If your community organization is interested in hearing about our work, please contact one of the investigators.
HLVC News
HLVC book coming soon | |
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Sneak preview of the Abstract and Table of Contents for Heritage Languages: Extending Variationist Approaches [to be published May 2024 by Cambridge University Press] |
Welcome, Hilary, our new Lab Manager!
Our newest team member is Project Manager Hilary Walton. She will be organizing, managing, helping and keeping things running smoothly for the HLVC Project. Read a bit more about her, also here. |  |
Heritage Language Teaching Opportunity
An alum of our Department, Marina Sherina-Lieber [marina dot lieber at gmail dot com] writes: if you know any graduate students in the department who would be interested in teaching their language as a heritage language to kids (including Russian), starting in the fall (2024), it would be great if you could refer them to me. Especially those interested in heritage languages, bilingualism, language acquisition.
ftp://nagynaom@ngn.artsci.utoronto.ca:28/HLVC/images/photoid/Hilary.jpg
NWAV 2023
The HLVC Project has a custom-designed conference coming up: NWAV 51 at Queens College with the theme: Variation in the World’s Languages! HLVC members will be giving 6 talks:
Dissertation defended
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Pocholo Umbal successfully defended his dissertation, A comparative variationist analysis of phonetic variation and change in Toronto Heritage Tagalog, on 28 August 2023. Watch for it to appear soon in T-space].Congratulations, Pocholo, on producing the 2nd dissertation in the HLVC project!!
Heritage languages and your well-being
Noah Philipp-Muller completed his MA Thesis at U Windsor (Spring 2023), with a focus on heritage languages. The research supported the hypothesis that proficiency in one’s heritage language (HL) helps facilitate social and cultural behaviours, which in turn has a direct bearing on mental health and well-being. It also shows that "when one is proficient in their HL, there is an increased sense of connectedness with one’s linguistic and cultural community, and an increased sense of authenticity and expressivity afforded by the HL." Contact the author if you'd like to know more.Understanding emotions in intercultural medical settings
Shiyang Sun gave a talk at the CVC conference, "Understanding emotions in intercultural medical settings: A quantitative analysis of adjective intensifiers in Mandarin serious illness conversation in North America." She aced it and got great feedback. (June 2023)
 Shiyang thinks about her work |
 Shiyang explains her dependent variable |
 Shiyang finishes up |
 Julien responds enthusiastically |
Faetar gets force-aligned!
A dedicated team of Jackman Scholars in Residence (SiRs), under the guidance of Sean Robertson and Ewan Dunbar, organized piles and piles of old and dilapidated transcripts and recordings of Faetar and produce a modern technological feat - force-alignment of transcripts to their corresponding audio files. They presented this work at the SiRs Research Forum (May 2023). Here's a selection of photos:
 Paula introduces Faeto to the crowd |
 Alba locates Faeto |
 Aman explains the method |
 Force-aligned Faetar! |
Technical detail: Miracle accomplished with the help of an ASR system trained using Kaldi (Povey et al., 2011)
The SiRs team: Paula Arkhangorodsky, Robin Huo, Alba Jorquera Jimenez de Aberasturi, Michael Ong, Aman Sakhardande
Chinese languages at the museum!
The newest exhibit at the Canadian Language Museum is all about Chinese languages in Canada. HLVC people were involved. Check it out!
Holman wins St. Kate Writing Prize
Holman Tse, Assistant Professor at St. Catherine University, St. Paul, MN, has won the Eleanor McCahill Denny Prize for Distinction in Writing in the Scholarly Category
in 2023 for his paper, “What Can Cantonese heritage speakers tell us about age of acquisition, linguistic dominance, and sociophonetic variation?” [In Bayley, Robert; Preston, Dennis and Xiaoshi Li (eds). Variation in Second and Heritage Languages: Crosslinguistic Perspectives, pp. 97-126. John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/silv.28.05tse]This Prize recognizes the highest quality of writing among St. Catherine University’s faculty and staff. Congratulations, Holman!
