ABSTRACT
“Heritage language” is sometimes referred to as ancestral language, native language, ethnic language, minority language, langue d’origine, mother tongue and community language, and so forth (Baker 1995: 129; He 2010: 66). The fact that heritage language can be defined as synonymous with these terms points to, first, heritage language as potentially an umbrella term referring to a language that is inherited. This is regardless of the social and cultural specificity of the given language and the community that acknowledges the language as their own. Second, it highlights heritage language as defined differently with respect to the social and cultural makeup of a society and migratory pattern. Native language often refers to the language of those who are historically the earliest occupants of the land. In this case, native language is understood as existing prior to the migration of people in history to the land that is being discussed. Ancestral language indexes a connection between language and place marked by distance, usually as a result of migration. Similarly, the French term langue d’origine underscores the dispersal of people as a consequence of colonialism when former colonial subjects navigate toward the metropoles of European colonial powers such as France (Aissaoui 2009). For example, the term marks French as distinct from Arabic, the langue d’origine of a Maghrebi diasporic subject living in France (Derrida 1998). Ethnic language refers to the language of ethnic minority, often in the context of multi-ethnic societies, such as the United States. This is sometimes conflated with minority language. Community language, though place-bound like the native language, seems to be focused more on the adoption, not inheritance, of a place to building communal identification alongside language usage. In fact, the convenient interchange between these terms and heritage language urges us to examine, specifically, what some of these terms mean or represent individually. In short, there is a lack of consensus among academics in terms of what a common definition of heritage language is. For example, in North America, the term heritage language is used concurrently to mean immigrant, indigenous, and ancestral language according to specific contexts, while in Australia the term is interchangeably used with community language (Wiley and Valdés 2000; Fishman 2001; Wiley 2001; Cummins 2005; He 2010).
