This chapter responds to the questions raised in Chapter 1. It reiterates the need for variationist sociolinguistic analysis of heritage languages to increase our understanding of linguistic structures, variation, and change in multilingual contexts. Each variable is considered through the lens of the profiles corresponding to different sources of change. This allows us to consider whether certain profiles are more common for certain types of variables and of language (types), and whether covariation is more prevalent among any subset of variables. We reiterate how these analyses, based on spontaneous speech in an ecologically valid environment, give a picture of heritage language speakers that contrasts with what we have learned from experimental/psycholinguistic studies, highlighting their stability and consistency with homeland varieties in most cases. Suggestions are made for how this approach can be extended to other under-documented, endangered, and smaller languages, along with discussion of benefits of the HLVC methodology to community members, educators and students, and the field of linguistics. The chapter concludes by reporting on students’ positive responses to engagement with the project.

Throughout history, Slavic spread from a fairly restricted area somewhere around Ukraine, Belorussia, and Eastern Poland out to large parts of Europe, and Russian as the most widespread Slavic language today spans almost half of the Northern hemisphere. Historic and present migrations of Slavic speakers and the concomitant geographical expansion of their cultural and political dominions could not fail to afford rich opportunities for language contacts of all kinds, running the gamut from mild to intense forms of language contact, from lexical borrowing, language shift, and group bilingualism to the creation of new, contact-induced languages. Language contacts have been part of the history of Slavic from its very outset, and there is virtually no historical period for which no significant contacts can be identified. One of the tasks of this chapter is to give an idea of the deep historical layering of Slavic language contacts from Proto Slavic up to the present age.

Brazilian Veneto (BV), an understudied variety of Veneto spoken in several areas of Brazil, has only one rhotic phoneme, which has been described as alternating between [r] and [ɾ] (e.g., Frosi & Mioranza, 1983). I investigate whether rhotic variation in BV is conditioned by prosodic factors (i.e., position in the syllable, position in the word, and stress) through an analysis of rhotic duration based on data from a naming task. I hypothesize that stronger prosodic positions yield longer rhotics (i.e., trills). The results overall confirm this hypothesis, with longer rhotics favored in stressed, word-initial singleton onsets. Participants’ productions are also analyzed qualitatively, revealing that rhotic variation involves not only the production of trills and taps, but also approximants and fricatives. Potential effects of contact with Portuguese on BV rhotic variation are discussed.

Humboldt also influenced a second generation of American linguists: Francis Lieber, who still had been a personal protégé of Humboldt’s and who studied Black English of South Carolina, English creoles of the Caribbean, and Chinook Jargon together with language acquisition; Albert S. Gatschet as a former student of the Humboldtian J. C. Eduard Buschmann in Berlin and as the only professional linguist at J. W. Powell’s Bureau of American Ethnology, studying diverse American languages; and Daniel G. Brinton, who examined Humboldt intensively, translated an essay of his on the verb in American languages into English, but misinterpreted Humboldt in social-evolutionist terms. Despite individual achievements, the second generation of American Humboldtians ultimately remained too disjointed to have much of a long-term impact, and Brinton appeared a renegade with his continued insistence on social Darwinism. When Brinton passed away, Humboldtian ideas evidently had little of a chance for survival in the United States.

Chapter 6 examines the diachronic aspect of Chinese politeness. Changes are identified in all three areas selected for analysis: the marriage ritual, end-of-dinner food offering, and compliment responses. In the first, modern Chinese marriage is found to show more gender equality between the bride and groom. In food offering, dinner hosts offer food to guests much less (if at all) than what they were found to do fourteen years earlier. In complement responses, Chinese are found to accept complements overwhelmingly as opposed to reject them overwhelmingly seventeen years earlier. MCP and B&L-E, however, can account for these changes coherently: they are diachronic variations on the same “theme,” the theme that is captured at higher level of generalization by the two models of politeness.

The goal of his chapter is twofold: firstly, to provide a general review of the literature on language contact and orthography, with a special focus on how situations of language contact can bring about alternation or conflict among various spelling traditions, and spearhead the emergence of new orthographic standards; and secondly, to explore how a historical sociolinguistic approach can contribute to the study of historical orthographies in language contact situations. Specifically, the chapter tests the possibilities of an ecological framework to the study of historical orthographies in contact settings, by considering spelling norms as a reflection of multiple, simultaneous linguistic and cultural environmental forces. This framework is illustrated in the second half of the chapter by means of a case study of the emergence of orthographic norms in a high-contact environment, namely the development of spelling protocols in colonial Nahuatl and the application of these protocols to Spanish loanwords containing sibilants. This case study exemplifies the interface between linguistic, social and cultural effects typical of language contact environments, and illustrates the affordances of an ecological approach to the study of historical orthographies and orthographic normativization in other contact settings.

We have seen that in normal cases children create their mental grammar from input that has been called “poor,” but that language fails to emerge when input is totally absent. Chapter 12 shows that when the input is of “extra-poor” quality, children nevertheless manage to arrive at mental grammars of apparently sufficient complexity. The relevant situation can lead to the emergence of whole new languages. The key claim is that children, when exposed to a so-called pidgin (a relatively primitive system of communication created by adults who do not share a common language), transform such an impoverished language into a full-fledged language, which we call a creole. How can children do this? Nativists have argued that children can do this because they have an innate “manual” that dictates the construction of a mental grammar, no matter how impoverished the input. This leads to the creolization argument in support of the Innateness Hypothesis. This chapter also surveys various kinds of artificially constructed languages that are typically created by adults who either want to design a universal language or to provide groups of people in fictional stories with their own language.

Beginning with the connection between language and society and the history of social thought and linguistic theory, this chapter discusses the development of empirical work on variability in language use in social settings. It describes progress in sociolinguistics and how analysis of speech in relation to the social backgrounds of speakers in heterogeneous, stratified societies, e.g., their racial and ethnic affiliations, migration histories and power relations, relationships in multilingual settings, etc., rested on new methodologies and created new findings about linguistic diversity.

Guided by work on speech communities, sociolinguists found various patterns in the relation between language and society (including language change) by studying: ‘free variation’; language use in specific sociocultural settings (engendering ‘ethnography of communication’); language contact and pidgins/creoles; bi/multilingualism, language choice (engendering ‘sociology of language’) and code-switching; language use in diglossia (related to functional domains, social situation, interlocutor, subject matter, etc.).

Working with sociolinguistic variables, such as space, time, social class, ethnicity/race, sex/gender, and age, which constitute a complex object of multidimensional variability, the sociolinguist Labov found, e.g., that race/ethnicity and gender differences were more important than social class for language change in the USA.

Given these issues, the problem of identifying the linguistic system is complex and paramount.