Summer school LangHerit: Heritage Languages : Theories, Domains and Methodologies
Roscoff, July 3-7, 2017
The Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (UMR 6310) is pleased to invite you to a summer school on heritage languages, which will be held at the biological Station in Roscoff, Finistère (France), from the 3rd to the 7th of July.
Description: A Heritage Language (HL) is a language learned from birth in the home environment, in a context where the ambient language spoken outside the home - the dominant language - is different. The notion covers both immigrant and regional languages (although their social and political status is different).
Despite a growing interest for the topic, manifested mostly in work on the extinction of regional languages and the debates concerning immigrant languages, the linguistic study and grammatical analysis of HL has received little attention. This summer school seeks to contribute to some of the core open issues raised by HL for linguistic theories:
- What are the most suitable methodologies for the study of HL?
- If the goal of linguistics is to characterize the knowledge/competence that a speaker has in a given language, what is the best way to deal with heritage speakers, who may understand very well their heritage language, but may rarely (and sometimes poorly) speak it?
- How are HL acquired, given that their acquisition differs from both L1 and L2 acquisition?
- How do we characterize the grammatical competence/knowledge of a heritage speaker? What are the main (morpho-phonological, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic) criteria that determine the ‘native-like quality’ of the resulting competence?
Programme: The summer school is organized over 5 days, combining courses and workshops:
- daily courses: (4 x 1H / day x 5d = 20H)
- workshops on case studies (5 x 3H / day = 15H)
The courses and workshops, coordinated by prominent international experts, offer complementary views on heritage languages.
- courses
- The three authors of the founding paper White Paper: Prolegomena to Heritage Linguistics (2010), Abbas Benmamoun, Silvina Montrul & Maria Polinsky, will each be in charge of a course.
- The topic of HL has been extensively developed and applied at the University of British Columbia, in the study of first nations languages spoken in Canada. UBC is well-known for both the outstanding quality of its research in formal linguistics on indigenous languages and the integration of social issues. Henry Davis and Lisa Matthewson, professors in the Linguistic Department at UBC, have accepted to offer a joint class to discuss their research.
- workshops: the workshops will focus on representative or locally relevant case studies. They will be coordinated by the following experts:
See 'Abstracts' and 'Programme' for further details
Download LangHerit flyer
Contact: langherit@gmail.com
