Autistic children from heritage-language-speaking homes in the United States are a growing group that would benefit from tailored support that honors their linguistic heritage. Bilingual autistic adults share benefits of their bilingualism abilities and report childhood learning environments as necessary for facilitating language learning or…

Bilingualism continues to increase with more than 350 different languages spoken in the United States, and more than 21% of people over the age of five (approximately 66 million people) speaking a language other than English at home (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). Many bilingual children in the US speak a minority first language (L1) and English as…

Research on heritage language (HL) development often focuses on immigrants' identity and social network as predictors of HL maintenance. However, an important and overlooked factor is the socio-political circumstances that trigger emigration, such as whether immigrants relocate due to economic hardship or political turmoil. This study examines if…

Paradis' (2023) keynote article is a timely documentation of the ongoing shift in focus within childhood bilingualism research from investigating the factors that modulate majority or second language (ML/L2) attainment (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011) to understanding the sources of variation that lead to minority heritage language (HL)…

The present study contributes to the field of bilingual and trilingual language acquisition by analysing four multilingual families. In each family, at least one parent is bilingual. Following research questions will be addressed: (A) "How relevant are the (amount of) input and the (kind of) parental language strategies for language…

Many parents in the UK enrol their children in Greek supplementary schools so the children can learn and maintain the Greek language and culture in parallel with English mainstream education. Despite fears about the effects of this heritage language (Greek) use on children's skills in the majority language (English), research on these somewhat…

The influential role of parents has long been acknowledged as a key contributor to children's bilingual development. Parents' home-based informal efforts to foster children's bilingual abilities are described as family language policies (FLPs). The important connection between bilingualism and FLP has been established, but to date there are few…

This case study delves into the experiences of three Saudi mothers living in the United States, exploring their evolving understanding of their children's language needs and the obstacles they face as learners of Arabic heritage language (AHL). The study is rooted in the notion of language as a form of capital and Bonny Norton's metaphor of…

In the context of German linguistic policies, Heritage Language (HL) education ranges from formal and informal to non-formal offers. Families with migratory backgrounds seeking acquisition and maintenance of the HL frequently resort to educational or maintenance opportunities that are not institutionalized. In the region of Bavaria (Germany), the…

This paper provides an introduction to Lakurumau, a previously undescribed and undocumented Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. The first part of the paper is a guide to the Lakurumau documentation corpus, deposited in the ELAR archive. The participants and the content of the deposit, the technology used for recording, and the ethical protocols…

This study addresses the question of how the main factors related to input--including the environment in which children are exposed to both languages, the relative timing of the onset of the exposure to them and the amount of input--affect bilingual language acquisition at primary-school age. We examined the data of 42 German Polish bilinguals who…

Heritage language maintenance can be very challenging for diaspora communities worldwide. The role of technology on heritage language maintenance has recently started to spark the interest of researchers as a new emerging field but it still needs a lot of exploration. This exploratory study aims to provide an insight into Macedonian diaspora…

Is it possible to track the revitalization of the Maori language statistically? Different large-scale statistical collections (censuses and surveys) in New Zealand effectively have different definitions of speaker because they ask different questions. This paper compares trends in numbers of Maori speakers as estimated from responses to questions…

The present study examines a family language transmission project in which a child, learning Polish in Australia, created video documentaries with her own voice annotations in Polish. The project generated numerous parent-child interactions at the time of videorecording, a focus of the present study. The data in the study were seven…

This longitudinal study examined the development of narrative micro- and macrostructure in Japanese-English bilingual returnee children. Returnees are children of immigrant families who move to a foreign country, spending a significant portion of their formative developmental years in the foreign majority language context before returning to their…