ABSTRACT
Heritage learners, like heritage language scholarship, are byproducts of globalization. Most typically, they are early bilinguals whose language ability develops through a series of sociolinguistic events—contact with a home language and a societal language in early childhood, shift to societal language as the primary language at school, dominance in societal language by early adulthood, and sometimes, relearning of the home language during adulthood. Such a learning journey breaks the codified norms we usually hold for first language (L1), second language (L2), and native language, suggesting a fertile ground to study problems of language learning and use in social contexts – the central concern of pragmatics. Unfortunately, in the rapidly growing field of heritage language research, pragmatics has been rather neglected for a long time, with only a few studies addressing it peripherally.
