“Until I take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself”: The Language Attitudes of Princeton’s Heritage Language Learners

Abstract

Through varying literature, methodology, and forms of analysis, the objective of this thesis is to document and give a voice to the complex and expansive relationships that heritage speakers have with their languages. Offering a sociological perspective on heritage language learning, this research centers on two studies, one quantitative (a survey), and one qualitative (ethnographic interviews), to illustrate the mosaic of language attitudes, ideologies, motivations, and investments of Princeton University’s heritage language speakers. My three core hypotheses revolve around language attitudes of heritage speakers and how they are correlated with language ideologies and attitudes that speakers were exposed to during their upbringing. Furthermore, I tested the validity of Agnes He’s (2012) hypotheses of language socialization. Lastly, I hypothesize that certain types of heritage speakers share characteristics in their identification, investment, and self-reported fluency in their heritage language. The core contribution of this thesis is the interview results of the second study. The quantitative survey study sets the groundwork for the qualitative interview study by analyzing trends that are further explored within the individual interviews. The core findings of the interview suggest that speakers’ language identification and investment in their heritage language generally correlated with their language attitudes. In addition, contradictory language socialization within key environments during a speaker’s upbringing correlated with mixed language attitudes in a speaker.