Course Description
A formal analysis of heritage languages (HLs). Spoken as a first language that differs from the language of the majority, HLs provide insight into language acquisition, use, and change in multi-lingual settings, which is not otherwise possible in the study of monolingual or L2 populations.
Athena Title
Heritage Languages
Prerequisite
LING 3060 or LING 3150 or LING 3150W
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
General Competence • Understanding of the basic correlation between social structure and language use • Understanding of the effects of unbalanced, domain-specific bilingualism on minority grammar • Understanding of the interaction between social factors and language acquisition, change, and shift Specialized knowledge • Broad overview of the theoretical approaches and experimental methods to studying language change, as caused by language contact, domain-specific multilingualism, and external factors affecting language change • Close familiarity with primary sources used to study linguistic structure within heritage/minority linguistic communities, including audio corpora and contemporary ego documents • Close familiarity with common experimental protocols for analyzing language use within heritage/minority communities, including fieldwork/interviews, phonetic analysis, and (audio) corpus building Specialized abilities • The ability to model language use in a heritage/minority community at a given point in time • The ability to track and model quantifiable changes in the structure of heritage/minority languages over time • The ability to correlate language-external (social) factors with events of language change • The ability to reconstruct probable language use for earlier historical stages of a heritage language, based on e.g. historical reconstruction, contemporary pre-immigration dialect grammars, meta-linguistic discourse, and language-external (social) evidence
Topical Outline
1. Introduction: Migration and contact 2. What linguists can learn about language from studying heritage languages and their speakers 3. HL Variation: the baseline problem, the 'yes bias', the tolerance principle, the actuation problem, and pragmatic variation 4. Principles and tendencies of language change in contact, e.g., typological change, economy, complexity, register compression, and divergent attainment 5. Types of language change in HLs: leveling, transfer, extension/overuse, innovation, reanalysis/grammaticalization 6. Heritage Language Syntax (e.g., verb-second, left dislocation, cliticization, preposition stranding, parasitic gapping, null elements) 7. Heritage Language Morphology (e.g., nominal case (and case syncretism), grammatical gender, differential object marking, loan words) 8. Heritage Language Phonology (e.g., consonants, vowels, phonological transfer/accommodation)