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:
“Flowers ... that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children—honoured as the jewellery of God only by them—when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these.”
—Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859)
“Which I wish to remark—
And my language is plain—
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar:
Which the same I would rise to explain.”
—Bret Harte (1836–1902)