36.3729, Reviews: Linguistic dynamics in heritage speakers: Shanley E. M. Allen, Mareike Keller, Artemis Alexiadou, Heike Wiese (eds.) (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3729. Wed Dec 03 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3729, Reviews: Linguistic dynamics in heritage speakers: Shanley E. M. Allen, Mareike Keller, Artemis Alexiadou, Heike Wiese (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 03-Dec-2025
From: Daniel Strogen [973256 at swansea.ac.uk]
Subject: Sociolinguistics, Text/Corpus Linguistics: Shanley E. M. Allen, Mareike Keller, Artemis Alexiadou, Heike Wiese (eds.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-2208

Title: Linguistic dynamics in heritage speakers
Subtitle: Insights from the RUEG group
Series Title: Current Issues in Bilingualism
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/473

Editor(s): Shanley E. M. Allen, Mareike Keller, Artemis Alexiadou,
Heike Wiese

Reviewer: Daniel Strogen

SUMMARY
Linguistic Dynamics in Heritage Speakers: Insights from the RUEG
Group, edited by Shanley E. M. Allen, Mareike Keller, Artemis
Alexiadou, and Heike Wiese, brings together fifteen papers from the
DFG Research Unit Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations
(RUEG). The papers examine the language use of heritage speakers of
German, Greek, Russian, and Turkish with either English or German as
their majority language, alongside comparison data from monolingual
speakers of each language. Although the definition is contested,
‘heritage language’ typically refers to a language acquired in
childhood and used in the home but not dominant in the wider speech
community (Rothman 2009; Montrul 2023; Polinsky 2018). RUEG
investigates how heritage speakers’ linguistic systems develop and
vary across communicative contexts, drawing on a shared corpus of
spoken and written narratives elicited in both formal and informal
settings. The volume is organised into three parts addressing
methodological issues, grammatical structures, and pragmatic
phenomena.
The first part, ‘Methodology and Application’, presents the conceptual
and methodological foundations of the RUEG project and explores their
implications for heritage-language research. In ‘Tapping into
speakers’ repertoires: Elicitation of register-differentiated
productions across groups’, Wiese, Labrenz, and Roy outline RUEG’s
central approach and describe the ‘Language Situations’ method used to
elicit comparable speech in formal and informal contexts. Drawing on
two pilot studies, they show that this design captures variation in
style and register while remaining close to natural language use.
Building on this, Shadrova, Klotz, Hartz, and Lüdeling’s ‘Mapping the
mappings and then containing them all: Quality assurance, interface
modelling, and epistemology in complex corpus projects’ turns to the
technical and epistemological dimensions of the RUEG corpus,
highlighting issues of data quality, annotation consistency, and
modelling complexity in large collaborative projects. Extending the
methodological discussion into a more applied domain, Purkarthofer,
Tracy, Grigoriadou, and Tausch’s ‘Family language dynamics:
Strengthening heritage speakers’ linguistic resources’ examines
multilingual families’ language practices and challenges deficit-based
views of heritage speakers. The authors offer practical
recommendations for supporting multilingualism through collaboration
among researchers, educators, and families. Overall, the opening
papers illustrate how RUEG seeks to connect theoretical rigour with
practical relevance.
The second part, ‘Dynamics of Grammatical Structure’, brings together
six papers examining how grammatical patterns develop and vary among
heritage speakers in multilingual contexts. The section opens with
Tsehaye, Tracy, and Tausch’s ‘Inter- and intra-individual variation:
How it materialises in Heritage German and why it matters’, which
examines clause structure in Heritage German. The study finds that
while overall syntax remains stable, most differences emerge in verbal
morphology and reflect individual rather than group-level tendencies.
Continuing this focus on how speakers differ in their patterns, Özsoy
and colleagues’ ‘Null subjects in heritage Greek, Russian, and
Turkish’ examines how speakers use or omit subjects, showing that
animacy consistently shapes subject expression and that differences
between groups reflect specific language pairings. Similarly, Rizou,
Özsoy, Martynova, Szucsich, Alexiadou, and Gagarina’s ‘Dynamics of
verbal aspect in heritage Greek, Russian, and Turkish’ explores how
both grammatical markedness and the formality of a situation influence
aspectual choice, showing that linguistic and contextual factors work
together. Moving from verbal to clause-level structure, Schroeder and
