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Part I - Heritage Languages around the World
Abstract
Heritage languages are minority languages learned in a bilingual environment. These include immigrant languages, aboriginal or indigenous languages and historical minority languages. In the last two decades, heritage languages have become central to many areas of linguistic research, from bilingual language acquisition, education and language policies, to theoretical linguistics. Bringing together contributions from a team of internationally renowned experts, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art overview of this emerging area of study from a number of different perspectives, ranging from theoretical linguistics to language education and pedagogy. Presenting comprehensive data on heritage languages from around the world, it covers issues ranging from individual aspects of heritage language knowledge to broader societal, educational, and policy concerns in local, global and international contexts. Surveying the most current issues and trends in this exciting field, it is essential reading for graduate students and researchers, as well as language practitioners and other language professionals.
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The UNESCO atlas on endangered languages recognizes the Ryukyuan languages as constituting languages in their own right. This represents a dramatic shift in the ontology of Japan’s linguistic makeup. Ryukyuan linguistics needs to be established as an independent field of study with its own research agenda and objectives. This handbook delineates that the UNESCO classification is now well-established and adequate. Linguists working on the Ryukyuan languages are well advised to refute the ontological status of the Ryukyuan languages as dialects. The Ryukyuan languages constitute a branch of the Japonic language family, which consists of five unroofed Abstand (language by distance) languages. The Handbook of Ryukyuan Languages provides for the most appropriate and up-to-date answers pertaining to Ryukyuan language structures and use, and the ways in which these languages relate to Ryukyuan society and history. It comprises 33 chapters, written by the leading experts of Ryukyuan languages. Each chapter delineates the boundaries and the research history of the field it addresses, and comprises the most important and representative information.
Not only can monolingual histories mask multilingual practices, but writing languages out of history happens very differently even in the same time and place. We examine two cases in one historical setting, an Indigenous language and an immigrant language in Wisconsin (U.S.), Menominee and German. The widespread view of the United States today as an English monolingual state reflects an ongoing process of writing other languages out of history, or invisibilization. Menominee and German present sharply contrasting cases of this process and reactions to it from the late 19th century to the present. German, once widely taught, written and read in a standard variety, has lost that status as one piece of a broader political struggle and exists today basically as a ‘post-vernacular’ language. In contrast, Menominee faced ongoing, violent efforts to extirpate it, but is being revitalized by a new generation of speakers today.
This book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller’s (2000) and Müller and Hulk’s (2001) hypotheses on cross-linguistic influence as a starting point, the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in the study of bilingualism. It also reflects the enormous increase in different language combinations (including dialects) being investigated, and the use of new methodologies. Moreover, the volume illustrates the growing interdisciplinarity of cross-linguistic influence research, considering extra-linguistic cognitive and social factors besides linguistics. It demonstrates that the time is ripe for a more integrated approach from different disciplines such as theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to obtain a better understanding of bilingual child acquisition. As such, it is of interest to (psycho/socio)linguists, psychologists and education specialists who study or want to learn about (child) bilingualism.
A critical evaluation of U.S. educational policies and practices designed to domesticate Native American peoples and societies; theorized according to the logic of a settler colonial Safety Zone. The oppressive and restrictive Safety Zone has been resisted by Native students, parents, communities, and educators working toward self-determination inside and outside of schools whose voices and experiences lie at the heart of this story.
Chapter titles: (1) Choice and self-determination: Central lessons from American Indian education; (2) The strengths of Indigenous education: Overturning myths about Indian learners; (3) Women's arts and children's songs: Domesticating Indian culture, 1900-1928; (4) How to "remain and Indian"? Power struggles in the safety zone, 1928-1940; (5) Control of culture: Federally produced bilingual materials, 1936-1954; (6) Indigenous bilingual/bicultural education: Challenging the safety zone; (7) "The new American revolution": Indigenous language survival and linguistic human rights; (8) Testing tribal sovereignty: Self-determination and high-stakes tests; Coda: Consummating the democratic ideal
Featuring hundreds of personal anecdotes by Latino college students against a backdrop of information on their culture, history, and academic needs and strengths, this book offers a compelling and exacting view of the world of Latino students and their families.
With a large percentage of public school students being Latino, the future of America is intertwined with that of Latino youth and their educational experience. Who are these children, and how are they transforming and being transformed by this nation? Voces: Latino Students on Life in the United States serves to answer these questions, putting the focus on the voices of Latino youth and presenting the research through the real-world experiences and individual perspectives of Latino college students. The students’ highly compelling yet rarely heard stories reveal the rewards and challenges of navigating two cultures and languages in school, home, and their communities and offer suggestions for how best to help other Latino youth. The student contributions are analyzed against a backdrop of information on Latino Americans, such as demographics, Spanish-English bilingualism, beliefs, traditions, and cultural practices, putting special emphasis on factors that bear on the academic and social wellbeing of Latino youth. Taking an assets-based approach, the book underscores the strengths of these students and spotlights how they are poised to enrich the American mosaic.
