Heritage Language
Heritage languages are incompletely acquired versions of languages spoken at home but not spoken in the wider community. Heritage speakers acquire the home language before acquiring the region's dominant language. However, acquisition of the heritage language slows when the speaker begins primarily using the region's dominant language. Although heritage speakers are comfortable in all registers of the dominant language, mastery of the heritage language may vary from purely receptive skills in only informal spoken language to native-like fluency.
The term "heritage language" may also refer to a language that is acquired in a classroom by an individual who has a cultural connection to the language but lacks early childhood exposure to it. This usage of "heritage" is purely adjectival and does not refer to a linguistic phenomenon.
Read more about Heritage Language: Proficiency in Heritage Languages, Controversy in Definition
Famous quotes containing the words heritage and/or language:
“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)