Determining how and why adult outcomes of heritage speaker (HS) bilingualism differ from monolinguals is difficult because it requires the reconstruction of developmental paths from end-state data. In an effort to address this issue, we examine HSs of Turkish in Germany at an early age of development (10–15 years old, n = 22), as well as age-matched monolingual controls in Turkey (n = 20) and Germany (n = 20), using a structured elicitation task for production of passives. The goal is to see whether HSs have the representation of passives in their mental grammars and to better understand the relative weight of factors (age at time of testing, immigration status of the Turkish parents (first or second generation), and literacy in the L1) that potentially contribute to the formation of HSs’ grammatical competence. The results show that all HSs have the underlying representation for passives in both Turkish and German. There was a significant effect of only literacy; high level of L1 literacy has a positive effect on monolingual-like production as compared to those with no literacy. We discuss these results pertaining to explicating ultimate attainment outcomes in heritage language acquisition in relation to larger debates in the field.

The rise of scientific inquiry focusing on bilingualism over the past few decades has also borne witness to an increase in the study of individuals and communities who speak a native language that is not the sociolinguistically dominant language of the environment in which they grew up. While it is common practice to refer to these diverse groups and individuals as “heritage speakers”, it is unclear whether it is appropriate to classify all of them under the same terminology. In this chapter, we take a closer look at three different groups: (i) children, (ii) young adults, and (iii) elderly, moribund bilinguals who have all been referred to as heritage speakers in the literature. After exploring aspects of phonological, (morpho)syntactic, and semantic/pragmatic developments, we show that a great deal of symmetry exists between them, thus justifying the cohesive, overarching label of “heritage speakers” to all three sub-groups. Finally, we outline what this broader definition of heritage speakers means for long-standing debates in the literature, such as those that concern the acquisition, development, and maintenance of the heritage grammar across the lifespan.

There has been a substantial amount of research on heritage language acquisition and diachronic change. Although recent work has increasingly pointed to parallels between those two areas, it remains unclear how systematic these are. In this paper, we provide a bird's eye view, illustrating how patterns of diachronic change are mirrored in heritage language grammars. In doing so, we focus on one of the best-described grammaticalization processes – namely, the formation of articles from demonstratives and numerals, reviewing studies on heritage varieties which mirror those processes. Based on this review, we make two main points: that change in heritage language can be predicted based on established diachronic scenarios, and that heritage languages often amplify incipient changes in the baseline. After discussing a number of attested changes in a bilingual context, we identify directions for future research in the domain of determiners in heritage languages.

This Special Issue (SI) is dedicated to early bilinguals, who acquire two languages during early childhood, before age 6,simultaneously (2L1 bilinguals)orsequentially (cL2 bilinguals). Recently, the notion ofheritage speakers(HSs) − bilinguals who grow up speaking a minority language at home − has become prominent in this context. HS research has typically targeted bilinguals at a mature (adult) state, but early developing bilinguals may of course be HSs too, though not uniformly labelled as such. HSs of a moribund language or variety are another type of early bilingual, representing the final or penultimate, often 4^thor 5^th, generation of speakers. Unfortunately, ‘deficiency’ or ‘incompleteness’ is a common thread linking much HS research − despite a wealth of evidence demonstrating HSs’ maintenance of complexity in many grammatical domains along with differences to monolinguals (see, e.g., Kupisch & Rothman, 2016; Putnam & Sánchez, 2013). This SI brings together studies on how and why the morphosyntax and phonology of early bilinguals might differ from that of monolinguals.

This paper reports on a study investigating restrictions on definiteness (the Definiteness Effect) in existential constructions in the two languages of Turkish heritage speakers in Germany. Turkish and German differ in how the Definiteness Effect plays out. Definite expressions in German may not occur in affirmative or negative existentials, whereas in Turkish the restriction applies only to affirmative existentials. Participants were adults and fell into two groups: simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) who acquired German before age 3 and early sequential bilinguals (2L1) who acquired German after age 4; there were also monolingual controls. The tasks involved acceptability judgments. Subjects were presented with contexts, each followed by a sentence to be judged, including grammatical and ungrammatical existentials. Results show that the bilinguals, regardless of age of acquisition, make judgments appropriate for each language. They reject definite expressions in negative existentials in German and accept them in Turkish, suggesting distinct grammars.