Correlations between linguistic change and linguistic performance among heritage speakers of Danish in Argentina

Abstract

Abstract The article addresses the issue of an assumed correlation between heritage language speakers’ linguistic system and their fluency. Previous research has shown that heritage language speakers who have grammatical patterns that are divergent from the language spoken in the homeland also have lexical retrieval problems and speak with a slower speech rate. We approach the issue by examining two linguistic features and 11 different fluency features (‘structural’ and ‘performance features’) of 10 speakers of Argentine Heritage Danish. A factor analysis shows that the 11 performance features can be reduced to 2 factors that characterize the speakers ‘lexical retrieval’ and ‘fluency’. A correlation analysis with the two structural features, weakening of a phonological contrast between /oː/ and /ɔː/ and simplification of the gender system, shows that there are no correlations at all between these two measures of the speakers’ language production, in contrast to what previous research has found.