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Heritage Languages
A language contact approach
Heritage languages, such as the Turkish varieties spoken in Berlin or the Spanish used in Los Angeles, are non-dominant languages, often with little prestige. Their speakers also speak the dominant language of the country they live in. Often heritage languages undergo changes due to their special status. They have received a lot of scholarly attention and provide a link between academic concerns and educational issues. This book takes a language contact perspective: we consider heritage languages from the perspective of their history, their structural properties, and their interaction with other surrounding languages.
The chapter on Bilingual language use has been co-authored by Anne Verschik; the chapter on Processing has been co-authored by Gerrit Jan Kootstra; and the chapter on Papiamentu has been co-authored by Bart Jacobs.
[Studies in Bilingualism, 58] 2019. xix, 302 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 12 November 2019
Published online on 12 November 2019
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- List of tables | pp. xi–xii
- List of figures | pp. xiii–xiv
- List of abbreviations and grammatical glosses | pp. xv–15
- Preface
- Chapter 1. Heritage speakers and heritage languages | pp. 1–22
- Chapter 2. History of the field of heritage language studies | pp. 23–42
- Chapter 3. Social aspects of heritage languages | pp. 43–66
- Chapter 4. Bilingual language use | pp. 67–86
- Chapter 5. Methods for collecting heritage language data | pp. 87–109
- Chapter 6. Studying variability in heritage language speaker populations and the base line | pp. 111–139
- Chapter 7. Heritage language phenomena and what triggers them | pp. 141–160
- Chapter 8. Grammatical models and research paradigms | pp. 161–182
- Chapter 9. Language processing in multilingual speakers | pp. 183–202
- Chapter 10. Heritage languages in a post-colonial setting: Focus on Papiamentu | pp. 203–223
- Chapter 11. The political dimension of heritage languages: Endangered languages, language rights, and the preservation of diversity | pp. 225–245
- Chapter 12. Technical terms used in this book related to heritage languages | pp. 247–262
- References
- Language index | pp. 297–298
- Subject index | pp. 299–302
“Aalberse, Backus & Muysken provide a very informative, well researched dive into the field of heritage language through the lens of language contact. The concrete examples of understudied languages taken from recorded language corpora as well as the global perspective of the research makes this an especially distinctive work. This book will make a great addition to anyone interested in heritage languages and their speakers and language contact phenomena.”
Tyler Kimball Anderson, Colorado Mesa University, on Linguist List 31.3392 (4 November 2020)
Cited by (94)
Cited by 94 other publications
Aalberse, Suzanne & Robert A. Cloutier
2025. Variation and stability in variants of heritage Dutch. In Dutch and Contact Linguistics [IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society, 55], ► pp. 502 ff.
Crombez, Yasmin
2025. Newspapers as a window into language beliefs of the past. In Dutch and Contact Linguistics [IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society, 55], ► pp. 427 ff.
Del Vecchio, Valentina
2025. ‘Medium’ choice in a community of Italians in the UK. In Italo-Romance Heritage Languages [Studies in Bilingualism, 68], ► pp. 64 ff.
Roberta D’Alessandro, Michael T Putnam & Silvia Terenghi
Fernández, Montserrat Benítez
2025. Moroccan Arabic as a minority language in contact with Spanish in a diasporic context. In Sociolinguistic Approaches to Arabic and Spanish in Contact [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 44], ► pp. 8 ff.
Frontera, Manuela
2025. Segmental changes triggering perceived attrition in the native speech of a migrant group. In Italo-Romance Heritage Languages [Studies in Bilingualism, 68], ► pp. 130 ff.
