My goal these days is to offer (and teach) sociolinguistic tools and theory to people with expertise in a wider range of languages. This exchange demonstrably improves both understanding of sociolinguistic patterns and of the behavior of minoritized languages. The vehicle for this exchange is the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto Project, a series of studies of intergenerational comparisons of speakers in language diaspora in Toronto. Two trends are emerging in the project:
I will describe the methods of this large-sale collaboration and showcase results of our investigations of Cantonese (one of 10 languages we explore in the HLVC project). Speakers in Hong Kong and two adult generations of Toronto speakers will be compared. Generation is defined with reference to the family’s migration trajectory. This adds to our knowledge of heritage language behavior in that much heritage language research has considered languages that are more closely related to English, meaning that “simplification” and “change toward English”, two expected outcomes in heritage languages, are hard to separate. Cantonese offers patterns of variation where “simpler” or “innovative” variants are not necessarily more English-like.
The twin foci will be on intergenerational comparisons of linguistic variables (Ø-subjects, tone merger, vowel splits and merger, classifier semantics (see cited studies cited) and patterns of covariation across these variable patterns. In general, greater linguistic stability is illustrated by the variationist approach than experimental methods.