Current Issues in Heritage Language Acquisition

An increasing trend in many postsecondary foreign language classes in North America is the presence of heritage language learners. In its broadest sense, heritage language learners are the children of families who speak an ethnolinguistically minority language, but in this article I only discuss the case of immigrants. As adults, these children of immigrant families wish to learn, relearn, or improve their current level of linguistic proficiency in their family language. In language programs such as Spanish, Russian, East Asian languages, Hindi-Urdu, Turkish, Arabic, and others, heritage language learners attend classes initially geared to second language (L2) learners with no previous knowledge of the language. Alternatively, and depending on the institution, heritage speakers can also enroll in classes specifically designed for students with cultural and linguistic ties to the language. Although the presence of heritage speakers in language classes is not new,1 what is new is the recognition that heritage language learners are a different breed of language learners whose partial knowledge of the language presents a unique set of challenges to language practitioners.