A satisfied workstudy student reports in
 | "My experience with HLVC this summer was fun and meaningful! Honestly, in the beginning, I was more like a syntax person than a phonetics one, because I thought working on sounds that I could not understand might be as boring as working on random noise. However, after spending the whole summer with Portuguese and Tagalog which I was totally unfamiliar with, I changed my mind. I realized that the phonemes themselves can be interesting, regardless of the content and meaning of the words. This gave me a lot more confidence and provided me with more options for my future studies. I enjoyed my work very much and I hope to keep working on more interesting languages for HLVC in the upcoming Fall term." |
Dim sum lesson
Bonita taught us all how to serve, eat and enjoy dim sum at Rosewood.
Then we toured Kensington Market and enjoyed cheese at the Cheese Boutique. Bulgarian kashkaval was as close to a Ukrainian cheese as they could offer. (August 2022)
Lab Lunch
Researchers in the HLVC had a lively discussion with Professor Jim Stanford, a sociolinguist at Dartmouth College.
Jim, Justin, Julia, Olha, Naomi & Bonita; Photo credit: Craig Diegel
Naomi quickly describes her research en français on a beautiful spring day à Paris (April 2022).
Final spring push for interviewing!!
The University has announced "Approved face-to-face (F2F) human participant research may resume, provided researchers follow the special masking, COVID-19 testing, and Protocol approvals and amendments guidelines." (March 2022)
Heritage language Zoom lecture by Dr. Maria Polinsky
Lecture by Maria Polinsky: March 9, 3pm Central Time [4pm in Toronto], 2022 Contact Naomi for the Zoom link!
FSAT Collab
HLVC collaborated with the Filipino Student Association of UofT (FSAT) to offer a mini-course about Heritage Tagalog -- where it came from, how it is spoken, and why. The first class was designed and taught on Oct. 29, 2021, by RAs Sophia Alcasabas, Jack Mahlmann, and Jann Aldrin Gamboa (involved in HLVC through the Jackman SiRs program in 2021 Summer). We were also excited to see Kathleen Zaragosa from UBC and ex-RA Ewen Lee there!
There was another collaboration of these groups on February 23, 2022, looking at sociolinguistic variation in Tagalog, including slang and Gay lingo!
Michael Iannozzi, a former Faetar RA, now working on his dissertation about variation in the Ciociaro dialect, took some time to tell people, via https://www.ctvnews.ca, about pandemic-related language change.
Paulina Łyskawa, who earned her BA (2014) and MA (2015) in our Department, successfully defended her PhD dissertation, Coordination without grammar-internal feature resolution, at the University of Maryland on Jan. 15, 2021. One of her committee members reports in.
Congrats Paulina!!
Pocholo Umbal won the LSA's Elizabeth Dayton Award, an award in honour of one of the early fieldworkers on Labov's Philadelphia Study! This award is "evidence of a distinguished level of scholastic achievement," and helped support Pocholo's excellent presentation at this year's Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
Annika Rossmanith, is a visiting MA student from Germany, pursuing a Master's degree in Multilingualism at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Using the HLVC corpus, she is investigating language attitudes of Russian heritage speakers and their relationship towards their language. She's helping Naomi develop a new sociolinguistics assignment for undergrad courses. She is working in the HLVC lab until the end of April 2020 and is looking forward to meeting lots of you and learning more about what's happening in our Department. She's ready to record it all in her special notebook!
Undergrad Research Opportunity Program students Kate, Mira and Jonathan featured in the U of T's Arts & Science News! Great description of how HLVC works (Jan. 29, 2020 article by Jovana Jankovic). On Sept. 14, 2018, Holman Tse successfully defended the first dissertation to be based on data from the HLVC Project. His U Pittsburgh dissertation, "Beyond the Monolingual Core and out into the Wild: A Variationist study of Early Bilingualism and Sound Change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese", is a landmark! His committee was Scott Kiesling (supervisor), Shelome Gooden, Alan Juffs and Naomi Nagy. 
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Michael Iannozzi, a grad student in Linguistics at UWO, who cut his research teeth as a HLVC RA, is featured in a fantastic article in the National Post about preserving his family's Italian dialect. Sound clips and delicious photos!
We organized a mini-conference showcasing recent research on heritage languages in (and near) Toronto: it's called Toronto Language Tapestry. See the write-up!
Heritage Languages in Toronto is on Wikipedia!
