Heritage Languages Are Not Weak! How Bilinguals Benefit from Language Diversity

Bilingual children’s first two languages are often characterized as majority languages (ML) and heritage (HL) languages, since they can develop in a different pace: the HL becomes the “weak” language with increasing age, especially when time outside the family increases. Our study compares longitudinal data of seven French-German/Italian children (age range 1;4–5;4) who acquire French as an HL or ML with the respective groups of monolingual peers. Language competence was assessed via MLU. The main results are: Surprisingly, HL French develops similarly to ML French and monolingual French. By contrast, German and Italian as HLs develop less target-like than their monolingual peers and as ML languages. We explain these results on the basis of language diversity and variety of contacts.