This MSCA project, entitled “Heritage Language Acquisition: The Qualitative Nature of Input and Cross-Linguistic Influence (HeLA)” examined which are the key factors contributing to the development of the heritage language in bilinguals. The field of heritage language bilingualism is a relatively young field within the more general field of multilingualism. It focuses on a specific group of bilinguals: heritage speakers, who typically grow up with a heritage language only spoken in the home or with other members of the (often immigrant) community, which is not an official language of the country of residence. Due to the increased input in the societal language, particularly after the onset of schooling, these bilinguals often show considerable divergencies relative to the baseline language (i.e. how the language is spoken in the home country) by the time they are adults, while typically becoming dominant in the majority language of the society over time. Although formative work over the past two decades has demonstrated that adult HLs tend to diverge in various ways from their baseline languages as spoken in the country of origin, we do not (yet) have a full understanding of how precisely these grammars come to be the way they are, or how we can explain the continuum of differences between individual speakers of the same HL in the same linguistic and societal context.
In particular, little is known about the qualitative nature of the input HSs receive. Input quality refers to the richness of the input (i.e. the number of interlocutors, the amount of education in the HL, and exposure to written text, etc.), but also to the potential deviances in the input from parents and other community members due to language loss as a result of long term exposure en use of a second language. Furthermore, it is not clear yet how much of the differences found in HL grammars can be attributed to cross-linguistic influence from the majority language. Project HeLA addressed several gaps in the existing knowledge by investigating child HSs of a severely understudied age range (7-14), in which environmental and input-related circumstances are likely to have important effects on the development of the HL.
HeLA has high societal relevance, given the increasing rate of migration in Europe and the world, as well as the many native minority languages in European states (e.g. Italian dialects, Basque, Sami). Unfortunately, European policies towards minorities rarely consider language preservation as one of the tasks. The findings from this project can ge used to better inform parents, teachers and other stakeholder for heritage language communities of how to best maintain the heritage language, as well as to promote their value and elevate these languages to a position of higher importance in society.