colleagues’ ‘Clause combining in narrative discourse: A contrastive
analysis across heritage and majority languages’ examines how
bilinguals link clauses in storytelling tasks, showing that
typological preferences for subordination are largely maintained,
while communicative context strongly shapes the kinds of clause
relations used. This is complemented by Kreskin’s ‘Balkan Turkic as a
model for understanding contact-induced change in Turkish’, which uses
Balkan Turkic to model contact-induced syntactic change, arguing that
recurrent innovations in word order and clause structure point to
general contact mechanisms rather than language-specific drift. The
section concludes with Zürn, Keller, Tracy, and Lüdeling’s ‘Dynamic
properties of the heritage speaker lexicon’, which compares spoken and
written narratives across registers and finds that heritage speakers
show considerable creativity and transparency in lexical formation.
Together, the papers depict grammatical systems in contact as largely
stable yet internally variable, with patterns of variation arising
from the interaction of structural constraints, speaker-specific
tendencies, and contextual demands.
The third and final part, ‘Dynamics of Pragmatic Structure’, shifts
focus from grammar to pragmatic and discourse organisation,
encompassing information structure, prosody, discourse markers, and
conversational framing. Bunk, Allen, Zerbian, Pashkova, Zuban, and
Conti’s ‘Information packaging and word order dynamics in language
contact’ opens the section by examining how information structure
shapes word order in contact settings. Drawing on RUEG studies of
English, German, and Russian, the authors show that referent
introduction, clause type, and particle placement reflect evolving
strategies of information packaging. Zerbian, Zuban, Böttcher, and
Bunk’s ‘Intonation in heritage languages’ then investigates prosodic
realisation and perception among heritage and monolingually raised
speakers of Russian and German, demonstrating that differences across
groups are largely quantitative rather than qualitative. Extending the
discussion to the majority language, Pashkova, Böttcher, Katsika,
Zerbian, and Allen’s ‘Majority English of heritage speakers’ analyses
the English of adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage
backgrounds in German, Greek, Russian, and Turkish, finding
contact-related variation in prosody, article use, and reference but
overall stability in discourse organisation. Labrenz, Iefremenko,
Katsika, Allen, Schroeder, and Wiese’s ‘Dynamics of discourse markers
in language contact’ further develops this perspective by showing how
societal status differences between languages affect the frequency and
functional range of discourse markers. Finally, Katsika, Labrenz,
Iefremenko, and Allen’s ‘Discourse openings and closings across
languages in contact’ examines how multilingual speakers structure the
beginnings and endings of narratives and conversations, revealing both
shared and language-specific organisational patterns. These papers
show that prosodic and discourse phenomena in heritage languages form
systematic responses to multilingual communicative demands,
maintaining structural continuity while adapting to context and
audience.
EVALUATION
Overall, this is a well-integrated contribution to research on
heritage speakers and language contact. The volume brings together
work on methodology, grammar, and pragmatics, showing how different
linguistic levels can be compared across languages and contexts. Its
combination of corpus-based, experimental, and qualitative approaches
illustrates the range of current methods in the field without losing
coherence. By analysing morphosyntax, prosody, and discourse
organisation using shared data and comparable elicitation contexts,
the contributors offer a consistent basis for cross-linguistic
comparison and provide a model for future research on multilingual
language use.
One of the volume’s main strengths lies in its methodological and
conceptual integration. Because all papers draw on the RUEG corpus,
they can be compared systematically across heritage and majority
languages and across structural, prosodic, and discourse domains. The
studies in the section ‘Dynamics of Grammatical Structure’ show how
comparable corpus-based designs reveal patterns of variation in areas
such as aspect, null subjects, and clause combining. The papers in
‘Dynamics of Pragmatic Structure’ extend this perspective to prosody,
discourse markers, and larger units of discourse organisation. Taken
together, the volume demonstrates how a shared empirical foundation
enables fine-grained insights into the factors that shape heritage
grammars, ranging from morphological markedness to communicative
