Heritage language

A heritage language is a minority language (either immigrant or indigenous) learnt by its speakers at home as children, but never fully developed because of insufficient input from the social environment: in fact, the community of speakers grows up with a dominant language in which they become more competent. Polinsky & Kagan label it as a continuum that ranges from fluent speakers to barely-speaking individuals of the home language. In some countries or cultures in which they determine one's mother tongue by the ethnic group, a heritage language would be linked to the native language. The term can also refer to the language of a person's family or community that the person does not speak or understand, but identifies with culturally. 'Heritage language' is the term used to describe a language which is predominantly spoken by 'nonsocietal' groups and linguistic minorities. In various fields, such as foreign language education and linguistics, the definitions of heritage language become more specific and divergent. In foreign language education, heritage language is defined in terms of a student’s upbringing and functional proficiency in the language: a student raised in a home where a non-majority language is spoken is a heritage speaker of that language if she/he possesses some proficiency in it. Under this definition, individuals that have some cultural connection with the language but do not speak it are not considered heritage students. This restricted definition became popular in the mid 1990s with the publication of Standards for Foreign Language Learning by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Among linguists, heritage language is an end-state language that is defined based on the temporal order of acquisition and, often, the language dominance in the individual. A heritage speaker acquires the heritage language as their first language through natural input in the home environment and acquires the majority language as a second language, usually when she/he starts school and talks about different topics with people in school, or by exposure through media (written texts, internet, popular culture etc.). As exposure to the heritage language decreases and exposure to the majority language increases, the majority language becomes the individual’s dominant language and acquisition of the heritage language changes. The results of these changes can be seen in divergence of the heritage language from monolingual norms in the areas of phonology, lexical knowledge (knowledge of vocabulary or words), morphology, syntax, semantics and code-switching, although mastery of the heritage language may vary from purely receptive skills in only informal spoken language to native-like fluency. As stated by Polinsky and Kagan: 'The definition of a heritage speaker in general and for specific languages continues to be debated. The debate is of particular significance in such languages as Chinese, Arabic, and languages of India and the Philippines, where speakers of multiple languages or dialects are seen as heritage speakers of a single standard language taught for geographic, cultural or other reasons (Mandarin Chinese, Classical Arabic, Hindi, or Tagalog, respectively).' One idea that prevails in the literature is that ' languages include indigenous languages that are often endangered. . . as well as world languages that are commonly spoken in many other regions of the world (Spanish in the United States, Arabic in France)'. However, that view is not shared universally. In Canada, for example, First Nations languages are not classified as heritage languages by some groups whereas they are so classified by others.