Tenth Heritage Language Research Institute

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The impact of colloquial Arabic and English on the acquisition of Standard Arabic by heritage speakers and L2 learners

Heritage speakers and L2 learners of Arabic are placed in the same classrooms in the vast majority of college-level Arabic programs, which focus almost exclusively on Standard Arabic (SA), a language that is typically learned in formal settings and is different in significant ways from the spoken dialects that heritage speakers learn at home and in their immediate community. While most L2 learners are monolingual speakers of English, heritage speakers are considered unbalanced bilinguals because most of them have acquired colloquial Arabic and English before they enter the SA classroom. This study examines the impact of the previously acquired languages, namely colloquial Arabic and English, on SA acquisition by heritage speakers and L2 learners. The study focuses on the performance of heritage speakers and L2 learners in a specific linguistic area: sentential negation. Thirty-five heritage speakers, 28 L2 learners, and 16 controls completed five oral tasks targeting negation of eight different clause types. The findings revealed striking similarities between heritage speakers and L2 learners with respect to overall performance and challenges, and patterns of errors made. Moreover, while neither group showed transfer effects from English, heritage speakers showed positive and negative transfer from colloquial Arabic, a language variety typologically similar to SA. We will discuss the results in light of the current discussions on the interaction between previously acquired languages and newly acquired ones as well as the role of typological similarity on language transfer. We will also situate the findings in the context of current discussions on the aspects of convergence and divergence between heritage speakers and L2 learners.