From Silence to Voice: Empowering Heritage Language Speakers in the 21st Century

Abstract

This report presents and discusses some salient properties of heritage languages. A heritage language is an ethnic or immigrant minority language which is the weaker of a bilingual speaker's two languages. Heritage speakers feel a cultural or family connection to their heritage language, but their most proficient language is the one that is dominant in their community. In the case of American heritage speakers of Spanish, that language is English.