Abstract
AbstractThere has been a substantial amount of research on heritage language acquisition and diachronic change. Although recent work has increasingly pointed to parallels between those two areas, it remains unclear how systematic these are. In this paper, we provide a bird's eye view, illustrating how patterns of diachronic change are mirrored in heritage language grammars. In doing so, we focus on one of the best-described grammaticalization processes – namely, the formation of articles from demonstratives and numerals, reviewing studies on heritage varieties which mirror those processes. Based on this review, we make two main points: that change in heritage language can be predicted based on established diachronic scenarios, and that heritage languages often amplify incipient changes in the baseline. After discussing a number of attested changes in a bilingual context, we identify directions for future research in the domain of determiners in heritage languages.
Highlights
Grammaticalization is a process by which lexical words turn into grammatical markers
Molise Slavic has developed an indefinite article, which has the exact same functions as its counterpart in Italian. Another example where language contact seems to have accelerated the expansion of the indefinite articles comes from American Norwegian (AmNo), a heritage language spoken in the United States and Canada (Kinn, 2020)
We have outlined parallels between well-described diachronic patterns within the domain of nominal morphology and heritage language acquisition, proposing that HERITAGE LANGUAGE (HL) data provides us with opportunities to zoom into language change scenarios that normally take place over a very long period of time
Summary
Grammaticalization is a process by which lexical words turn into grammatical markers. We propose that heritage languages are an ideal testbed for language change (a) because they are in a situation of EXTREME LANGUAGE CONTACT, and (b) because they rely on colloquial input and are typically not subject to standardization, unlike their homeland counterparts. While grammaticalization studies generally stress universal principles driving language change, it is clear that the stages before European state-building (typically documented in such studies) involved language contact. In the latter case, this could be characterized as ‘normal’ language contact settings, settings of societal multilingualism or cases of ‘external’ language contact.
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