| This dissertation analyzes the language used by 20 adult heritage Welsh speakers now living in London, i.e., bilinguals who shifted to English dominance in childhood, and whose Welsh proficiencies now show divergences from baseline norms as a result of incomplete acquisition and attrition. The grammars of these heavily imbalanced bilinguals are compared with baseline informants (20 Welsh-dominant controls) on a narrative elicitation task, in which the informants tell the story of a children's wordless picture book ( Frog, Where Are You? by Mercer Mayer). The samples collected for this project (Appendix II.1) constitute the first corpus of heritage Welsh.;Particular attention is paid to indicators of fluency (mean length of utterance, frequency of embedded clauses, speech rate, vocabulary recall delay, retraces, and retraces with correction), simplification in the system of initial consonant mutation, reanalysis of tense and aspect in verb construction, any non-native agreement morphology, and the availability of a null subject in the heritage Welsh samples. The heritage Welsh samples are examined for evidence that divergence in the heritage grammar results more from a trend toward simplification and access to Universal Grammar than influence from the speaker's dominant language, English.;Part I investigates topics which are pertinent to the study of heritage language---its definition and connection to the Critical Period Hypothesis, the distinction between incomplete language acquisition and attrition, and theories of bilingual language systems. Part II details the analysis of the heritage Welsh samples in particular. The concluding remarks broaden the focus to the minority status of the baseline language in Wales, presenting the inevitability of heritage speakers there as well if childhood exposure to Welsh does not reach the critical level necessary for full native proficiency and if the language is not maintained in adulthood. This project introduces the terms "heritage Welsh" and "heritage speaker" into Welsh linguistics, and presents a framework with which to discuss this previously neglected category of bilinguals. |
