Heritage language education: Minority language speakers, second language instruction, and monolingual schooling

Most discussions of heritage language education begin with a consideration of the term “heritage language, " which arose in Canada to refer to languages other than English or French (Duff and Li 2009). This definition of heritage languages as any “languages other than the national language(s)" has been adopted and applied to a wide array of international contexts, leading to extensive discussion and debate. On one hand, scholars have sought to fine-tune our understanding of the meaning of “heritage languages”-for instance, by distinguishing among colonial, Indigenous, or immigrant languages (Fishman 2001). On the other hand, scholars have critiqued the term itself, noting that “ancestral languages, " “community languages, " or “minority languages” are widely used outside of the U.S. context (Brutt-Griffler and Makoni 2005; De Bot and Gorter 2005; Wiley 2005), and hence proposed the use of a more inclusive term, such as “heritage and community languages” (Wiley 2005).