“Broken Arabic” and Ideologies of Completeness: Contextualizing the Category of Native and Heritage Speaker in the University Arabic Classroom

Abstract

Through weekly participant observations and eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with second-generation bilingual students in the Arabic for Native Speakers/Heritage Learners course at one of City University of New York’s (CUNY) senior colleges, I investigate the interdiscursive connections between the students’ notion of “broken Arabic” and the concept of “incomplete acquisition and/or attrition” (Montrul, 2013) from SLA research on heritage speakers. This paper moves away from the concept of proficiency towards performativity in order to recognize and support diverse repertoires in motion.

Keywords

• heritage language
• Arabic sociolinguistics
• incomplete acquisition
• linguistic anthropology