Workshop at SLE 2026: Stability in the Grammar of Germanic Heritage and Minority Languages
Short Title: SLE 2026

Date: 26-Aug-2026 - 29-Aug-2026
Location: Osnabrück, Germany
Contact: Patrick Mächler
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: https://linguistlist.org/issues/36/2149/

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Morphology; Phonology; Syntax; Typology
Subject Language(s): Danish (dan)
German (deu)
Icelandic (isl)
Norwegian (nor)
Swedish (swe)
Language Family(ies): Germanic

Submission Deadline: 01-Oct-2025

Description of the Topic and Research Questions:

Previous research in (Germanic) heritage and minority languages has mainly focused on various aspects of language change and the simplification, convergence, or loss of grammatical features, often identifying language attrition and the incomplete acquisition of grammar as the driving forces behind these developments (see Benmamoun et al. 2013, Montrul 2008 and, for instance, the case studies by Kolmer 2010, Larsson/Johannessen 2015, Lohndal/Westergaard 2016, Mächler/Hasse 2023, Montrul et al. 2015, and Moser 2025). Less attention, however, has been given to the stability of grammatical features, i.e., to features which do not change despite intensive language contact with surrounding languages (a notable exception, with a Pan-Germanic focus, being Westergaard/Kupisch 2020, and Poletto/Tomaselli 2021 with a case study on Cimbrian grammar). This is surprising, given that features resistant to far-reaching restructuring processes (or loss) even under high-contact settings unravel the “basic, perhaps universal, core structural properties of their languages” (Benmamoun et al. 2013: 148), similar to the order in which features are acquired in L1 acquisition and lost in language impairments, respectively.

In our workshop, we will focus on stable grammatical features in Germanic heritage and minority languages to determine whether these features are the same (or very similar) across all these languages or not. Germanic languages are the ideal testing ground to this end, as they are closely typologically and genealogically related and are, above all, one of the best-documented language families worldwide. Thanks to extensive field work in recent decades, this also holds true for Germanic heritage and minority languages. In our workshop, we aim at bringing together researchers from different linguistic disciplines with an interest in theoretically grounded approaches to grammar based on solid empirical evidence.

Due to a long tradition of emigration from Germanic-speaking areas, sometimes dating back to the Middle Ages, Germanic languages reached many parts of the world, giving rise to a plethora of different language-contact scenarios in which a Germanic language is (or was until recently) spoken as a heritage or minority language. In our workshop we do not differentiate between research in heritage languages and research in minority languages such as linguistic islands (Sprachinseln). We are interested in all languages spoken by minority communities surrounded by one or several majority language(s). This includes not only (rather recent) migrant communities such as German, Swedish, and Norwegian in North America (e.g. Larsson/Kinn 2025, Larsson et al. 2015, and Yager et al. 2015) or Low German and Danish in South America (e.g. Kaufmann 2025, Heegård Petersen et al. 2018). It also comprises minority languages or linguistic islands which were founded before the 18th century, such as those attested in Eurasia (e.g. Bidese/Tomaselli 2018, Dal Negro 2004, Moser/Gasner in press, Rabanus 2015, Riehl 2018, Rosenberg 2016, Rosenkvist 2018) and the Americas (e.g. Louden 2016, Hasse/Seiler 2024) as well. What both heritage language communities and minority languages have in common, is the widespread bi-/multilingualism of their speakers. Therefore, these varieties provide insight into typological stability and drift in various settings: These settings differ, for instance, in terms of the intensity and duration of language contact, the number of languages involved, the number of speakers, the age and type of acquisition (L1, L2) of the heritage/minority language and the majority language(s), and the typological (dis-)similarity of the languages.

The broad empirical base gained through decades of intensive field work in Germanic heritage and minority languages enables us to (1) take our starting point in analyses that are empirically well-informed, and to (2) compare varieties spoken in very different contact scenarios. Findings from research on heritage Germanic in Europe and North America (summarised by Westergaard/Kupisch 2020) prove that this kind of approach is necessary to arrive at sound conclusions: In second-generation Swedish and German spoken in Romance-language countries in Europe as well as in the US, V2 word order in declarative sentences seems to be highly intact and robust. Also in heritage Norwegian in the US, V2 violations have turned out to be surprisingly rare, given the intensity of contact with English. One might jump to the conclusion that there is something innately stable about V2 declaratives. However, as Westergaard/Lohndal (2019) have shown, the results from moribund North American Norwegian might be simply due to the fact that the speakers produce a low number of V2 contexts compared to Germanic languages with V2, where non-subject-initial sentences account for 30–40% of all declaratives. This difference is probably the result from pragmatic transfer from English, a language with less than 10% non-subject-initial declaratives. That the preliminary conclusion about V2 robustness does not hold up to scrutiny is also shown by data from German linguistic islands in Northern Italy, where V2 in declaratives is highly variable and more than one constituent is allowed before the finite verb (see e.g. Bidese et al. 2020).

As many heritage/minority language speakers are fluent in both their heritage/minority language and their surrounding (dominant) language(s), questions arise as to how we can account for the multilingualism of these speakers when modelling their grammar. One approach considering both actual language use and the multilinguistic reality of the speakers/communities is Diasystematic Construction Grammar, which tries to discern the contexts of language-specific constructions and contexts unspecified for language (see Höder 2014, 2018, Boas/Höder 2021). Another approach is the incomplete acquisition hypothesis (see Montrul 2002, Polinsky 2006) and the alternative model inspired by the incomplete acquisition hypothesis (Putnam/Sánchez 2013). The latter suggests that it is not the dominance of L2 input influencing the formation of heritage grammars, but different levels of activation inside the grammar.

Questions relevant to our workshop include, but are not limited to, the following ones:
- Do we find different degrees of stability in different components of grammar, e.g. is morphosyntax more stable than morphology?
- Are there components in heritage/minority-language grammars that have proven to be stable despite being absent or organised radically different in the surrounding (dominant) majority language?
- Do structural properties of the different Germanic languages (e.g. North vs. West Germanic) influence the stability or instability of a certain grammatical feature?
- Do structural properties of the different Germanic languages (e.g. North vs. West Germanic) influence the emergence of new features such as progressive aspect (or even new grammatical categories)?
- Does the degree of relatedness of the languages in contact have an impact on the stability of grammatical features?
- How can we appropriately model the grammar of these bi-/multilingual speakers, e.g. with the help of (Diasystematic) Construction Grammar or in generative approaches?
- Do we find extralinguistic factors influencing the stability of heritage/minority languages such as different settings of language acquisition or the existence of closely related varieties spoken somewhere else as majority language?

Please send your abstract (maximum 300 words, excluding references) in PDF format by 1 October 2025 to
[email protected]
[email protected]

References:
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Bidese, Ermenegildo; Tomaselli, Alessandra (2018): Developing pro-drop: The case of Cimbrian. In Federica Cognola, Jan Casalicchio (Eds.): Null Subjects in Generative Grammar: A Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford Academic, pp. 52–69.
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