It has been widely recognized that how languages behave, particularly under conditions of contact with other languages, depends on their context. Using the Ethnolinguistic Vitality framework, this chapter describes the demographics, linguistic attitudes and institutional supports for heritage languages, defining the concepts and illustrating them with examples from Toronto, the context in which the HLVC project is conducted. Demographic information includes population sizes, language shift rates, and history of settlement in Toronto. Status information includes both reflections on the status of heritage languages, as a whole, in Canada and labels attributed to the specific varieties. The institutional support section reports on the number of language classes available for each language. The chapter also includes discussion of language policy, particularly for education, and the demographics of the university where the research is centered, enabling other researchers to best consider what aspects of the project might need adjusting for adaptation in other contexts.

This chapter reports on trends of continuity and divergence within the heritage generations examined and between heritage and homeland varieties. It discusses the degrees of similarities between the varieties in terms of (a) rates of use of innovative forms and (b) conditioning factors in the constraint hierarchy. The three variables examined are voice onset time (VOT, n=8,909), case-marking on nouns and pronouns (CASE, n=9,661), and variable presence of subject pronouns (PRODROP, n=9,190), each in three or more languages. The similarity in rates and conditioning effects across generations for (PRODROP), examined in seven languages, particularly contrasts with findings for this variable in experimental paradigms. Similarly, findings of little simplification or overgeneralization of the case system in three languages stands in contrast to the outcomes of several previous studies. (VOT) shows a drift toward (but not arriving at) English-like values for only some of the languages examined. For each variable, models are presented and interpreted; a table then details which aspects of the analysis contribute to the interpretation of stability and of each type of variation.

The variables examined in Chapters 5 and 6 show little evidence of being used for identity work. That is, they do not show (consistent) effects of ethnic orientation measures or speaker sex. This chapter explicitly contrasts variables that reflect indexicality (correlation to social factors) in homeland varieties to non-indexical variables. We begin by considering three indexical variables in Italian: (VOT) in unstressed-syllable contexts, (APOCOPE), and (R), illustrating the extent to which indexicality is maintained in the heritage variety. We find increasing use of the more standard variant only in (VOT). Furthermore, we find that younger speakers (both in homeland and heritage) favour the non-standard variant. We then compare the variable (R), the contrast between trill (or tap) and approximant variants, in Italian and Tagalog, where it has indexical value in the homeland varieties, to Russian and Ukrainian, where it does not. Finally, we consider two additional indexical variables: Cantonese denasalization and Korean VOT. We conclude by contrasting the behavior of homeland-indexicals in heritage varieties. The presence of indexical value in homeland varieties does not consistently influence outcomes in the heritage varieties.

This chapter draws cross-linguistic comparisons among the patterns reported in Chapter 5 for three linguistic variables that occur in at least three languages in the project: (VOT), (CASE), and (PRODROP). Conditioning factors, both linguistic and social, are discussed. Collapsing across rate and constraint hierarchy for each variable, we note any indication of change in either. Half the context we examine exhibit stability. Of the eight that indicate difference, half of these can be attributed to English (including both convergence and divergence). With few differences between homeland and heritage speakers to work with, we find few generalizations about what parts of the language, or which languages, change. We do see more change in one morphosyntactic variable, (CASE), than in the phonetic variable (VOT), but less in the other morphosyntactic variable (PRODROP).

In mainland China, Reform and Opening up in the last few decades has opened a floodgate of foreign infusion. Foreign businesses such as KFC, Starbucks, Walmart, McDonalds, and Carrefour are seen everywhere. There have also been many loanwords. Some of the loanwords have become so much a part of the Chinese lexicon that their foreign origin may not even be clear to all. Apart from the social and cultural implications, the influx of things foreign presents quite a challenge to Chinese with its non-phonetic script. Various accommodation strategies have been used to represent foreign words with Chinese characters, including meaning translation, phonetic transliteration, or a combination of both, resulting in varying degrees of semantic and phonetic approximation. Incidentally, the fact that the Rebus (phonetic loan) Principle is extensively used for phonetic transliterations, whereby Chinese characters are used only for their sounds without regard to their meanings, gives the lie to the persistent ideographic myth concerning Chinese characters.

This study investigates the effect of changes in voice onset time (VOT) on heritage speakers’ perception of Korean intervocalic stops (i.e., /p, t, k/), and compares their results to those of Korean monolinguals and second language (L2) learners of Korean who are L1 speakers of American English or Mandarin Chinese. A discrimination task using five synthetic /C1V1C2V2/ stimuli that differed in VOT of C2 was created to test inter-group differences. While the L2 learners display categorical awareness of VOT variation, Korean and heritage speakers perceive the two consonants to be the same for most stimuli regardless of VOT values. This unexpected lack of attention to VOT variation among heritage speakers suggests that they may switch their language mode to Korean and activate Korean phonology in discriminating non-phonemic VOT differences. However, their responses are not uniform or robust, with some showing a pattern similar to that of L2 learners, revealing strong individual differences among heritage speakers.

