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5. The Grammatical Competence of Spanish Heritage Speakers
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C H A P T E R 5 The Grammatical Competence of Spanish Heritage Speakers Silvina Montrul, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign A LTHOUGH DEFINITIONS of heritage language speakers vary from very broad to very narrow (Carreira 2004; Hornberger and Wang 2008), those interested in understanding the nature of heritage speakers’ proficiency and competence in the heritage language tend to adopt Guadalupe Valdés’s (2000, 1) definition: ‘‘a student who is raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken, who speaks or merely understands the heritage language, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language.’’ In the context of the United States, Spanish heritage speakers are individuals who emigrated in early childhood with their parents and other family members, or children of immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries. Although the parents are either monolingual or dominant in a variety of Spanish, the children grow up in a context where both English and Spanish are spoken. Valdés’s definition of who is a heritage speaker, like many others that are available, is not without problems. Although many would question the term ‘‘non-English’’ if we want to extend this definition to heritage speakers living in other countries or in other language contact situations, others would find Valde ́s’s definition too inclusive of speakers who possess from minimal to advanced proficiency in the heritage language and silent with respect to a person’s generation of immigration (first, second, third, etc.). Nonetheless, Valdés’s definition is still useful for grammatically oriented studies because it takes into account knowledge and use of the heritage language (even if minimally) rather than just a cultural connection to the language with no actual knowledge of it. Having some ability in the language is important for studies that look at the grammatical competence of heritage speakers. 101 102 SILVINA MONTRUL Heritage speakers are exposed to the heritage language early in childhood, like monolingual children; but unlike monolingual children, who end up with similar levels of competence in their native language (leaving sociolinguistic variation aside), heritage speakers do not form a linguistically homogeneous group. In fact, the range of linguistic ability and proficiencies reached by heritage language speakers in adulthood varies considerably, from minimal aural comprehension ability to full fluency in written and spoken registers, and everything else in between, as aptly captured by Valdés’s (2000) definition. For this reason, it has been claimed that many Spanish heritage speakers do not completely acquire their family language in childhood (i.e., incomplete acquisition), or may have acquired and later lost parts of their language in childhood (attrition) (Montrul 2008; Polinsky 2007; Silva-Corvalán 1994), thus also giving the impression that as a group they speak a different variety of Spanish altogether (Lipski 1993). As a result, the grammatical competence of Spanish heritage speakers may differ in important ways from the grammatical competence of highly fluent bilinguals and native speakers of the language who grew up in a predominantly monolingual environment (regardless of whether they have knowledge of a second language and are also ‘‘bilingual’’ to some extent). Indeed, heritage speakers raise crucial questions about what it means to be a native speaker, what complete acquisition of a language entails, and what are the necessary ingredients for achieving targetlike levels of linguistic ability in a language learned in childhood. The extent to which heritage speakers are also native speakers is a matter of much current controversy and debate, but space limitations do not allow me to elaborate on this issue in the depth that it deserves; for a discussion of this issue, see Benmamoun , Montrul, and Polinsky (2010). OVERVIEW OF THE MAIN ISSUES FOR RESEARCH IN THE SUBFIELD The wide range of grammatical variation found in Spanish heritage speakers has long been the realm of sociolinguistics, and notably of the field of Spanish in the United States (among many others, Dvorak 1983; Flores-Ferrán 2004; Garcı́a 1982, 1995; Lipski 1993; Lowther 2005; Lynch 1999; Ocampo 1990; Otheguy, Zentella, and Livert 2007; Poplack 1983; Poplack and Pousada 1981; Potowski 2007; Silva-Corvalán 1994, 2003; Zentella 1997). It is important to clarify that not all these studies have used the term ‘‘heritage speaker’’ that is widely used today; some have referred instead to a person’s ‘‘generation of immigration’’ or to the ‘‘type of bilingual’’ person. Still, given the descriptions these researchers provide of the participants...