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Abstract

Research on multilingual speakers is often compared to monolingual baselines which are
commonly treated as if they were homogeneous across speakers. Despite recent research
showing that this homogeneity does not hold, these practices reproduce native-speakerism
and monolingualism. Heritage language research, which established itself in the past two
decades, is no exemption. Focusing on three predefined linguistic groups, namely Turkish
speakers which are framed as monolingual in Turkey as well as two heritage bilingually
framed groups in Germany and the USA, we ask: (1) Do heritage speakers of Turkish
produce more discourse and fluency markers (FMs) than monolingual speakers? (2) Are
the groups homogeneous, or is there wide variation between speakers across groups? We
focus on the variation between and within groups using Bayesian Linear Regression with a
multilevel model for speakers and heritage groups. Our findings confirm that the use of
discourse and FMs is largely defined through individual variation, and not through the
belonging to a certain speaker group. By focusing on variation across groups rather than
between groups, our study design supports the growing body of literature that questions
common heritage language research practices of today and shows alternative paths to
understanding heritage grammars.