This is a chapter in which Chinese politeness is compared with politeness in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. With their respective morphological systems of honorification, Japanese and Korean languages are structurally different from Chinese, an isolating language that has hardly any inflectional morphology. These linguistic differences, however, do not prevent the three linguacultures to demonstrate a remarkable degree of similarity in terms of politeness at a deeper level of analysis. The three linguacultures, for instance, seem to be similarly hierarchical in social structure, although they differ in the relative weight a particular factor on a hierarchy has in a given context. The architectural features of language, Chen argues, are not as determinant in politeness as scholars have believed. A culture value such as self-denigration, which often presents itself in terms of politeness, is expressed regardless of how the language is structured linguistically. Vietnamese, on the other hand, is typologically close to Chinese, its culture shares much with Chinese culture, but it was under the French rule for several decades (1985-1954). And yet, B&L-E is shown to be capable of capturing the similarities and differences between it and Chinese in terms of politeness.

Chapter 29 examines the recurring attributes in current definitions of HL learners. These include early and significant exposure to the HL, proficiency in the HL, bilingualism to some degree, dominance in a language other than the HL, and an ethnic/cultural connection to the HL. From sociolinguistic journey, Korean heritage language (KHL) learners often end up with high receptive language skill, low to moderate accuracy in their speaking, and zero metalinguistic knowledge, and consequently enroll in Korean language in college to (re)learn their HL language. This poses pedagogical challenges, as KHL learners are linguistically distinguished from L2 learners due to their language experience. This chapter explores issues in language acquisition, language attrition, and language processing of Korean-English bilingual children and how such experience sheds light in understanding the pedagogical issues related to the language processing of young adult KHL learners.

Chapter 19 investigates the conceptual mappings of conventional figurative expressions, specifically idioms and collocations containing the body-part term nwun “eye(s)” in Korean. Working within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), the study explores the types of conceptual shift that give rise to extended meanings and discusses how extension mechanisms draw on shared features between source and target domains. Common Korean expressions involving the eyes involve vision, persons, time, events/processes, perception (e.g., attention, attraction, interest, judgment), mind activities (e.g., thinking, knowing, understanding), and emotions (e.g., anger, avarice, surprise). These figurative expressions are motivated by the basic experiences of eye behavior, eye appearance, and vision, as well as by our interactions with people and environments. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the influence of embodiment in language in general and in Korean in particular.

Since the early development of modern syntactic theory, empirical data from three major East Asian languages, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, have often challenged empirical generalizations and theoretical proposals based on data from the better-studied Indo-European languages, especially English. Experimental syntax also began with studies of phenomena in English and other major Indo-European languages. More recently, however, a growing number of experimental syntactic studies have focused on East Asian languages, especially in the past decade. This chapter highlights three phenomena explored in the rapidly growing body of experimental syntactic research with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean: (i) split intransitivity, (ii) quantifier scope, and (iii) wh-in-situ. The goal of the chapter is to show that, while the literature on East Asian experimental syntax is still at an early stage, it has already accumulated interesting experimental data on syntactic phenomena with important theoretical implications.

This chapter outlines an emergentist approach to understanding why human languages have the particular properties that they do and how those properties are acquired by children. Drawing on a variety of examples, it illustrates the role of two factors in shaping language and its acquisition: limitations on the resources available for processing utterances in real time, and the role of input in facilitating the acquisition of particular words and patterns. Both these factors fit well with a key claim of linguistic emergentism, which is that the human language faculty is shaped by forces – cognition, perception, memory, computation, and experience – that are not themselves linguistic in character. The emergentist approach thus provides an alternative to theories that attribute the unique human ability to learn and use language to an inborn Universal Grammar. The second line of inquiry pursued investigates the emergence of particular features of Korean, especially reflexive pronouns and relative clauses, in child and adult heritage learners. The developmental profile associated with these phenomena fits well with the emergentist approach to language, and helps confirm that heritage languages are learned in essentially the same way as languages that are acquired in a monolingual setting.

In this chapter, the framework proposed in Chapter 2 is applied to the history of Korean. The discourse markers studied are icey, makilay, maliya, and tul. The findings presented are in support of the hypothesis proposed in Section 1.5, according to which discourse markers are the joint product of two separate mechanisms, with each of the mechanisms accounting for specific properties of discourse markers.

North Korea and posthuman superheroes rarely share discursive space. One reason: North Korea - the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) - is often imagined as a pre-posthuman Cold War relic. Another reason: it may seem wrong, even blasphemous, to discuss posthumanism and superheroes vis-à-vis a regime that systematically violates human rights. While mindful of such realities, I believe posthumanism can refresh overly rehearsed scripts surrounding the DPRK. The vocabulary of posthumanism (e.g. Donna Haraway’s “cyborg”) and posthuman characters from science fiction (e.g. the instantly legible superhero Spider-Man as well as the less legible Korean American Spider Lim in Richard Powers’s novel Plowing the Dark) can provide new approaches to North Korea’s “otherness” and “post”-DPRK refugees. Moreover, superheroic icons and posthumanism can address a new American art of DPRK origin such as the artwork of Song Byeok and Sun Mu. Finally, posthumanism and superheroes must narrate Korea’s future beyond trauma, war, and division. It is time for us to uproot, fruitfully, kimilsungia and kimjongilia from their rotting namesakes. Let them grow wild in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). How might these organisms mutate? Dear Korean and Korean American artists and writers: let us now respond.