Heritage language

A heritage language is the language someone learns at home as a child which is a minority language in a society, but because of growing up with a dominant language, the speaker seems more competent in the latter and feels more comfortable communicating in that language. Polinsky & Kagan label it as a continuum that ranges from fluent speakers to barely speaking individuals of the home language. In some countries or cultures where they determine one's mother tongue by the ethnic group, a heritage language would be linked to native language. The term can also refer to the language of a person's family or community, which the person does not speak or understand but with which they culturally identify.

"Heritage language" is the term used to describe a language which is predominantly spoken by "nonsocietal" groups and linguistic minorities. "[Heritage] languages include indigenous languages that are often endangered. . . as well as world languages that are commonly spoken in many other regions of the world (Spanish in the United States, Arabic in France)" The label heritage is given to a language based principally on the social status of its speakers and not necessarily on any linguistic property. Thus, while Spanish typically comes in second in terms of native speakers worldwide and has official status in a number of countries, it is considered a heritage language in the English-dominant United States. Speakers of the same heritage language raised in the same community may differ significantly in terms of their language abilities, yet be considered heritage speakers under this definition. Some heritage speakers may be highly proficient in the language, possessing several registers, while other heritage speakers may be able to understand the language but not produce it. Other individuals that simply have a cultural connection with a minority language but do not speak it may consider it to be their heritage language.

In various fields, such as foreign language education and linguistics, the definitions of heritage language become more specific and divergent. In foreign language education, heritage language is defined in terms of a student’s upbringing and functional proficiency in the language: a student raised in a home where a non-majority language is spoken is a heritage speaker of that language if she/he possesses some proficiency in it. Under this definition, individuals that have some cultural connection with the language but do not speak it are not considered heritage students. This restricted definition became popular in the mid 1990s with the publication of Standards for Foreign Language Learning by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

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