A myth about immigrant families holds that heritage languages will be spoken by the first generation, weakened in the second, and dead by the third.
But a landmark longitudinal study shows that Toronto’s many immigrant languages have remarkable staying power: not only to stay alive from one generation to the next, but to remain largely unchanged in the way they are spoken.
The Heritage Language Variation and Change (HLVC) project was started by Naomi Nagy over 25 years ago. Nagy, professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts & Science, initiated HLVC to examine the ways in which heritage languages evolve over time.
The project has compiled a substantial body of research into many languages that are spoken widely in Toronto, but haven’t been studied well. These include Cantonese, Russian, Korean, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Portuguese and a minority Franco-Provençal language called Faetar.
Nagy’s specialty is sociolinguistics, which examines how social factors such as ethnicity, class, gender and age affect how language use changes over time. Her interest in starting the HLVC dates back to her earliest days at U of T.
“During my job interview, I started thinking about a multi-language project in Toronto where we would collect data showing how people spoke the language, ideally people of different generations and ages,” she says.
“We’re interested in what happens to a language among the people who keep speaking it. And the answer is: very little happens to it.”
For example, several years ago Cantonese-speaking researchers speculated that so-called “lazy” pronunciation — where the “n” and “l” sounds are interchanged at the beginning of a word — would be more common in Toronto than in Hong Kong, since language is thought to weaken in a country where the dominant language is different; their findings showed otherwise. Currently, MA student Irene Zhuang is expanding the study and has been able to replicate its findings, with a broader dataset and more sophisticated methods.
“And in Ukrainian, we have fourth- and fifth-generation speakers who are still speaking in ways that are not statistically distinct from people in the homeland,” Nagy says.
Nagy started the project with a small grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
“We went into big linguistics classes looking for speakers of Russian and Korean. Almost immediately we started getting students of other languages saying, what about us? How come our language isn’t being represented?”
Nagy explained that her budget wasn’t big enough to accommodate research into all the possible languages the students spoke.
But they gratefully agreed to work as project volunteers nonetheless, even taking recording devices with them when they went to visit family in Poland or attended summer camps in Ukraine. Nagy took a team of three students to Italy together to conduct fieldwork in 2014.
Sociolinguistic research mainly takes the form of conversational interviews in the home — a more effective method of recording spontaneous speech than laboratory-based research.
The data compiled by HLVC is represented in the Heritage Language Documentation Corpus (HerLD), a trove of conversational speech samples covering several generations of speakers in all ten target languages.
In 2024 Nagy also wrote a book about the project, entitled Heritage Languages: Extending Variationist Approaches.
“The project is in-depth enough that students can use the data that others have collected and annotated, which is very important for making sociolinguistics a multilingual field,” Nagy says.
“We’ve really been able to pass along the knowledge, and one of the reasons for writing the book was to capture the methodology in detail and have a reference book for people who want to work either with our data, or to develop similar types of sociolinguistic projects with other languages in other cities.”
What accounts for Toronto’s relative lack of change in heritage language use?
Start with the city itself: “New York has 200 mother tongues, while Toronto has 140,” Nagy says. “But New York is so much bigger — so our number of languages per person is much higher.”
In fact, Toronto’s rich variety of spoken languages is one of the city’s defining characteristics.
We’d like to be supportive and encourage communities to use their languages more often and keep them going. If they can be reassured that they’re doing a great job, that will increase pride they should naturally feel about speaking them.
“Not only are there a lot of speakers of a lot of languages here,” says Nagy, “but there’s not a lot of negative stigma attached to speaking them. We have multilingualism across the socioeconomic scale, and when you hear someone speaking a different language, you don’t assume they can’t speak English.”
Another factor that contributes to language persistence is that even when younger generations do stop speaking their heritage language, new immigrants are always arriving. There is also an appetite to learn on the part of “passive understanders,” who may understand heritage languages but not speak them.
“There are quite a few students who don’t use a language but really want to,” Nagy says. “They’ve told me moving stories about trying to use it more, and how much it means to be able to chat with their grandma when they see her every Sunday for dinner.”
Languages do have to be used to survive; multiple independent studies estimate that up to 50 per cent of the world’s 7,000 known languages are currently endangered.
One such endangered language is Faetar, one of the HLVC’s target languages. It is spoken by fewer than 1,000 people worldwide, including a small community in Toronto, and Nagy has received wide acclaim for her efforts to study and preserve it.
Fortunately, projects like the HLVC show that even languages with a relatively small number of speakers are thriving in the city.
“We’d like to be supportive and encourage communities to use their languages more often and keep them going,” Nagy says. “If they can be reassured that they’re doing a great job, that will increase pride they should naturally feel about speaking them.”