Blingual Literacy and Input Knowledge Outcomes: Tracing Heritage Language Bilingual Development

Descripción del proyecto

Preservación de las lenguas y culturas heredadas

En un mundo en el que se valora la diversidad cultural y el multilingüismo, a menudo han pasado desapercibidos los retos a los que se enfrentan los bilingües que hablan lenguas heredadas. Con el apoyo de las acciones Marie Skłodowska-Curie, el equipo del proyecto BLINK pretende arrojar luz sobre este grupo poco estudiado. Mediante la combinación de métodos de investigación en línea y presenciales, se centrará en los hablantes de la lengua turca pertenecientes a la diáspora de Noruega y Alemania, dos países con diversos subgrupos que poseen distintos niveles de alfabetización en turco. En el proyecto se examinarán variables clave y su repercusión en los bilingües que hablan lenguas heredadas respecto a sus homólogos monolingües. Comprender a fondo el bilingüismo de las lenguas heredadas es esencial para cumplir los compromisos de la Unión Europea en materia lingüística, lo que convierte al proyecto BLINK en una labor vital para las ciencias sociales y lingüísticas.

Objetivo

Bilingual Literacy and Input Negotiates Knowledge Outcomes: Tracing Heritage Language Bilingual Development
This project significantly adds to a burgeoning—roughly 2 and half decades long—sub-field of bilingualism studies, namely Heritage Language Bilingualism (HLB). We propose a novel approach that combines offline and online methods and focuses on a severely understudied, yet crucially important age group of heritage speaker (HS) bilinguals in an effort to fill crucial gaps in the available literature. We will examine the role and weight of key variables that (potentially) contribute to ubiquitous differences between these populations and matched monolingual counterparts. To this end, we capitalize on the relatively unique opportunity Turkish provides as a heritage language acquired in its diaspora in the EU (the snapshot will be Norway and Germany). Having access to balanced populations in both Norway and Germany and their respective multiple subgroups that differ in key variables (e.g. access or not to literacy education in Turkish) we will for the first time have a fairer chance to converge on an understanding of how and why HLB presents so differently from monolingualism and even other cases of bilingualism. Because HLB, deals with the development and maintenance of minority languages spoken in the home and small ethnic communities in a larger national context, it fits very well with the imperatives of the EU and its commitment to fostering cross-cultural integration while guaranteeing the rights of all to maintain their heritage languages and cultures. Understanding how to best fulfill language related EU imperatives and commitments is inherently related to understanding the cognitive, social and linguistic sciences behind HLB.