Acting in and through the Heritage Language: Collaborative Strategies for Research, Empowerment, and Reconnecting with the Past

Heritage languages can be not only objects and spaces of symbolic and physical violence but also powerful tools of agency, resilience, and autonomous intellectual expression and creativity. They carry a still underestimated and underexplored potential for the decolonization of both the academy and speakers' lives. In this essay I discuss the possible impacts of collaborative activities on empowerment and positive historical identities in the context of language continuity and revitalization as well as on the individual and collective capacity of community members to act with regard to their linguistic and cultural heritage.