Heritage language
Type of minority language of lower prestige / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Heritage language?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
A heritage language is a minority language (either immigrant or indigenous) learned by its speakers at home as children, and difficult to be fully developed because of insufficient input from the social environment. The speakers grow up with a different dominant language in which they become more competent.[1] Polinsky and Kagan label it as a continuum (taken from Valdés definition[2] of heritage language) that ranges from fluent speakers to barely speaking individuals of the home language. In some countries or cultures which determine a person's mother tongue by the ethnic group they belong to, a heritage language would be linked to the native language.[3]
The term can also refer to the language of a person's family or community that the person does not speak or understand, but identifies with culturally.[4][5]