Giannakou, Aretousa & Georgios P. Georgiou
Goria, Eugenio & Margherita Di Salvo
Goria, Eugenio & Fabio Gasparini
Hernandez Santacruz, Jasmin, Julio Torres & Judith F. Kroll
Lupica Spagnolo, Marta
2025. Italian in transit. In Italo-Romance Heritage Languages [Studies in Bilingualism, 68], ► pp. 247 ff.
Marlim, Yenny & Zihe Rang
Montrul, Silvina
Moro, Francesca R. & Gina Russo
Piepers, Joske, Ad Backus & Jos Swanenberg
Protassova, Ekaterina & Maria Yelenevskaya
Pérez Rodríguez, Samantha, An Vande Casteele & Rik Vosters
Shabtaev, Ronald
Shabtaev, Ronald
Warditz, Vladislava
Warditz, Vladislava
Yang, Jiahui
Zhang, Xiang, Yanyu Xiong & Addison Miller
Şan, Nebiye Hilal
Aalberse, Suzanne
2024. Multilingual acquisition across the lifespan as a sociohistorical
trigger for language change. In Lifespan Acquisition and Language Change [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 14], ► pp. 104 ff.
Backus, Ad & Helena Halmari
Berns, Janine, Marie Steffens & Esther Baiwir
Chen, Jia, Lin Wang & Youngsoon Kim
Cocchi, Gloria & Cristina Pierantozzi
Crombez, Yasmin , Wim Vandenbussche & Rik Vosters
2024. Exploring past and present layers of multilingualism in Flemish-emigrant writing. In Investigating West Germanic Languages [Studies in Germanic Linguistics, 8], ► pp. 276 ff.
Di Salvo, Margherita
Fridman, Clara, Maria Polinsky & Natalia Meir
Georgiou, Georgios P. & Aretousa Giannakou
Hutson, James, Pace Ellsworth & Matt Ellsworth
Kartsevski, Mackarena & Ítalo Lazcano
Korkus, Mari-Liis & Virve-Anneli Vihman
Nagy, Naomi & Marisa Brook
Parafita Couto, M. Carmen, Charlotte Pouw, Rodi Laanen & Luis López
Rao, Rajiv & Maria Polinsky
Reina, Javier Caro & Işık Akar
Sanz-Sánchez, Israel
2024. Language acquisition across the lifespan in historical
sociolinguistics. In Lifespan Acquisition and Language Change [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 14], ► pp. 2 ff.
Scetti, Fabio
Thorpe, Anthony & Maria Karamanidou
Tokaç-Scheffer, Suzan D., Lyndsey Nickels & Seçkin Arslan
Tse, Holman
Walla, Dianna
2024. Assessing knowledge of English verb placement and subject-verb agreement among multilingual students in grades 5–7 in Norway. Pedagogical Linguistics 5:2 ► pp. 162 ff.
Walla, Dianna
Kaya-Soykan, Didem, Elena Antonova-Unlu & Cigdem Sagin-Simsek
Kinn, Kari & George Walkden
Olfert, Helena
Torres, Julio
Torres, Julio
2024. Heritage language education. In Multifaceted Multilingualism [Studies in Bilingualism, 66], ► pp. 270 ff.
Tsehaye, Wintai
Zerbian, Sabine, Yulia Zuban & Martin Klotz
Abraham, Werner, Andrzej Kątny & Piotr Bartelik
Arnaus Gil, Laia
Arnaus Gil, Laia & Amelia Jiménez-Gaspar
Arnaus Gil, Laia & Amelia Jiménez-Gaspar
Bakker, Peter
Barbour, Catherine
Di Salvo, Margherita & Naomi Nagy
2022. Differential object marking in heritage and homeland Italian. In Variation in Second and Heritage Languages [Studies in Language Variation, 28], ► pp. 311 ff.
Doreleijers, Kristel
Kantarovich, Jessica
Rao, Rajiv, Ting Ye & Brianna Butera
Rodriguez-Ordoñez, Itxaso, Jonathan Kasstan & Bernadette O’Rourke
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Özsoy, Onur, Kateryna Iefremenko & Christoph Schroeder
Antonova-Unlu, Elena, Li Wei & Didem Kaya-Soykan
Backus, Ad & Derya Demirçay
2021. Intense Turkish-Dutch bilingualism leads to intense Turkish-Dutch mixing. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 35 ► pp. 13 ff.
Bayram, Fatih, Maki Kubota, Alicia Luque, Diego Pascual y Cabo & Jason Rothman
D'Alessandro, Roberta
D'Alessandro, Roberta, David Natvig & Michael T. Putnam
Iefremenko, Kateryna, Christoph Schroeder & Jaklin Kornfilt
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.