Covering countries ranging from Afghanistan and China to Kazakhstan and Russia, this encyclopedia supplies detailed information and informed perspectives, enabling readers to comprehend Asian ethnic groups as well as Asian politics and history.
Asia is quickly becoming one of the most important regions of the world—culturally, economically, and politically. This work provides encyclopedic coverage of a wide array of Central, North, and East Asian ethnic groups, including those in eastern Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, China, Taiwan, Japan, and the Koreas.
Arranged alphabetically by ethnic group, each entry provides an overview of the group that identifies its major population centers and population, primary languages and religions, parallels with other groups, origins and early development, major historic events, and cultural belief systems. Information on each group’s typical ways of life, relations with neighboring groups, politics and recent history, notable challenges, demographic trends, and key figures is also included.
Special attention is focused on the numerous ethnic groups that make up China, one of the world’s most populated countries. Sidebars throughout the text provide fascinating facts and information about specific groups to make the encyclopedia more accessible and appealing, while “Further Reading” sections at the end of each entry and the bibliography will provide ample additional resources for students performing in-depth research.
This book is the study of two different kinds of variation across the Germanic languages. One involves the position of the finite verb, and the other the possible positions of the "logical" subject in constructions with expletive (or "dummy") subjects. The book applies the theory of principles and parameters (also known as the "government-binding theory") to the study of comparative syntax. Several languages are considered, including less frequently discussed ones like Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Yiddish.
Focusing on the relation between functional categories and lexical and phrasal categories in Arabic dialects, Benmamoun proposes that universally functional categories are specified for categorial features which determine their relation with lexical categories. Language variation is attributed to differences with respect to the categorial feature specifications of functional categories and how they interact with lexical categories. The book brings new insights to issues related to the syntax of functional categories, the relation between syntax and the morpho-phonological component, and comparative syntax.
This is the first book-length treatment of the social motivations for codeswitching, that is, the use of two or more linguistic varieties in the same conversation. Using data from multilingual African contexts (mostly from conversations studied in Kenya), Carol Myers-Scotton advances a theoretical argument which aims at a general explanation of these motivations. She treats codeswitching as a type of skilled performance, not as the 'alternative strategy' of a person who cannot carry on a conversation in the language in which it began. When engaging in codeswitching, speakers exploit the socio-psychological values which have come to be associated with different linguistic varieties in a specific speech community: they switch codes in order to negotiate a change in social distance between themselves and other participants in the conversation, conveying this negotiation through the choice of a different code. Switching between languages, Professor Myers-Scoton suggests, has a good deal in common with making different stylistic choices within the same language: it ias as if bilingual and multilingual speakers have an additional style at their command when they engage in codeswitching between different languages.
This volume introduces the study of language attrition - the forgetting of language. In this first collection devoted to second language attrition, the contributors focus on contexts of loss where Japanese is either the attriting language, or the replacing language. Bringing together research to substantiate previous hypotheses in the field, this book offers new theoretical and practical insights for those interested in language change.
Despite a short history of language attrition as a field of linguistic research, we have witnessed new insights being accumulated, hypotheses being generated, and evidence and counter evidence being provided. However, as young a field as it is and the methodological paths to the inquiry being multifold, many areas still remain basically unexplored. The present study is devoted to one such area, namely, a longitudinal study-in a genuine sense, of natural second language (L2 English) attrition within an individual in the first language (LI Japanese) environment.
In the last two decades, the number of Japanese families going abroad to English-speaking countries on business has increased dramatically as a result of the growth in the country’s economy. Consequently, the number of children in such families who spend several years during their youth exposed to a second language (L2 English), acquiring the L2 fairly naturally, and later suffering L2 attrition after their return to Japan, has increased considerably. There is thus a rising need in Japan to develop language maintenance programs for both the first language (Ll Japanese) and second language (L2 English) of such children.
The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics contains forty chapters dealing with a great variety of topics in the study of language and society. It presents the major theoretical approaches in particular bilingual and multilingual contexts, and both spoken and signed languages. The volume not only offers an up-to-date guide to the diverse areas of the study of language in society, but also numerous guideposts to where the field is headed. The first section examines the contributions of the various disciplines that have contributed to the sociolinguistic enterprise. The second section deals with methods, a central concern of a discipline that bases its conclusions on evidence drawn from the real world of social interaction. The third section deals directly with a number of issues in multilingualism and language contact. The fourth section focuses on a core area of sociolinguistics: the study of language variation and change. The fifth section focuses on macrosociolinguistics and explores language policy, ideology, and attitudes in a wide range of contexts. The final section of the volume discusses sociolinguistics in a number of different domains including law, medicine, sign-language interpretation, language awareness, language revitalization, and social activism.
