The concept of register in heritage language retention

Abstract

Abstract This paper argues for a greater consideration of the role of register in the retention of heritage languages by analyzing data on adolescent heritage-language speakers in Germany. The study addresses the following question: Which language external factors have the greatest impact on heritage-language retention in the intimate vs formal registers? A questionnaire was filled out by 202 students (age 15–17) in an urban area in Germany, who are all heritage-language speakers of 42 different languages. The major finding of this study is that heritage-language retention is determined by different language-external factors in each register. The fact that different models of heritage-language retention can be postulated for different language registers emphasizes the need to describe the language competences of heritage-language speakers according to registers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.