Heritage languages: In the 'wild'and in the classroom (original) (raw)

2012 'Taking up speech' in an endangered language: Bilingual discourse in a heritage language classroom. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 27(2): 57-78.

Faced with the " diversification of diversity " (Vertovec, 2010) that seems to define the contemporary world, some have called for a fundamental reorientation of sociolinguistics: from a focus on languages and speakers to a focus on resources and repertoires; from unitary, localized and countable ethnolinguistic communities to diasporized (or even virtual) ones; and from fully-fluent 'native speaker' competence to " individuals' very variable (and often rather fragmentary) grasp of a plurality of differentially shared styles, registers and genres " (Blommaert & Rampton 2011, 6). The 'super-diversity' that prompts such reflections, I argue, can and should be discussed together with what seems to be its opposite: the seeming loss of diversity brought about by processes of language shift, obsolescence, and endangerment. Examination of classroom discourse on a US Indian Reservation suggests that in this community, at least, people have long since moved on from the idea that all the competences associated with "proficiency" in language need to coincide in a single person. These students are learning to speak (parler) rather than internalizing a complete grammar (langue); in this respect their project resembles that of (other) denizens of the "super-diverse" metropole.

Language in Immigrant America

2017

Exploring the complex relationship between language and immigration in the United States, this timely book challenges mainstream, historically established assumptions about American citizenship and identity. Set within both a historical and current political context, this book covers hotly debated topics such as language and ethnicity, the relationship between non-native English and American identity, perceptions and stereotypes related to foreign accents, code-switching, hybrid language forms such as Spanglish, language and the family, and the future of language in America. Work from linguistics, education policy, history, sociology, and politics is brought together to provide an accessible overview of the key issues. Through specific examples and case studies, immigrant America is presented as a diverse, multilingual, and multidimensional space in which identities are often hybridized and always multifaceted.

Heritage Speakers as Part of the Native Language Continuum

Frontiers in Psychology, 2022

We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. (1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. (2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. (3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.

From a Language Graveyard to a Language Playground: Remarks at National Press Club, Commission on Language Learning

The ability to understand, speak, read and write in another language in addition to English confers a wide array of benefits for individuals across the life course—from the cognitive to the economic and the cultural—as well as for the Unites States as a whole—from commerce to security and diplomacy. Expanding the capacity for language learning is in the national interest. English is not sufficient to meet the nation’s needs in the 21st century. Research comparing bilinguals to monolinguals links fluency in a second language to enhanced cognitive ability and problem solving, improved learning performance and outcomes from primary to secondary grades—including higher standardized test scores in both math and English reading skills—as well as significantly lower high school dropout rates, higher educational expectations and self-esteem, and higher earnings in early adulthood. Ironically, however, despite the diversity of America’s languages historically, the United States has acquired a well-deserved but dubious reputation as a language graveyard. No other country in the world has received more multilingual peoples, and yet in no other country has a switch to monolingual English occurred as rapidly as it has in the United States. The experience of bilingualism and multilingualism is normative in most countries around the world, but not in the United States. Chiefly as a result of international migration to the United States over the last few decades, the percentage of people in the United States who speak English-only has declined from about 90 percent in 1970, the country’s linguistic nadir, to just under 80 percent today, while 20 percent now indicate that a language other than English is spoken in their home. However, when asked how well they speak that other language, only about half of that 20 percent speak a non-English language well. In other words, only 1 in 10 people in the United States speaks another language proficiently; the vast majority of American citizens remain monolingual. In that respect the U.S. lags behind most nations of the world, including Europe and China, in the percentage of its citizens who have some knowledge of a second language. Most of the people in the U.S. who speak a non-English language did not learn it in school, but at home. They tend to be immigrants or children of immigrants. Yet the children of immigrants are losing their home language quite rapidly—we can actually measure language death with survey methods. And so we have American-born residents failing to acquire second-language skills through school, and immigrants and children of immigrants who are not retaining and passing on their non- English language skills. The result is a self-inflicted national disadvantage in global business, in international diplomacy and national security, in the exchange in research and ideas, in our ability to communicate with our own neighbors—as well as a missed opportunity to significantly expand the cognitive abilities and academic performance of America’s children, and the lifelong benefits that accrue to bilinguals from early childhood on, across the life course. Monolingualism is a curable disease, but we cannot wait until middle school or high school to attack it. If we are to invest in and value language education as a persistent national need—just like education in math and English—it is critical to start early. By age two or three, the brain is generating trillions of new synapses, and language is acquired most easily during the first ten years of life. The capacity of young children to learn a new language is extraordinary; they are like sponges. If you have ever spent a year in a Kindergarten language immersion classroom, and seen little kids from all background (white, black, Latin and Asian American) arrive at school in September without speaking a non-English language, and then nine months later you see them speaking it effortlessly and without an accent… you can see how possible it is to turn a language graveyard into a language playground.

The (Il)Logical Problem of Heritage Speaker Bilingualism and Incomplete Acquisition

This Forum challenges and problematizes the term incomplete acquisition, which has been widely used to describe the state of competence of heritage speaker (HS) bilinguals for well over a decade (see, e.g., Montrul, 2008). It is suggested and defended that HS competence, while often different from monolingual peers, is in fact not incomplete (given any reasonable definition by the word incomplete), but simply distinct for reasons related to the realities of their environment.

A Prolegomenon to the Construct of the Native Speaker: Heritage Speaker Bilinguals are Natives Too!

Applied Linguistics, 2014

This Forum challenges the generally accepted position in the linguistic sciencesconscious or not-that monolingualism and nativeness are essentially synonymous in an exclusive way. We discuss two consequences of our position that naturalistic bilinguals and multilinguals exposed to a language in early childhood are also native speakers: (i) that bi-/multilinguals have multiple native languages; and (ii) nativeness can be applicable to a state of linguistic knowledge that is characterized by significant differences to the monolingual baseline.