36.3614, Calls: Frontiers in Education - "Special Issue: Heritage Language Maintenance and Attrition Across the Lifespan: Typical and Atypical Language Development" (Jrnl)

Tue Nov 25 14:05:02 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3614. Tue Nov 25 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3614, Calls: Frontiers in Education - "Special Issue: Heritage Language Maintenance and Attrition Across the Lifespan: Typical and Atypical Language Development" (Jrnl)

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Date: 22-Nov-2025
From: Weifeng Han [weifeng.han at flinders.edu.au]
Subject: Frontiers in Education - "Special Issue: Heritage Language Maintenance and Attrition Across the Lifespan: Typical and Atypical Language Development" (Jrnl)

Journal: Frontiers in Education
Issue: Heritage Language Maintenance and Attrition Across the
Lifespan: Typical and Atypical Language Development
Call Deadline: 01-Oct-2026

Heritage language means a home or community language acquired in
childhood that is not the dominant societal language; it differs from
a monolingual L1 in status and input conditions, and from an L2
typically learned later through formal instruction. Heritage
languages, therefore, underpin cognitive development, identity,
well-being, family cohesion, and educational opportunities. In an era
of intensified migration and diversity, speakers navigate shifting
demands across the lifespan. Early childcare and schooling often
accelerate the shift to the societal language; adolescence brings peer
influence and identity renegotiation; adulthood introduces workplace
pressures and parenting; later life can involve attrition,
maintenance, or reactivation. Outcomes are shaped by family language
policy, schooling models, peer networks, digital media, community
institutions, labour markets, and language ideologies. Yet,
scholarship and practice remain siloed by age, setting, and
discipline, leaving educators, clinicians, and policymakers with mixed
messages. This Research Topic frames heritage language maintenance and
attrition as a long-term phenomenon across the lifespan, an
ecosystemic issue requiring interdisciplinary inquiry across
education, linguistics, psychology, speech-language pathology, and
sociology. It also recognises that heritage language maintenance and
loss occur within complex sociocultural systems shaped not only by
family and community practices but also by structural forces, such as
colonial histories, racialised language ideologies, and monolingual
norms, that influence access, value, and legitimacy of
multilingualism. It invites global perspectives and underrepresented
languages, seeking evidence that is inclusive of learners with diverse
profiles, applicable to both typical and atypical language
development, so that findings can translate into practical guidance
for classrooms, clinics, communities, and policy.
The core challenge is fragmentation: evidence is uneven across life
stages, settings, and languages, with limited longitudinal and
cross-linguistic data, as well as under-examined adult and older-adult
trajectories. Monolingual bias in assessment and pedagogy persists;
research-to-practice pipelines are weak, especially for scalable
models that work across varied sociolinguistic contexts. Structural
drivers, such as funding mechanisms, accountability regimes, and
language policies, are often treated as background rather than levers
for change.
This Research Topic will assemble an integrated body of work to: (1)
map heritage language trajectories and turning points across the
lifespan; (2) identify risk and protective factors for maintenance
versus attrition; (3) evaluate pedagogies, family language planning,
and community programmes that build biliteracy; (4) develop and
validate equitable assessment and progress-monitoring approaches; (5)
test the role of technologies (e.g., digital media, AI-enabled tools)
in sustaining use; and (6) analyse policy architectures that normalise
bilingualism. This Research Topic also aims to advance
interdisciplinary understanding of heritage language maintenance and
attrition while explicitly acknowledging the structural and systemic
forces, including but not limited to raciolinguistic ideologies,
structural oppressions and/or language policy, that contribute to
language shift and inequitable linguistic outcomes. We welcome
contributions that include, but are not limited to, learners with
additional communication needs without placing them in a silo.
Expected outputs include design principles for schools and community
providers, guidance for families and clinicians, open tools (e.g.,
corpora, assessment protocols), and policy-ready syntheses that can
travel across languages, cultures, and systems.
This Research Topic will assemble an integrated body of work to: (1)
map heritage language trajectories and turning points across the
lifespan; (2) identify risk and protective factors for maintenance
versus attrition; (3) evaluate pedagogies, family language planning,
and community programmes that build biliteracy; (4) develop and
validate equitable assessment and progress-monitoring approaches; (5)
test the role of technologies (e.g., digital media, AI-enabled tools)
in sustaining use; and (6) analyse policy architectures that normalise
bilingualism. We welcome contributions that include, but are not
limited to, learners with additional communication needs without
placing them in a silo. Expected outputs include design principles for
schools and community providers, guidance for families and clinicians,
open tools (e.g., corpora, assessment protocols), and policy-ready
syntheses that can travel across languages, cultures, and systems.
This Research Topic focuses on heritage language use, maintenance, and
attrition across the lifespan. We invite studies that situate heritage
bilingualism within interconnected ecosystems of home, school,
community, and health, and that consider how heritage language
practices shape wellbeing, identity, and motivation. We are especially
interested in work that examines family language policy, peer
networks, instructional models for biliteracy, and equitable
assessment approaches that challenge monolingual bias, as well as how
structural oppression and social power relations shape linguistic
experiences, educational opportunities, and assessment practices.
Contributions may also address heritage language attrition,
reactivation, and the affordances of digital media and AI-enabled
tools in sustaining use. Comparative and global policy analyses are
welcome, with a particular emphasis on under-researched languages and
communities.
Manuscript types: Original Research, Systematic Review, Scoping
Review, Mini Review, Brief Research Report, Methods/Methodology,
Conceptual Analysis, Hypothesis and Theory, Policy and Practice
Reviews, Community Case Study, Perspective, and Opinion. We
particularly welcome mixed-methods, longitudinal, corpus-based,
experimental, ethnographic, and design-based implementation research,
as well as tool and resource papers (e.g., datasets, assessment
frameworks). Submissions should make clear, actionable implications
for educators, clinicians, families, and policy makers and, where
possible, provide open materials to enhance reproducibility and
uptake.

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Clinical Linguistics
                     Language Acquisition
                     Language Documentation
                     Psycholinguistics

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