Linguistic Proficiency: A Quantitative Approach to Immigrant and Heritage Speakers of Danish

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a corpus-based quantitative study on linguistic proficiency of approx. 300 immigrant and heritage speakers of Danish in North America and Argentina, aiming at the question whether linguistic proficiency is connected to ‘immigrant generation’ (i.e. the difference between speakers who migrated as adults with a fully acquired language competence and foreign-born heritage speakers) or the sociocultural setting, or both. The large data base at hand provides a rare opportunity to compare developments within the same minority language in different places, representing different sociocultural settings for the immigrant or heritage speakers and, accordingly, different language ecologies. The study relies on the Corpus of American Danish (1.6 million tokens, including both words and non-word utterances). Based on this data set, the paper explores the distribution of 13 linguistic and non-linguistic variables representing linguistic proficiency (i.e. Danish words, L2 words, word-internal codeswitching, type-token ratio, empty and filled pauses, self-interruption, lengthening, speech rate, word length, runlength and the ratio of main and subclauses) by applying Factor Analysis as a statistical tool. On an empirically solid basis, the paper concludes that (a) the sociolinguistic setting is the crucial factor in the development of linguistic proficiency and (b) linguistic proficiency is a non-universal cognitive phenomenon.