Conjunctions in early Yiddish Lithuanian bilingualism: heritage language and contact linguistic perspectives

ENHeritage language research and contact linguistics have developed as separate fields, yet both deal with aspects of L2 impact on the L1 to a considerable extent. Thus, one may ask whether they investigate the same phenomena using different terms or whether they concern only partly overlapping phenomena. In cases where there are very few speakers of a certain heritage language, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between incomplete L1 acquisition, attrition and contact-induced language change. This point will be illustrated by a case-study on conjunctions in the speech of a Yiddish-Lithuanian bilingual. The data display borrowing of conjunctions not only from the dominant language of the heritage language setting, but from other languages as well. Yet, no categorical differences are found between the borrowed conjunctions with regard to the language they originate from. The results can be best explained by observations within the study of language contact, especially in terms of Matras’ (1998) utterance modifiers, which tend to come from the pragmatically dominant language and not necessarily from the sociolinguistically dominant language of the heritage language setting.