context, while supporting greater methodological transparency and
replicability in heritage-language research.
While the volume is impressively wide-ranging, this breadth sometimes
comes at the cost of overall cohesion. The section on ‘Dynamics of
Grammatical Structure’ is tightly focused, with papers that build on
shared assumptions about how morphosyntax varies in contact settings.
In contrast, the later sections, especially those dealing with
discourse and lexical patterns, are more varied in both topic and
level of analysis. Some papers, such as those on discourse markers or
intonation, remain largely descriptive, whereas others, including the
studies of majority English and the heritage lexicon, adopt more
interpretive or theoretically driven approaches. This unevenness can
make it difficult to see the common threads the editors highlight in
the introduction, particularly the idea of “emerging grammars” as a
single unifying concept. A stronger editorial synthesis or clearer
cross-references might have shown more explicitly how the different
linguistic levels, such as morphology, syntax, prosody, and discourse,
fit together within the volume’s overall model of grammatical change
in multilingual settings.
Given the volume’s origin within the RUEG consortium, the recurrence
of overlapping author teams is unsurprising. This contributes to
strong methodological coherence, but it may also limit the range of
theoretical perspectives represented, which is a common trade-off in
tightly coordinated collaborative projects. The absence of a
concluding editorial chapter or an explicit synthesis across sections
limits the volume’s overall coherence. While the introduction outlines
the goals of the RUEG project and the unifying notion of linguistic
dynamics, readers are largely left to connect the findings from
grammatical, prosodic, and discourse-focused papers for themselves. A
short concluding chapter or clearer cross-references could have shown
more explicitly how analyses at different linguistic levels jointly
support RUEG’s account of variability and change in multilingual
settings. In addition, the volume’s empirical breadth and detailed
methodological reporting, although a major strength for specialists,
may be demanding for readers who are less familiar with corpus
linguistics, quantitative modelling, or prosodic analysis. Some papers
assume a high level of technical background, which may limit
accessibility for newcomers to heritage-language research, even as it
provides substantial depth for researchers already working in the
field.
Despite these minor limitations, the volume offers a substantial and
carefully executed contribution to heritage-language research. By
combining large-scale empirical comparability with detailed
qualitative analysis, it provides a clear methodological and
conceptual model for investigating linguistic variability in contact
settings. Its integration of morphosyntactic, prosodic, and discourse
analyses within a shared empirical framework illustrates the value of
coordinated cross-linguistic collaboration for advancing both
theoretical and applied understandings of multilingualism. Beyond its
immediate findings, the volume points to promising directions for
future work, including extending the RUEG approach to additional
language pairs, incorporating longitudinal perspectives, and examining
how individual speaker trajectories relate to community-level change.
Ultimately, it stands as a valuable resource for scholars seeking to
understand how structural patterns, communicative contexts, and
speaker experiences interact in heritage grammars.
REFERENCES
Montrul, S. (2023). Heritage languages: Language acquired, language
lost, language regained. Annual Review of Linguistics, 9(1), 399-418.
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030521-050236
Polinsky, M. (2018). Heritage languages and their speakers. Cambridge
University Press.
Rothman, J. (2009). Understanding the nature and outcomes of early
bilingualism: Romance languages as heritage languages. International
Journal of Bilingualism, 13(2), 155–163.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006909339814
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Daniel Strogen is a PhD candidate at Swansea University, specialising
in Welsh language revitalisation. His research focuses on patterns of
language decline among young Welsh speakers, employing mixed methods
approaches informed by sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. He
holds qualifications in English Language, Primary Education, and
Social Research Methods, and has published short fiction alongside his
academic work. His broader interests include dialectology, language
attitudes, and language policy.



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