TY - JOUR
TI - Heritage Languages Are Not Weak! How Bilinguals Benefit from Language Diversity
AU - Arnaus Gil, Laia
AU - Stahnke, Johanna
AU - Silva Colaco, Isabel
AU - Müller, Natascha
TI - Heritage Languages Are Not Weak! How Bilinguals Benefit from Language Diversity
AB - Bilingual children’s first two languages are often characterized as majority languages (ML) and heritage (HL) languages, since they can develop in a different pace: the HL becomes the “weak” language with increasing age, especially when time outside the family increases. Our study compares longitudinal data of seven French-German/Italian children (age range 1;4–5;4) who acquire French as an HL or ML with the respective groups of monolingual peers. Language competence was assessed via MLU. The main results are: Surprisingly, HL French develops similarly to ML French and monolingual French. By contrast, German and Italian as HLs develop less target-like than their monolingual peers and as ML languages. We explain these results on the basis of language diversity and variety of contacts.
VL - Tom 24 (2024)
IS - Tom 24, numer 3
PY - 2024
SN - 1732-8705
C1 - 2084-3917
SP - 317
EP - 328
DO - 10.4467/20843917RC.24.024.20979
UR - https://ejournals.eu/czasopismo/romanica-cracoviensia/artykul/heritage-languages-are-not-weak-how-bilinguals-benefit-from-language-diversity
KW - heritage language
KW - majority language
KW - mean length of utterance
KW - French
KW - German
KW - Italian