Toronto Heritage Italian (r): Maintaining homeland patterns

Abstract

Contrary to experimental research, comparative variationist approaches find for heritage speakers many cases of maintenance of the homeland grammar. We analyze patterns of rhotic production in spontaneous speech of the heritage Calabrese Italian community of Toronto, Canada, and its homeland counterpart in Calabria, Italy. 1,555 tokens of word-internal, singleton /r/ were collected from the HLVC corpus and analyzed using mixed-effects models. Results show an ongoing pattern of lenition for both homeland and heritage speakers. Heritage speakers further develop this language internal trend, indicating grammar boosting. Homeland social constraints are maintained by heritage speakers. We find no evidence of transfer from English or simplification in the heritage language. Similar patterns of rhotic lenition are found in heritage Tagalog (Umbal & Nagy 2021) and Russian (Nagy 2024), though with different social constraints. Cross-linguistic comparison proves that variation in heritage languages is not necessarily caused by contact, and that change needn’t be related to indexicality.