HCIAS Wednesday Colloquium – Perspectives on Ibero America Structural Parallels Between Endangered and Heritage Languages
- Date in the past
- Mittwoch, 17. April 2024, 16:00 - 18:00 Uhr
- Psychologisches Institut, Hörsaal 2, Hauptstraße 47-51 (Hintergebäude), 69117 Heidelberg
- Prof. Dr. Maria Polinsky, University of Maryland (USA), Department of Linguistics
In her presentation , Prof. Polinsky investigates the link between indigenous endangered languages and immigrant heritage languages. An endangered language (EL) is a language that is at risk of falling out of use, due to the scarcity of surviving speakers and lack of intergenerational transmission. A heritage language (HL) is a minority language learned in the home by speakers who are more dominant in the majority societal language. Connections between the two types of languages, both minoritized, has not yet been investigated in a systematic and extensive way. Aside from letting us understand social and cultural pressures associated with language shift, focusing on structural parallels between ELs and HLs will allow us to conduct more inclusive research on minoritized languages.
Address
Psychologisches Institut
Hörsaal 2
Hauptstraße 47-51 (Hintergebäude)
69117 HeidelbergOrganizer
Event Type
Colloquium
Series of events
Talk
Contact
Further information
Indigenous ELs, languages that are not robustly transmitted to younger generations, share important characteristics with immigrant HLs (Sasse 1992): (i) the switch from early and naturalistic immersion in the ancestral language to takeover by the ambient language, e.g., in the context of Residential Schools in Canada or the USA, and (ii) the presence of socio-economic power associated with the ambient language. In both immigrant HL and indigenous EL settings, this socio-cultural dynamic gives rise to a range of bilingual outcomes. However, unlike HLs, there is no baseline because the traditional language is lost. Thus, identifying structural properties that arise due to extensive bilingualism leads to a better analysis of the current state of ELs. This is where comparisons to HLs are particularly fruitful and effective.
The gain for linguistic theory in connecting ELs and HLs is twofold. First, examining languages that are used in the context of extreme bilingualism would allow us to better understand the nature of universal structural principles; second, some unusual phenomena that may be observed in ELs could be explained by effects of recessive bilingualism, which in turn would prevent the unnecessary exotification of such languages. In her talk, Prof. Polinsky will present and analyze particular structural parallels, which show that both types of languages observe locality, maximize the use of anaphoric dependencies, and show a bias against using displacement as a structure building mechanism.