Abstract
In this paper, we bring to the attention of the linguistic community recent research on heritage languages. Shifting linguistic attention from the model of a monolingual speaker to the model of a multilingual speaker is important for the advancement of our understanding of the language faculty. Native speaker competence is typically the result of normal first language acquisition in an environment where the native language is dominant in various contexts, and learners have extensive and continuous exposure to it and opportunities to use it. Heritage speakers present a different case: they are bilingual speakers of an ethnic or immigrant minority language, whose first language often does not reach native-like attainment in adulthood. We propose a set of connections between heritage language studies and theory construction, underscoring the potential that this population offers for linguistic research. We examine several important grammatical phenomena from the standpoint of their representation in heritage languages, including case, aspect, and other interface phenomena. We discuss how the questions raised by data from heritage speakers could fruitfully shed light on current debates about how language works and how it is acquired under different conditions. We end with a consideration of the potential competing factors that shape a heritage language system in adulthood.
Highlights
What do we know when we know a language? This question is at the heart of the debate about the language faculty
There is no question that within a speech community the so-called “normal” native speakers share a complex linguistic system that enables them to communicate with each other beyond what is allowed by an elementary system of communication shared by many species or by people who do not speak the same language, to process each other’s linguistic input, and to transmit language to subsequent generations
Research on heritage languages brings together several related fields that have much to gain from working with and talking to each other: theoretical linguistics, with its emphasis on universal principles of language structure; experimental linguistics, especially the study of comprehension, which stands to gain a lot from working with readily available, populations; L1 acquisition, which can compare normal and arrested development; and L2 acquisition, which can compare heritage languages with both first and second languages
Summary
What do we know when we know a language? This question is at the heart of the debate about the language faculty. A prototypical (educated) native speaker living in a monolingual environment or if living in a bilingual one, who has not undergone attrition, has “native” pronunciation and a sizable and comprehensive vocabulary.1 Such a person speaks using grammatical sentences (except for the occasional slip of the tongue), does not omit or misplace morphemes, recognizes ambiguity and/or multiple interpretations and pragmatic implications of words and sentences, and is attuned to his or her sociolinguistic environment (social class, social context, gender, register, etc.). While we welcome and embrace the rich interdisciplinary potential of heritage speakers, the purpose of this paper is to highlight the relevance of this linguistic group to theoretical linguistics, an area of linguistics that has given primacy to the “monolingual” native speaker as the most valuable source of data for linguistic theories Such an emphasis on monolingual solid speakers was reasonable in the early stages of theory construction when the main goal was mainly to delimit the structural characteristics of the language faculty. The other critical component of this definition has to do with identifying a continuum of proficiency, reflecting the tremendous variation in heritage language ability observed by several researchers (see Polinsky & Kagan 2007; SilvaCorvalán 1994)
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