An Italo-Romance perspective on heritage languages

Heritage languages have received considerable attention from linguists coming from different subfields, because of their structural properties as well as for the salient sociolinguistic features of the communities in which they are spoken. In this paper, we provide a critical review of the existing readership that specifically deals with Italo-Romance heritage language communities. We subsume under this heading communities characterised by a heterogeneous set of linguistic resources, which include Italian, Italian dialects and minority languages spoken in Italy. We then proceed to identify a number of critical points that in our view should receive particular attention in future studies.