Multilingual Transmission in Indigenous Languages in the Diaspora

2026-07-22

Bilingual speakers of a Heritage Language (HL)—a language acquired naturalistically from early childhood, but distinct from the dominant language of the larger society—often display innovation and variation. Which exact factors account for this observation is subject of both theoretical discussion and empirical work. Cross linguistic influence (CLI) from the majority language plays an important role. However, the providers of input for the HSs are bilinguals living in the same dominant language society and potentially themselves HSs, whose linguistic patterns can be qualitatively different from those of the speakers from the homeland. To address the genuine contribution of the CLI in HL development, a good and largely underused comparison within the study of HLs would be the tripartite comparison of (i) HSs, (ii) their L1 immigrant input providers and (iii) speakers in the homeland. Most of psycholinguistics, including HL, research is conducted on languages endowed with writing systems and literacy traditions, an official status in some areas of their spread and a large, multi-million speaker population. Thus, what we know about HLs is largely based on a small sample of language pairs in a handful of sociolinguistic situation types. This incompleteness of coverage underdetermines the power of generalizations from empirical observations as well as their contributions to (psycho)linguistic theories. Therefore, it is urgent to take psycholinguistic studies out of the lab and focus on lesser-studied, including indigenous HLs. Using Mano as a case study, the objective of MuTILDa (Multilingual Transmission in Indigenous Languages in the Diaspora) is to study variation in linguistic knowledge of speakers of an indigenous HL in the diaspora, measured at the level of production and comprehension. It will be the first study of an indigenous language combining data from L1 immigrant generation, HSs and speakers in the homeland, as well as offline and online measures.

France

2025-10-01