Project description
What happens when Farsi meets French or Spanish?
Language learning takes a long time. It is not a simple task and the precise duration or final proficiency level depends on many factors, including age, aptitude, teaching programme and access to interaction in the new language. In the context of globalisation and immigration, researchers are focusing on immigrants. How immigrants acquire and use multiple languages is a question with few answers. The EU-funded CLICK project will investigate how developmental trajectories of native minority languages (heritage languages) are shaped alongside the societal languages in their children who are heritage speakers. Specifically, the project will study heritage speakers of Persian/Farsi in contact with two societally dominant languages in France and Spain. Using offline and online methodologies, CLICK will generate hypotheses about human language.
Objective
Due to increasing global mobility, research into how immigrants acquire and use multiple languages has become a major topic in the past few decades. However, comparatively little is known about how the developmental trajectories of native minority languages (i.e. heritage languages (HLs)) are shaped alongside the societal languages in their children who are heritage speakers (HSs). The CLICK project, as the first study to investigate how different societal languages leave their traces on the developmental trajectories of the same HL, will make a significant contribution to an emergent subfield of bilingualism, namely Heritage Language Bilingualism (HLB). This will be done by studying HSs of Persian/Farsi in contact with two societally dominant languages in France and Spain. We will innovatively combine offline and online methodologies to explore whether or not the syntactic status of pronominal subjects (null and overt subjects in the case of Spanish versus overt subjects only as in French) affects the development and maintenance of related properties in Persian as a HL. Additionally, we will strive to establish if a novel co-registered methodology which combines online and offline measures in the same task offers a promising test battery to better capture underlying grammars of HSs in different language contact situations. Ultimately, CLICK will generate substantive, empirically informed hypotheses about human language, which within the present context of globalization and increased bi-/multilingualism are likely to achieve a marked scientific impact. Accordingly, the findings of this project will be of interest not only to psycholinguists, sociolinguists and psychologists but also to teachers, speech pathologists, education policy makers and immigrant parents. In addition, the emphasis given to non-standard languages promotes linguistic diversity, concordant with the EU’s efforts to raise awareness about minority languages.
Fields of science
Not validated
Not validated
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
9019 Tromso
Norway