phenomenon becomes a struggle for adults who are trying to learn a different language. Once an individual has learned a language fluently, they will be heavily influenced by the grammatical rules and pronunciations of the first language they learned, while learning a new language.

Although speech rate has been shown to be an effective way of measuring proficiency of heritage speakers, some heritage speakers are reluctant to produce any heritage language whatsoever. Lexical proficiency is an alternative method that is also effective in measuring proficiency. In a study with heritage Russian speakers, there was a strong correlation between the speaker's knowledge of lexical items (measured using a basic word list of about 200) and the speaker's control over grammatical knowledge such as agreement, temporal marking, and embedding. Heritage speakers also tend to distinguish, rather than conflate, easily confusable sounds in the heritage language and the dominant language more reliably than second language learners. In morphosyntax as well, heritage speakers have been found to be more native-like than second language learners, although they are typically significantly different from native speakers.

Many linguists frame this change in heritage language acquisition as "incomplete acquisition" or "attrition." This argument by Pascual and Rothman claims that the acquisition of the heritage language is therefore not incomplete, but complete and simply different from monolingual acquisition of a language. This new model thus moves away from language acquisition that is dependent on the exposure to input of the language and moves towards dependence on the frequency of processing for production and comprehension of the heritage language.

Some colleges and universities offer courses prepared for speakers of heritage languages. For example, students who grow up learning some Spanish in the home may enroll in a course that will build on their Spanish abilities.

Notes

References

External links

Heritage Language Journal
International Journal of Heritage Studies
National Heritage Language Resource Center (US)