The grammar and acquisition of Sanna (Cypriot Maronite Arabic) across generations

Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change.

SOAS Linguistics Seminar
The grammar and acquisition of Sanna (Cypriot Maronite Arabic) across generations

Natalia Pavlou
University of Cyprus, Cyprus Acquisition Team

Abstract: The phenomenon of unbalanced bilingualism found in speakers with a heritage acquisition profile has led researchers to conduct theoretical, experimental, and applied studies to investigate populations that use a dominant language in their community along with a home language, referred to as a heritage language. A large body of existing work has concentrated on the ways in which heritage and baseline grammars differ or exhibit variation, as well as the role of the linguistic data available to a speaker in the acquisition of their L1, the parsing and encoding of that input and any factors that affect its representation (Polinsky & Scontras 2020; Montrul & Polinsky 2021; Polinsky 2018). In this work, I focus on Sanna (Cypriot Maronite Arabic), which is an endangered language found on the island of Cyprus. I will discuss its grammar and its contact with the dominant variety of Cypriot Greek, the different speaker groups within this community based on its acquisition as a heritage language, the variation in the competence in speakers of different proficiency and the sociolinguistic factors that describe the community. Based on experimental results, I show that speakers of the community show grammatical divergence from the target language structures, supporting the need for sophisticated heritage language research.