The talk presents a corpus-based quantitative study on speech production of approx. 300 immigrant and heritagespeakers of Danish in North America and Argentina. It aims to answer the questionwhether variation in linguistic proficiency on group level is connected to ‘immigrant generation’ (i.e., thedifference between speakers who migrated as adults with a fully acquiredlanguage competence vs.foreign-born heritage speakers who grew up bilingual)or the sociocultural setting in the diaspora, or both. In other words: Is thevariation in proficiency that can be observed in immigrant and heritagespeakers, caused by different acquisition settings or by the language ecologies that provide the frameof everyday life? Much heritage language research has been built on theassumption that the acquisition setting is fundamental for the linguisticdevelopment of heritage speakers (Montrul 2022, Benmamoun, Polinsky & Montrul 2010)

The study relies on the ‘Corpus ofAmerican Danish’ (1.3 million tokens produced by 337 speakers) which has beencompiled within the research project ‘Danish Voices in the Americas’(2014–2018) at the University of Copenhagen (www.danishvoices.ku.dk; Kühl, Heegård Petersen &Hansen 2019). These data provide an opportunity to compare developmentswithin the same immigrant minority language (Danish) in different geographicalplaces (North America and Argentina) that in turn represent differentsociocultural settings for the Danish immigrant or heritage speakers.

The talk presents a bottom-up exploration ofthe distribution of 13 linguistic and para-linguistic variables that we havetaken to represent speech production in terms of linguistic proficiency(Heegård Petersen et al. 2018). The variables include Danish words, L2 words,word-internal codeswitces, the ratio of type to tokens, empty and filled pauses, self-interruptions,lengthenings, speech rate, word length, runlength of an uninterrupted utterance, and the ratio of main to subclauses. In the talk, wewill discuss the methodological considerations and challenges in exploringthese variables in large-scale data by applying Factor Analysis as astatistical tool.

By comparing immigrant and heritagespeakers of North American Danish, we conclude that the sociolinguistic settingrather than ‘immigrant generation’ (i.e., the acquisition setting[JT5] ) is a crucial factor in the development of linguisticproficiency. We also conclude that the linguistic proficiency of heritage andimmigrant speakers (as reflected by the linguistic variables mentioned above)are certainly a display of idiosyncraticcognitive processes as one cannot consistently anticipatefrom a measure of one (para)linguistic variable the outcome of other (para)linguisticvariables, e.g., from a speaker’s speech rate or use of filled pauses that aspeaker is more likely to produce more L2-words or to have a specific type-token-ratio. Interestinglythough, certain linguistic variables arestrongly interrelated and cluster consistently depending on particular datasets(Argentine Danish speakers vs. North American Danish immigrant speakers vs.North American heritage speakers), implying that the variation in linguisticproficiency is a complex concept that takes various shapes related tocommunities and their language ecologies.

With this empirical corpus-based investigation, we offer an operationalisation of the theoreticalconcept linguistic proficiency, taking into account the variation in speechproduction of heritage and immigrant speakers.

 
References

Benmamoun, Elabbas;Montrul, Silvina; Polinsky, Maria (2010) White Paper: Prolegomena toHeritage Linguistics. Harvard University. Harvard

Heegård Petersen, Jan;Jacob Thøgersen; Gert Foget Hansen & Karoline Kühl (2018) Linguisticproficiency in immigrant and heritage speakers of Danish in Argentina and NorthAmerica: A quantitative approach. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.DOI: 10.1515/cllt-2017-0088.

Kühl,Karoline; Jan Heegård Petersen; Gert Foget Hansen (2019) The Corpus of AmericanDanish: A language resource of spoken immigrant Danish in North and SouthAmerica. Language Resources and Evaluation 54 (3), S. 831-849. DOI:10.1007/s10579-019-09473-5.
Montrul,Silvina (2022) The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.