2016 was a busy spring for HLVC. Presentations at conferences included:
Lyskawa, Paulina, Valeriya Mordvinova & Naomi Nagy. Case marking variation in heritage Slavic languages in Toronto. Slavic Linguistic Society, Toronto, Sept. 23-25, 2016
Nagy, Naomi. Speakers' attitudes and innovations in Toronto's heritage languages. Sociolinguistics Symposium 21, Murcia, June 15-18, 2016.
Maddeaux, Ruth, Paulina Lyskawa, Emilia Melara & Naomi Nagy. (Why) is code-switching sometimes a predictor of contact effects? CVC 9, Ottawa, May 7-8, 2016
March 2016: After warming up at the Undergraduate Research Forum at U of T, The HLVC Project participated in Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL) at the Ohio State University. We learned a lot about recent research in Cantonese, and are especially excited about the PyCantonese tool. We presented 3 talks from the HLVC project, listed in the WICL conference program. Here are some highlights:
Zahid Daujee, Sam Lo and Andrew Peters prep their talks |
 Naomi studies Cantonese during the conference dinner |
 Andrew presents on automated alignment |
 Holman Tse explains the Cantonese vowel space |
 Sam Lo and Zahid present on variation in Classifier use in Cantonese and Korean |
 Holman presents some more |
Fall 2015: HLVC is very excited about the NWAV44 conference at U of T, which featured invited speakers talking about many relevant topics, a session on conservatism in heritage varieties, and these presentations from the HLVC project:
- Heritage Faetar's verbs are good to the last (pro-)drop, Michael Iannozzi
- Heritage speakers abide by all the rules, Evidence of language contact effects in Heritage Polish word-final devoicing, Paulina Lyskawa, Emilia Melara & Ruth Maddeaux
- Is Heritage Language phonology conservative?: Evidence from variation and change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese vowels, Holman Tse
Naomi appeared on her first Chinese-language tv show: Timeline Magazine (Fairchild TV) as part of an episode on endangered language preservation and documentation. A unique opportunity to watch a digital
Summer 2015: Maksym Shkvorets, a recently graduated Linguistics major, will be entering the Linguistics MA program at UofT and continuing his study of Heritage Ukrainian. He was a key player in our recent recognition by a research grant from the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Congrats also on his recent marriage!
Summer 2015: Samuel Lo, a Linguistics major, spent most of the summer in Hong Kong doing fieldwork to learn about Cantonese as currently spoken in the Homeland. This data will provide a comparison point for the Heritage Cantonese data being collected in Toronto. 11 speakers were recorded. Ariel Chan presented our recent analysis of Cantonese classifiers at a workshop in Hong Kong.
Summer 2015:HLVC gets media coverage in Corriere Canadese with an article by our own Paolo Frascà.
Homeland Fieldwork in Calabria
Summer 2014: Two undergrads and a grad student from the Italian Department, and a professor (the HLVC Project's PI) spent 3 weeks in Calabria doing fieldwork to learn about Calabrese Italian(s) in the Homeland. This data will provide a comparison point for the Heritage Italian data being collected in Toronto. More than 25 speakers were recorded, producing the first sociolinguistic corpus of Calabrese speech. This blog highlights some nice moments from the fieldwork.
Findings from the Calabrese part of the HLVC project also made it into PanoramItalia 4.4, p. 51. See some of our favourite spots on pp. 40-42. See also a dashing picture of one of our fieldworkers on p. 36.
Meanwhile in Poland...
An incoming MA student (who also earned her BA in our Linguistics Department) is in Poland at the moment, also collecting homeland data. She reports in:
"I have been travelling a bit around Europe, mainly Berlin, Bristol and Prague but this was just for pleasure. It is awfully hot in Poland at the moment so I am hiding indoors which leaves no excuse but to work on transcription.There have been 9 interviews with homeland speakers so far, I really like this part. I found out so much about my own family, just amazing. All the people my age whom I interviewed so far mentioned that the younger generation (say 15, 16-year-olds) would be the most interesting to look at as far as changes are concerned.
Transcribing gave me a few ideas of what else could be interesting to research. Also, I was very surprised at how much faster homeland speakers speak (which is maybe a bit more time-consuming to transcribe but results in plenty of data).
