#heritage language

[romancelangs]

This Twitter thread really spoke to me. I wanted to share it with anyone who hasn’t seen it. 

[navegaremmim]

for all heritage speakers: do you pronounce dominant language words in a thick ass heritage language accent when speaking your heritage language

i cannot help but use a brazilian accent for any german/english word i use in portuguese - it's physically near impossible, taxing and almost revolting to try to use an english/american accent for english words, or pronounce german perfectly. i instantly adapt the pronunciation or it disrupts the flow

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 104: Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski

When we talk about language reclamation, we often think about oral traditions. But at this point, many Indigenous languages also have considerable written traditions, and engaging with writing as part of teaching these languages to children is important for all of the same reasons as we teach writing in majoritarian languages.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about multilingual literacy with Dr. Hanna-Máret Outakoski, who’s a professor of Sámi languages at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway. We talk about growing up with a mix of Northern Sámi, Finnish, Norwegian, and English, as well as how Hanna-Máret got into linguistics and shifted her interests from more formal to more community-based work, such as "language showers" and the role of play in language learning. We also talk about the long history of literature in Sámi, from joiks written down as early as the 1500s to how people are still joiking today (including on Eurovision), and how teaching kids writing can strengthen oral traditions.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the linguistics of kissing]! We talk about the technical phonetics terms for kissing (bilabial clicks...plus the classic ling student quadrilabial clicks joke) as well as how different cultures taxonomize types of kissing (the Roman osculum/basium/suavium distinction is still pretty useful!). We also talk about how toddlers acquire the "blow a kiss" gesture, how couples time their kisses around their sentences, and many ways of representing kissing in writing, such as xx, xoxo, and emoji.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. If you join before July 1st you'll get a sticker of a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox! There’s a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see how many items you can recognize!

We're also running a poll for current patreon supports to vote on the final sticker design! This sticker will go out to everyone who’s a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025.

We’re also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. Our coffee hasn’t cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Hanna-Máret Outakoski (university profile)

'Developing Literacy Research in Sápmi' by Hanna Outakoski

'Giellariššu: Indigenous language revitalisation in the city' by Hanna-Máret Outakoski and Øystein A. Vangsnes (language showers)

'An introduction to joik' by Juhán Niila Stålka

Wikipedia entry for 'Joik'

Sami voices / Sáme jiena (for more information on the archiving of joiks)

'Developing Literacy Research in Sápmi' by Hanna Outakoski

'Conceptualizing fireside dialogues as gulahallan' by Hanna-Máret Outakoski

'What is indigenous research methodology?' paper on Relational Accountability by Shawn Wilson

Northern Oral Language And Writing Through Play

Lingthusiasm episode 'Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Connecting with oral culture'

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[letsspeechtherapylogopedia]

Chen! No tos perdaís a presentazión d'o mío pai filologo, investigador y activista d'a nuestra luenga ereditaria! Fonz entalto!

💫Aragonese is a Romance language spoken in several dialects by about 25,000 people as of 2011, in the Pyrenees valleys of Aragon, Spain, primarily in the comarcas of Somontano de Barbastro, Jacetania, Alto Gállego, Sobrarbe, and Ribagorza/Ribagorça. It is the only modern language which survived from medieval Navarro-Aragonese in a form distinct from Spanish.

Post by Sonia-K.Marqués Kiderle, 18th March 2025

[sefaradweb]

Learning Ladino

Ladino, also referred to as Judeo-Spanish or Judezmo, serves as the linguistic heritage of Sephardic Jews, or Sepharadim, descending from the Iberian Peninsula, which encompasses present-day Spain and Portugal. Following their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Sepharadim dispersed throughout the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and beyond, predominantly finding refuge in the Ottoman Empire. It was within this diverse cultural milieu that Ladino emerged, blending Spanish and other Iberian languages with a robust infusion of Hebrew-Aramaic elements, while also incorporating linguistic influences from the surrounding Mediterranean regions such as Turkish, Greek, Italian, French, and Arabic. Embracing versatility, Ladino became the language of everyday life, spanning from domestic settings to public spaces like markets and synagogues, and encompassing various aspects of culture including humor, politics, and literature.

Learning Ladino - UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies

[rapha-reads]

Hey i saw you mentioned you speak Tamazight, what kind? Is it relatively difficult or easy to learn? I’m not gonna learn it tbh but i’m just curious! I’ve been reading some Tamazight (Tarifit) translated poetry and in some books they write it in Arabic script and in some in Latin script, do you read it in either of these or in Tifinagh or do you mostly speak it?

Hello! I'm so glad you asked! Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about my heritage language.

My father is from the Middle Atlas in Morocco, so the Tamazight we speak is mostly known as tamazight, but also sometimes tachelhit or shilha. It's written with the Tifinagh alphabet, but also the Latin or Arabic one, and I can read it in Latin and Arabic, and can decipher some Tifinagh letters.

I can't tell you if it's difficult or not. It's my second language, I've been able to speak it since little, but I'm actually not fluent in it. There is a school in France called the Inalco that teaches all kinds of African and Asian languages, and when I was a kid, we received at home several USamerican women who had learned it and could speak it even better than me, so I imagine that it's actually not that hard.

I mostly speak it, when I go back home, with the family or to do grocery shopping or things like that. I don't really speak it outside of Morocco, even when I meet people who do speak it, because Arabic is considered the main language of all Maghrebian (North-Africa: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania and Egypt) people, the common language.

Tamazight is a fascinating subject. The language and its people might be as old as 3,000 to 7,000 years old (old Proto-Berber and contemporary Proto-Berber), it's a branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages and can itself be divided in many branches, just as diverse as Romance languages. And it's also an important social, political and cultural theme, being the indigenous language and people of North Africa, and having its own movements of political and cultural reclamations - Tamazgha, fictitious entity and toponym corresponding to all the lands that belong originally to the Imazighen people and used as the name for the political movement; it represents the Amazigh nation, united and whole. Tamazight is one of the official languages of Morocco since 2011, which is why if you go to Morocco you'll see that all the signs on streets and buildings, all the ads and official papers, are written in Arabic, French, and Tamazight.

The discussion of postcolonialism in Morocco and Algeria in particular are very tied to the recognition of the Tamazight language and people as the original colonised people of North Africa long before Europe decided to step foot on the continent. But that's another story, which is a favourite of my father but I'm not too knowledgeable about.

[sprachgefuehle]

One of the weirder parts of learning your heritage language later in life is somehow ending up with a dialect that's completely different to the way your family speaks

[lilhawkeye3]

A bit over a year ago, I posted a survey about languages and heritage speakers that some of you took. Just wanted to see, is anyone interested in a write up of the results?