Heritage Language Institute

Held June 22-26, 2002, UCLA

What Linguists Know About Heritage Speakers

Maria Polinsky, UCSD

Heritage speakers or near-native speakers have been at the fore of sociolinguistic and pedagogical work for some time now and these two fields of inquiry have made important contributions to heritage language studies. Theoretical linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of heritage speakers have become a priority only recently, and the goal of this presentation is to outline the main linguistic questions relevant for heritage language research and to provide some preliminary answers to these questions.

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