Finally, I'm in love with the Zoom H4n recorder and the mic. The quality is fantastic and it is very easy to operate. I am using 4CH mode which gives two files - one from internal built-in and one from external lavaliere microphone - just in case.
So far, everything is really good. I am hoping to be as lucky when I come back to Toronto and need to find heritage speakers."
Naomi presented at a workshop on Heritage Languages in London
See some video clips [clip 1 - Multilingualism in Toronto] [clip 2 - Benefits of Heritage language teaching] [clip 3 - Benefits of multilingualism]
Yannis presented at the Change and Variation in Canada 7.
May 4, 2013, 12:00-12:20, in Sid Smith 560A.
Koumarianos, K. 2013. Adjective suffixation across three generations of Italian-Canadians. CVC 7, Toronto.
Natalia L presented at the Toronto Undergrad Linguistics Conference:
Lapinskaya, N. 2013. Effects of contextual variety of language use on vowel production among speakers of Heritage Russian. TULCON 6, Toronto.
In 2012-13 , we have HLVC presentations in Alberta, Quebec, Japan, Singapore, Hawai'i, Pennsylvania, the UK and France, as well as Toronto.
Three HLVC researchers presented at The Road Less Travelled, an international conference on heritage languages and heritage language acquisition.
Final Report on 2009-2012 (SSHRC SRG-funded grant)
Understanding variation in multilingual communities is at the heart of this project. We are developing a body of theoretically-informed, quantified descriptions of variation in several Heritage Languages. Our first step was to build databases of recordings of conversations. We collected samples to represent three generations (immigrants, their children, and the grand-children), representing all age groups (except young children) and speakers with a range of fluency and attitudes toward their Heritage. Though we originally intended to examine only Faetar, Russian and Korean, an array of factors, mostly notably the enthusiasm of students who were speakers of other heritage languages, encouraged us to expand our project to include Italian, Cantonese and Ukrainian.
Collaboration between a phonetician, a phonologist, a morphosyntactician, and a variationist with specialists in these languages provided the necessary breadth of expertise to carry out this multi-language research project and obtain cross-linguistically valid results and a holistic view of multiple language usage in context. Students were integral for participant recruitment, collection and coding of data and participated in all stages of analysis, interpretation and presentation, developing skills in each area through an apprenticeship-like process. Many students have transferred these skills to other research interests.
We digitally recorded, transcribed and archived one-hour conversational speech samples from speakers of six heritage languages in Toronto and pilot-tested methods for further corpus development. Variationist analyses produced quantitative descriptions of variable patterns in each language, showing where there was change and where there was maintenance of pronunciation, grammatical and vocabulary patterns across generations of Heritage Language speakers. In some cases, where a comparable corpus existed, we were able to compare directly to Homeland patterns. Our work to date shows, in general, that speakers quite consistently maintain the grammatical structures and vocabulary used in Homeland varieties, in contradiction to widely-held beliefs that language quickly “degrades” or is “bastardized” in immigrant communities, and in contrast to many studies published about heritage language usage in the USA. On the other hand, we see changes in one phonetic pattern (Voice Onset Time, or aspiration of word-initial consonants, a feature that distinguishes English from several of these Heritage Languages). Here, we find a correlation of the variable pronunciation pattern with speakers’ ethnic orientation: those who identify more strongly with the culture of the Homeland maintain Homeland-like pronunciation patterns, while those participants who identify more as “Canadian” tend to adopt a more English-like pronunciation of these sounds (while speaking the Heritage language). This ability to accommodate change within the language may well be one reason that Heritage Languages seem to be maintained better in Canada (at least in Toronto) than in the USA, contributing to Canada’s “mosaic” approach to multiculturalism.
As of October 2015, 68 talks and eight published papers reporting this work had been presented in 11 countries, including almost 30 student (co)authors. This project contributed to more than a dozen undergraduate independent study projects, three MA theses, 1 PhD Generals Paper, six student projects at European universities, and the development of two undergraduate and two graduate courses at U of T, plus some courses at the Centre of Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG), University of Groningen.
Faetar portion of project featured in Il Corriere Canadese & Tandem.