Este artigo traz como principal propósito mostrar o contexto de bilinguismo que se apresenta no cenário de fala norte mato-grossense, região situada na Amazônia meridional. Para situar este contexto, utiliza-se, como enfoque norteador, um programa de rádio transmitido em língua portuguesa, mas com alternância entre o alemão padrão (Hochdeutsch) e a variedade de língua minoritária de origem sulista, o Hunsrückisch rio-grandense (ou hunsriqueano). Para a compreensão do status linguístico atribuído a estas distintas variedades, tecemos considerações analíticas sobre o corpus apreendido junto a quatro sujeitos entrevistados, um radialista e três ouvintes. Dentre os pressupostos teórico-metodológicos que fundamentaram este trabalho de pesquisa, destacam-se teóricos que dialogam com esta temática, tais como Altenhofen, Fergunson, Calvet, Horst, Bellmann, Fristcher, Seyferth, entre outros. A partir dos resultados analíticos apreendidos nas considerações feitas, esperamos contribuir com uma amostra do estado atual da língua neste espaço geográfico de recente colonização.
The Slavic group of languages - the fourth largest Indo-European sub-group - is one of the major language families of the modern world. With 297 million speakers, Slavic comprises 13 languages split into three groups: South Slavic, which includes Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian; East Slavic, which includes Russian and Ukrainian; and West Slavic, which includes Polish, Czech and Slovak. This 2006 book, written by two leading scholars in Slavic linguistics, presents a survey of all aspects of the linguistic structure of the Slavic languages, considering in particular those languages that enjoy official status. As well as covering the central issues of phonology, morphology, syntax, word-formation, lexicology and typology, the authors discuss Slavic dialects, sociolinguistic issues, and the socio-historical evolution of the Slavic languages. Accessibly written and comprehensive in its coverage, this book will be welcomed by scholars and students of Slavic languages, as well as linguists across the many branches of the discipline.
Heritage speakers are native speakers of a minority language they learn at home, but due to socio-political pressure from the majority language spoken in their community, their heritage language does not fully develop. In the last decade, the acquisition of heritage languages has become a central focus of study within linguistics and applied linguistics. This work centres on the grammatical development of the heritage language and the language learning trajectory of heritage speakers, synthesizing recent experimental research. The Acquisition of Heritage Languages offers a global perspective, with a wealth of examples from heritage languages around the world. Written in an accessible style, this authoritative and up-to-date text is essential reading for professionals, students, and researchers of all levels working in the fields of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, education, language policies and language teaching.
This book introduces a new and still emerging theoretical framework for understanding language shift, and presents several case studies of minority language communities using this approach. To date, approaches to language shift have typically relied on explaining the process through descriptive sociolinguistic models, i.e., how the community first becomes bilingual in both the majority and minority languages and then eventually shifts entirely to the majority language. The approach used in this edited volume attributes shift to a change from local control of tightly interconnected “horizontal” institutions within a community to more external or “vertical” control of those increasingly autonomous institutions outside the community. In short, this theory proposes that language shift is driven by specific changes in community structure. Unlike previous approaches to language shift, the one proposed here is generalizable. The bulk of the book contains chapters on language communities aimed at testing and refining the theoretical implications. The chapters cover different languages, contexts, and periods. Importantly, the two final chapters – from leading specialists in the broader field and working largely outside the US – provide critical commentary on the theoretical approach and again offer refinement toward a theory of language shift.
Desde principios del siglo XX comenzaron a llegar personas del Palenque de San Basilio -pequeña población en el departamento de Bolívar- a la ciudad de Barranquilla, una urbe donde confluyeron múltiples migraciones a lo largo del siglo XIX y XX. En la actualidad, ellos configuran y reconfiguran su identidad en ese contexto urbano, mediado además por las dinámicas de reivindicación en torno a la diversidad desarrolladas en el marco de los movimientos sociales afrocolombianos. Aunque ya no viven en la población, y algunos ni siquiera nacieron en ella, siguen identificándose como palenqueros; pero de igual forma se consideran barranquilleros, teniendo presente entonces estos dos referentes territoriales en sus construcciones identitarias a través de una constante negociación. Podemos observar también, cómo en estos procesos se presenta una permanente negociación de sentido con los “otros”.
