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Linguistic Proficiency: A Quantitative Approach to Immigrant and Heritage Speakers of Danish

  • Jan Heegård Petersen

    Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen, Jacob Thøgersen and Karoline Kühl are affiliated with the Department of Nordic Languages and Lingustics at the University of Copenhagen. All authors have published research on spoken language, and Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen and Karoline Kühl have for the past four years done research in Danish as an immigrant and heritage language.

     EMAIL logo     , Gert Foget Hansen

    Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen, Jacob Thøgersen and Karoline Kühl are affiliated with the Department of Nordic Languages and Lingustics at the University of Copenhagen. All authors have published research on spoken language, and Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen and Karoline Kühl have for the past four years done research in Danish as an immigrant and heritage language.

         , Jacob Thøgersen

    Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen, Jacob Thøgersen and Karoline Kühl are affiliated with the Department of Nordic Languages and Lingustics at the University of Copenhagen. All authors have published research on spoken language, and Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen and Karoline Kühl have for the past four years done research in Danish as an immigrant and heritage language.

         and Karoline Kühl

    Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen, Jacob Thøgersen and Karoline Kühl are affiliated with the Department of Nordic Languages and Lingustics at the University of Copenhagen. All authors have published research on spoken language, and Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen and Karoline Kühl have for the past four years done research in Danish as an immigrant and heritage language.
Published/Copyright: December 18, 2018
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory
From the journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory Volume 17 Issue 2

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based quantitative study on linguistic proficiency of approx. 300 immigrant and heritage speakers of Danish in North America and Argentina, aiming at the question whether linguistic proficiency is connected to ‘immigrant generation’ (i.e. the difference between speakers who migrated as adults with a fully acquired language competence and foreign-born heritage speakers) or the sociocultural setting, or both. The large data base at hand provides a rare opportunity to compare developments within the same minority language in different places, representing different sociocultural settings for the immigrant or heritage speakers and, accordingly, different language ecologies. The study relies on the Corpus of American Danish (1.6 million tokens, including both words and non-word utterances). Based on this data set, the paper explores the distribution of 13 linguistic and non-linguistic variables representing linguistic proficiency (i.e. Danish words, L2 words, word-internal codeswitching, type-token ratio, empty and filled pauses, self-interruption, lengthening, speech rate, word length, runlength and the ratio of main and subclauses) by applying Factor Analysis as a statistical tool. On an empirically solid basis, the paper concludes that (a) the sociolinguistic setting is the crucial factor in the development of linguistic proficiency and (b) linguistic proficiency is a non-universal cognitive phenomenon.

Keywords: language attrition; heritage language; factor analysis; fluency; speech rate

About the authors

Jan Heegård Petersen

Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen, Jacob Thøgersen and Karoline Kühl are affiliated with the Department of Nordic Languages and Lingustics at the University of Copenhagen. All authors have published research on spoken language, and Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen and Karoline Kühl have for the past four years done research in Danish as an immigrant and heritage language.

Gert Foget Hansen

Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen, Jacob Thøgersen and Karoline Kühl are affiliated with the Department of Nordic Languages and Lingustics at the University of Copenhagen. All authors have published research on spoken language, and Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen and Karoline Kühl have for the past four years done research in Danish as an immigrant and heritage language.

Jacob Thøgersen

Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen, Jacob Thøgersen and Karoline Kühl are affiliated with the Department of Nordic Languages and Lingustics at the University of Copenhagen. All authors have published research on spoken language, and Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen and Karoline Kühl have for the past four years done research in Danish as an immigrant and heritage language.

Karoline Kühl

Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen, Jacob Thøgersen and Karoline Kühl are affiliated with the Department of Nordic Languages and Lingustics at the University of Copenhagen. All authors have published research on spoken language, and Jan Heegård Petersen, Gert Foget Hansen and Karoline Kühl have for the past four years done research in Danish as an immigrant and heritage language.

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Published Online: 2018-12-18
Published in Print: 2021-10-26

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Attractors of variation in Hungarian inflectional morphology
  3. A diachronic perspective on near-synonymy: The concept of sweet-smelling in American English
  4. From extra- to intratextual characteristics: Charting the space of variation in Czech through MDA
  5. An information-theoretic view on language complexity and register variation: Compressing naturalistic corpus data
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  7. The lexical context in a style analysis: A word embeddings approach
  8. Linguistic Proficiency: A Quantitative Approach to Immigrant and Heritage Speakers of Danish
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https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2017-0088
Keywords for this article
language attrition; heritage language; factor analysis; fluency; speech rate

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Attractors of variation in Hungarian inflectional morphology
  3. A diachronic perspective on near-synonymy: The concept of sweet-smelling in American English
  4. From extra- to intratextual characteristics: Charting the space of variation in Czech through MDA
  5. An information-theoretic view on language complexity and register variation: Compressing naturalistic corpus data
  6. A corpus-based study of the Chinese synonymous approximatives shangxia, qianhou and zuoyou
  7. The lexical context in a style analysis: A word embeddings approach
  8. Linguistic Proficiency: A Quantitative Approach to Immigrant and Heritage Speakers of Danish
  9. DISCOver: DIStributional approach based on syntactic dependencies for discovering COnstructions
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