Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

In this talk, I will first introduce and problematize both the concept of what a heritage language bilingual is and the literature that has studied their competence outcomes in adulthood over the past two decades. Heritage speakers are native –often child L1 or 2L1– speakers of a minority “home” language who (usually) become dominant speakers, starting at school-age, in the external societal majority language of the national community in which they grow up and are educated. Typically, heritage speakers show interesting differences in their knowledge and performance in the heritage language as compared to age-matched monolinguals and even across themselves as an aggregate. Often, such differences have been labelled as instances of incomplete acquisition (e.g. Montrul 2008, 2016) or attrition (Polinsky 2011, 2018). Under such accounts, heritage language bilingual differences are viewed as some type of comparative deficiency. I will propose that many differences, alternatively, could have only developed the way we see them in heritage grammars for reasons related to qualitative differences in the input heritage speakers receive (e.g. Rothman 2007; Pires and Rothman 2009; Pascual y Cabo and Rothman 2012; Kupisch & Rothman, 2018). We will examine a few empirical studies looking at inflected infinitives, passives, CASE and global measures of lexical density/diversity and morphosyntactic complexities as cases in point. I conclude by suggesting that many aspects argued to be incompletely acquired in heritage language grammars are in fact complete, but unavoidably distinct from a wrongly assumed to be appropriate baseline.