We focus on complexity from the comparative variationist perspective, a sociolinguistic approach that examines variable aspects of language (that is, different ways of saying the same thing). Arguably, variable elements are harder to acquire than categorical ones, as a Variability Matrix must be acquired along with every element. This matrix contains probabilistic information about when each form is (more) appropriate, according to an array of factors. These include inter-speaker (social) and intra-speaker (linguistic context) predictors. We ask how the Variability Matrix for predictors of a variable compares between heritage speakers (people living in a context where their language is a minority language) and homeland speakers (people living in a context where their language is a majority language), and how these can fairly be compared.
In the variationist approach, multivariate regression analyses reveal the predictors (and levels within each predictor) of a response or dependent variable and their corresponding Variability Matrices. However, the variationist field lacks an established comparative methodology to determine how/if varieties differ. One shortcoming is that different-sized samples are often compared, implicating different levels of statistical significance even when the populations’ patterns are identical.
Comparison of variable patterns in Heritage and Homeland Cantonese illustrates one solution. We revise analyses conducted previously of two morphosyntactic variables: prodrop and classifiers (Nagy, 2015; Nagy & Lo, 2019) in Cantonese, applying a bootstrap procedure to mitigate issues associated with unequal-sized datasets frequent in studies of minority and endangered varieties.
From these analyses, we learn that heritage and homeland grammars’ degrees of complexity are similar: the matrices of (significant) frequencies are the same size. This approach allows us to consider not just which surface forms constitute the heritage vs. homeland varieties, but also the complexity of the decision-making process the speakers apply in selecting among the forms. As one might expect, heritage and homeland speakers are capable of equally complex processes.
The present chapter provides an overview of the main questions investigated in research on bilingual returnees. Returnees are second/third generation speakers who grow up in a migration setting and move back to their families’ country of origin at a certain moment of their life. On the one hand, research on returnees focuses on dominant language attrition, i.e., on the linguistic changes that affect the previous societal language after moving to the homeland. On the other hand, it targets L1/HL development after immersion in the L1/HL environment and possible outcomes of heritage language reversal. In addition to the focus on language development, we discuss the pedagogical and sociological implications of return to the country of origin, which go hand in hand with changes to the returnee’s language competence.
Movement, dislocation, and contingent, multilocal forms of belonging are increasingly prevalent and normalized ways of life. Ethnographers of transnationalism are documenting the various ways in which people connect the complex geographies of their lives and attempt to forge meaningful identities within multiple and protracted disjunctures. According to this literature, mobility, travel, transience, and liminality are the common themes of latetwentieth-century existence (Appadurai; Clifford; Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc; Pries, “New Migration”); the notion of “home” is increasingly uncoupled from the location of daily life (Amit-Talai; Berking; Goldring; Olwig; Rapport and Dawson, “Home”; Smith); and citizenship is not the only status through which people acquire social and political rights or national identities (Kearney; Soysal). Recent explorations of transnational migration have expanded traditional conceptualizations of the subject and site of anthropological research in order to capture the complex experiences of these on-going global interconnections (see, e.g., Rouse; Mountz and Wright). These efforts have successfully challenged assumptions that movement is unidirectional, that migration is a circumscribed and temporary event in individuals’ lives, and that daily lives and imagined futures are always firmly anchored in a single location (see Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc; Pries, Migration; Rapport and Dawson, Migrants).
Over the last two decades, increasingly numbers of heritage language (HL) learners have been enrolling in the same classes as second language (L2) learners, given that most universities do not offer separate courses for HL learners (Beaudrie, 2012). This trend raises the question of whether L2 and HL learners benefit from working together. However, research on the interaction in L2-HL dyads has been scarce, and learning outcomes of L2-HL interaction have never been documented. This study examines whether L2 and HL learners differ not only in terms of how often and how accurately they resolve form-focused episodes (FFEs) as they work together, but also in terms of learning gains as a result of the interaction. The audio-recorded interactions of 8 L2-HL dyads engaged in a collaborative writing task were coded for FFEs, and learning gains were assessed through the incorporation of linguistic information from successfully-resolved FFEs in subsequent individual writing tasks: one administered immediately after completing the collaborative task, and the other two weeks later. Overall, L2 learners appeared to benefit more from the interaction than their HL partners. Findings are discussed in light of differences in peerand self-perceptions documented through a post-task attitudinal questionnaire.
This article examines the current status of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) in the United States, referring to the Capacity-Opportunity-Desire (COD) framework (Grin, 1990, 2003; LoBianco, 2008). After briefly describing the linguistic profile of Chinese immigrants in the United States, the current status and future prospects of CHL in the United States are discussed. Thearticle concludes that a wide variety of programs are available to CHLspeakers, compared to those available decades ago. However, heritage speakers’ capacity in Chinese will be developed only when they have opportunities to use thelanguage and a desire to learn it.