What Do We Know about Heritage Languages? What Do We Need to Learn About Them?

Grace Cho, Fay Shin, and Stephen Krashen
Multicultural Education (in press)

Heritage languages (HL) are language spoken by the children of immigrants or by those who immigrated to a country when young. The purpose of this paper is to briefly review what is known about heritage language development over time and to identify some gaps in our knowledge. We will consider three aspects: how much HL speakers use their HLs, how well they know them, and the attitudes they have toward their HLs, focusing here on older children, adolescents, and adults.

Use

There is no question that the use of the HL declines as second generation students move through school. Table 1, from Garcia and Diaz (1992), is from a survey of Spanish-speaking high school students in Miami in their senior year of high school. Thirty percent of the sample were born in the US, but all, apparently, did all of their schooling in the US. There is a clear decline in the percent of students who report mostly or all Spanish use.

Table 1.
Language Use Pre-School, Junior High School, and High School

	Prior to Elementary School	Jr HS	Sr Yr HS
Spanish	85%	37%	18%
Both	8%	36%	63%
English	7%	27%	19%

From: Garcia and Diaz (1992)
Spanish = Spanish only or mostly Spanish
English = English only or mostly English