Reverse language transmission, intergenerational attrition and language change

Reverse language transmission, intergenerational attrition and language change Silvina Montrul (University of Illinois - Urbana Champaigne) Some long-term immigrants may undergo native language attrition after several years of residence in the host country. Second generation immigrants, or heritage speakers, are known to display significant structural variability in their grammars in some of the same areas that are vulnerable to subtle attrition effects in long-term immigrants (gender agreement, case marking, verbal morphology, pronominal reference, etc.). Given these two sets of findings, to what extent are these patterns related, and if so, in what way? It has been suggested that because first generation immigrants are the main source of input to the heritage speakers, they may be responsible for directly transmitting attrited patterns or “errors” to the heritage speakers, who then amplify them. This position is consistent with some diachronic models of language transmission. In this talk, I will provide a different interpretation of the relationship between attrition in first generation immigrants and partial acquisition in heritage speakers, based on recent empirical evidence from different languages. I suggest that the linguistic changes observed in the adult immigrants and the heritage speakers may be independent (unrelated) and internally motivated, because they also occur in L2 acquisition. Alternatively, if related, I argue that reverse transmission may be at play instead, when the young adult heritage speakers might be influencing the language of the parents; rather, than the other way around. Bringing together insights from diachronic language change, sociolinguistics and bilingualism, I base my proposal on the purported timing of attrition in adults and partial/protracted acquisition in child heritage speakers as a function of age. Theoretical and empirical evidence for reverse language transmission may explain the emergence of the variety of Spanish spoken in the United States.