Heritage languages and the study of Malayo-Polynesian diasporas

This chapter starts with an overview of heritage linguistics, which is a new linguistic discipline primarily concerned with the study of heritage languages (immigrant minority languages spoken in diaspora contexts). The main goal of heritage linguistics is to describe and analyse the differences between heritage languages and their homeland counterparts, and to identify the sources or causes of divergence. One of these sources is cross-linguistic influence, as the unequal status of the majority (dominant) language and the heritage languages often leads to both lexical and structural transfer from the former to the latter. Among the Austronesian languages, there are at least a dozen languages spoken by diaspora communities. The chapter focuses on five of these Austronesian heritage languages by providing an historical and sociolinguistic background, together with some salient linguistic features showing syntactic convergence on the grammars of the majority language(s). These five heritage varieties are Sri Lankan Malay, Cocos Malay, Javanese in Suriname, Javanese in New Caledonia, and Ambon Malay in the Netherlands.