Despite the range of varieties of Han Chinese, Mandarin is the most widely studied variety in research on Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) around the world. To better understand the role of other varieties of Han Chinese in addition to Mandarin, this article presents a synthesis of research on the learning of Chinese varieties in formal and…

This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in…

Scholars have long critiqued points of view in which monolingual perspectives are seen as normative in research on multilingualism. In relation to this "monolingual orientation," however, in which monolingualism is perceived to be the implicit norm, less work has been dedicated to methodological challenges. As disciplinary perspectives…

In my research I examine the linguistic practices of Moroccans in Spain, many of whom speak Moroccan Arabic as well as Modern Standard Arabic, Tamazight, French, English and Spanish at varying levels of proficiency. As part of my research, I conducted a 10-month linguistic ethnography. I was able to rely on my native English and near-native…

Increasingly, speakers of minoritized languages around the world are becoming uprooted due to economic pressures, political forces, and environmental destabilization. As communities leave their traditional homelands, they often experience accelerated language shift. Although youth are in a critical position to further transmit their languages to…

For more than a decade, research on heritage speakers' (HSs') mood selection has documented a high degree of variability in their interpretation and use of mood morphology in variable contexts. Most of the previous literature, however, has focused on late-acquired alternations, and often limited analyses to one form (i.e., subjunctive), making it…

Heritage languages (HLs) are acquired in contexts of unbalanced input, or situations in which children receive primary exposure to the family/HL and experience an abrupt shift after the child begins formal schooling. As a consequence, HL speakers normally become more dominant in the environmental language, while the development of the HL is…

Since the 1990s, grammatical complexity is a topic that has received considerable attention in various fields of applied linguistics, such as English for academic purposes, second language acquisition, language testing, and second language writing (Bulte & Housen, 2012). Many scholars in applied linguistics have recently argued that…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

This article contributes to the debate about the appropriate use of corpus data in language learning research. It focuses on frequencies of linguistic features in language use and their comparison across corpora. The majority of corpus-based second language acquisition studies employ a comparative design in which either one or more second language…

This article focuses on the use of collocations in language learning research (LLR). Collocations, as units of formulaic language, are becoming prominent in our understanding of language learning and use; however, while the number of corpus-based LLR studies of collocations is growing, there is still a need for a deeper understanding of factors…

Whilst the links between learner corpus research (LCR) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have long been debated, McEnery et al. (2019. "Corpus Linguistics, Learner Corpora, and SLA: Employing Technology to Analyze Language Use." Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 39: 74-92. doi:10.1017/S0267190519000096) claim that learner corpus…

We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

This article draws on longitudinal research of a linguistic ethnographic nature with four young women of Pontian Greek origin who migrated to Greece, from Russia and Georgia, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and who speak Standardised Modern Greek and Pontian Greek; a language variety of the former. The article focuses on the ways in…

This paper contributes to current sociolinguistic research on the rapidly-changing landscape of digitally mediated communication (Androutsopoulos and Staehr 2018) by presenting mediagrams, a new method for research on transnational mediated interaction. Based on an ethnographic study of mediated multilingual communication in four families with…