Vietnamese at home, French at school: thousands of children grow up between two languages. Linguistics has a name for this situation, heritage language, and a precise question to go with it: what happens to a language learned very early when another one takes over?
A language learned “in pyjamas”
A heritage language is acquired very early and naturally, usually within the family, but it is not the main language of the surrounding society. [First name Last name], a PhD student in phonetics and phonology at Université Paris Cité, describes it as a language learned “in pyjamas”. As soon as the child steps outside, the language of the street, public transport and school takes over. Over time, this dominant language often becomes the speaker’s main language.
A term born outside the lab
The word did not originate in linguistics. It emerged in Canada in 1977 with Ontario’s Heritage Languages Program, which taught children languages other than French and English. From the 1990s onwards, bilingualism research adopted it. The question was no longer only how to pass on a family language, but how the linguistic system works in someone who acquired one language early while becoming dominant in another.
Hearing tones through a French filter?
Vietnamese is a tone language: pitch distinguishes words. French has no tones but uses intonation: the voice rises for a question and falls for a statement. The research discussed in the episode focuses on this point of contact: does a Vietnamese heritage speaker perceive a rising tone through the filter of French intonation?
The phenomenon is studied from three angles:
- perception, with tasks in which participants judge whether two tones are the same or different, then whether they map onto French intonation patterns;
- production, using controlled sentences that isolate tonal effects;
- interaction, with two people solving a problem together, to see whether their speech changes depending on who they are talking to.
Each participant’s language history is also collected: which language was spoken at home, how often, and who they speak which language to today.
From a deficit view to a question of place
Heritage speakers were long compared to monolingual speakers from the country of origin, which amounted to looking for what they “lacked”. Their language was sometimes even described as “broken”. Research has changed considerably over the past twenty to thirty years. It now questions whether that comparison is appropriate and asks what place the language holds in a speaker’s life. The wide variability among speakers, once treated as statistical noise, has become a research question in its own right, explained through individual life paths.
As the guest puts it, a language is not just a code: it is also a biography.
🎧 Listen to the episode: https://www.podcastics.com/podcast/episode/langue-dheritage-434824/