Since I started working in the field of heritage languages from a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective, I have been interested in understanding the wide range of linguistic variability displayed by heritage speakers in their native language. I have conducted many studies comparing the linguistic knowledge of second language learners and heritage speakers to understand how age of onset of bilingualism and type of linguistic experience shape these grammars during their development and in their steady state. But one of the topics that drove me to linguistics many years ago, when I was an undergraduate student at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata in Argentina, was the way the structure of languages changes over time. I have come to understand that we have a lot to learn from heritage speakers about this process: their language provides a unique testing case for isolating those aspects of language that are particularly vulnerable to change. The intense contact situation in which heritage languages are acquired allows us to see the fast development of linguistic processes attested in diachronic language change (simplification, grammaticalization, other innovations) at a more micro-linguistic and individual level. I join many colleagues in the firm belief that the analysis of the language of heritage speakers can contribute significantly to our understanding of fundamental questions about the universal nature of human language and the experiential-cultural factors that shape the acquisition, maintenance, and historical development of languages.
The present work – Native Speakers, Interrupted – is primarily concerned with understanding language loss across the lifespan and its potential role in language change. The book advances our understanding of language development and language change in a very specific way: it focuses on a well-studied grammatical phenomenon – Differential Object Marking (DOM) – and considers how the language of the parent generation may affect directly (or not) the language of their heritage language-speaking children. I present an in-depth and comprehensive study of heritage speakers’ acquisition, maintenance, and loss of DOM in Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian, and consider the potential relationship between social and cognitive factors in language acquisition, bilingualism, and language change. The study is based in part upon a project supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number BCS-0917593, ARRA to Silvina Montrul, Rakesh Bhatt, and Roxana Girju (2009–2013). This book presents the main findings from this project in a comparative manner as well as from some new studies. I thank the National Science Foundation for their support and confirm that any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are mine only and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
I have long been thinking about the ideas presented in this book, which took a long time for me to write for various reasons. One reason is that I wanted to have all the data from this major project analyzed completely, because my goal was to focus on the comparative analysis of the three languages. Transcribing, checking transcriptions, coding and running reliability checks on the coding of all the oral production data took a long time to accomplish, especially for Hindi and Romanian because I had to rely on several native speakers with knowledge of linguistics. Second, life happened: even though I received a Center for Advanced Study fellowship from the University of Illinois for the fall semester of 2017 and a sabbatical in fall 2020 to focus on this book, and for which I am extremely grateful, a series of personal losses and adverse family circumstances got in the way. I would like to remember and acknowledge my late anthropology colleague Nancy Abelmann, for encouraging me to write this book and reading many drafts of my proposed idea for it. She would be very happy to know I have finally finished it. Maria Gillombardo, Research Development Manager from the Office of Research Advancement and Project Development, at the University of Illinois also read early versions of the proposal for this book, and her questions as a non-linguist greatly helped me find clarity in my ideas and my writing. Cambridge University Press acquisitions editor Helen Barton’s enthusiasm for this project has also been key to keeping me committed to and on track with this project, as has been Isabel Collins’. Thank you, Helen and Izzie. Finally, Anne Rix deserves special mention for her outstanding copyediting job.
Working on different languages, two of which are not my native language, required the assistance of many colleagues, students, and research assistants to help me design the tasks, collect the data, transcribe all the oral data, check accuracy of transcriptions multiple times, and code and analyze the oral production data. I would like to thank all of them for their invaluable contribution to this project: Rakesh Bhatt, Roxana Girju, Nicoleta Bateman, Kirsten Hope, Noelia Sánchez-Walker, Laura Romaní, Archna Bhatia, Vandana Puri, Raluca Kim, Luminita Marcus, Andreea Faur, Bogdan Haiducu, Codruta Girlea, and Daniela Raducanu. I would not have been able to complete this work without them. Laura Romaní, Vandana Puri, and Bogdan Haiducu went to Mexico, New Delhi, and Brașov to collect the data from all the native speakers in their homeland. Laura Romaní is a heritage speaker of Spanish and Bogdan Haiducu is a heritage speaker of Romanian. I know it was immensely meaningful for them to travel to their countries of origin and connect to their people through this project. I also thank Marissa Barlaz for guidance with all the statistical analyses, especially after redoing all data files that were prepared and analyzed with SPSS to be run in R. And finally, I would like to thank my graduate students Elias Shakkour and Aylın Coşkun-Kunduz, and my colleague Esther Rinke from the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, who read and provided invaluable critical feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.
