The acquisition, maintenance, and attrition of morphological properties of heritage languages (HLs) has been a central research focus since the inception of the systematic study of these linguistic varieties. Both child and adult heritage language speakers (HSs) experience difficulty in producing target-like inflectional morphology, and in some instances, the errors in their production are similar to those found in the speech of L2 learners. This chapter offers a broad survey of developmental trends of derivational and inflectional morphology in the nominal (e.g., gender and case) and verbal (e.g., agreement, tense, aspect, mood) domains. Different morphological types (e.g., inflectional, agglutinative, fusion, isolating) are discussed, focusing on whether certain properties of heritage morphology are specific to each type and whether certain properties cut across all of them. Claims regarding the effects of maturational constraints and continued activation on the ultimate attainment of heritage morphology are reviewed. This chapter also considers the issue of age effects in connection with heritage morphology and concludes with a brief discussion of the implications that these findings have on linguistic theory as well as highlighting future directions for the study of heritage morphology.

The empirical focus of this chapter are heritage Germanic languages spoken in North America. Heritage languages are the first language of individuals who speak a language at home that is not the dominant language of the larger society (pace Rothman 2009). Unlike minority languages (see Louden, Chapter 34), speakers of heritage varieties of Germanic are not tied to a particular religious group. Additionally, the majority of these heritage speakers speak moribund vernaculars. Here we review the general properties of the phonology, morphology and morpho-syntax, syntax, and semantics and pragmatics of heritage German and Norwegian. We discuss the impact that these empirical findings have on theoretical analyses, include language attrition and the potential of incomplete mastery of elements of the heritage language.

The Germanic languages include some of the world’s most widely spoken and thoroughly researched languages. English has become a global language that serves as a lingua franca in many parts of the world and has an estimated 1.12 billon speakers (Simons and Fennig 2018). German, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, and Norwegian have also been studied and described extensively from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. In addition to the standard varieties of these languages, there are available descriptions of many nonstandard varieties as well as of regional and minority languages, such as Frisian and Low German. There are several possibilities to consider when putting together a handbook of a language family. One would be to have a chapter devoted to each language, as in König and Auwera (1993).