"heritage speakers"

[James Kirchner]

I have never taught "heritage speakers" and have no experience of them in
Slavic.  My main experience of such nativoid speakers was as their classmate
in an Italian sequence I once took under a native-speaking instructor.  As I
remember, the first semester began with about half the class comprised of
people who "spoke it at home" and ended with most of them gone.

I don't know if this also applies to Slavic communities, but it would seem
there are heritage speakers and there are heritage speakers.  In the Italian
courses I took, they seemed to fall into two distinct groups, and it would be
a challenge to create materials to address both of them.  Based on my
informal observation, the groups were:

1.  Students who spoke a local American dialect of Italian that was not
mutually intelligible with the standard language, partly due to its parent
dialect and partly to its large number of calques and phonologically
disguised loanwords from English.  (This dialect might be analogous to
something like Hamtramck Polish.)  Virtually all these heritage speakers
dropped the class.  The main reasons seemed to be (a) that the course was
going to require study, and wouldn't yield the effortless A they wanted out
of it, and (b) a sort of indignation over the discovery that they were
expected to learn something different from the Italian they were used to (as
if teaching of the standard were an assertion that their own language was no
good).  By the middle of the first semester, these students were underscoring
students who had never heard Italian before starting the class.

2.  All the heritage speakers who stayed with the class through the entire
four semesters either spoke or had been more extensively exposed to standard
Italian at home before beginning the course.  (They also appeared to me to be
more articulate in English.)  While their command of their own Italian
dialect(s) appeared as good as that of the students in the first group, they
studied, and seemed to feel they were deriving some steady benefit from the
instruction oriented toward the anglophone students.

So it would seem that different groups of "heritage speakers" in the same
class would have vastly different needs and motivations.  What these would be
among nativoid Slavic speakers might have a lot to do with their families'
educational level and the basic attitude of their linguistic communities
toward standard and literary language in general.  I'd be interested to know
if other list subscribers have seen situations with Slavic speakers that
confirm or contradict my observation.

James Kirchner