Heritage Welsh: a study of heritage language as the outcome of minority language acquisition and bilingualism

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the language used by 20 adult heritage Welsh speakers now living in London, i.e., bilinguals who shifted to English dominance in childhood, and whose Welsh proficiencies now show divergences from baseline norms as a result of incomplete acquisition and attrition. The grammars of these heavily imbalanced bilinguals are compared with baseline informants (20 Welsh-dominant controls) on a narrative elicitation task, in which the informants tell the story of a children's wordless picture book (Frog, Where Are You? by Mercer Mayer). The samples collected for this project (Appendix II.1) constitute the first corpus of heritage Welsh.