Heritage Language Complexity Matters: The Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

The story of heritage languages is often told as a story of grammatical simplification. Whether in the classroom or “in the wild” (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007), heritage speakers have been the focus of investigations of processes and principles of linguistic change for over two decades. Nearly every subfield of language study has now addressed the heritage language phenomenon, entailing new interdisciplinary collaborations among scholars in formal and applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, contact linguistics, typology, classroom instruction, corpus research, and many other disciplines. Notwithstanding the remarkable gains achieved across all of these areas, inherent within many underlying research traditions has been the practice of placing a heritage language system on one side of the scale, with an appropriately chosen baseline system balanced on the other side. Understood narrowly in such comparative terms, and setting aside the issue of proper calibration of the measuring mechanism employed, the question of what is interesting and novel about heritage languages is often asked through a deficit lens, bringing under the microscope those areas in which heritage languages fall short of displaying all of the properties and processes documented for earlier, pre-contact stages in their genesis. Imagine what our conception of the grammatical structure of Modern English would be if all or most linguistic theorizing were carried out from a similarly-oriented “what’s missing” perspective – say, in comparison to the structure of Old English or, more broadly, in relation to other Indo-European