Heritage Language Maintenance and Attrition Across the Lifespan: Typical and Atypical Language Development

Heritage language means a home or community language acquired in childhood that is not the dominant societal language; it differs from a monolingual L1 in status and input conditions, and from an L2 typically learned later through formal instruction. Heritage languages, therefore, underpin cognitive development, identity, well-being, family cohesion, and educational opportunities. In an era of intensified migration and diversity, speakers navigate shifting demands across the lifespan. Early childcare and schooling often accelerate the shift to the societal language; adolescence brings peer influence and identity renegotiation; adulthood introduces workplace pressures and parenting; later life can involve attrition, maintenance, or reactivation. Outcomes are shaped by family language policy, schooling models, peer networks, digital media, community institutions, labour markets, and language ideologies. Yet, scholarship and practice remain siloed by age, setting, and discipline, leaving educators, clinicians, and policymakers with mixed messages. This Research Topic frames heritage language maintenance and attrition as a long-term phenomenon across the lifespan, an ecosystemic issue requiring interdisciplinary inquiry across education, linguistics, psychology, speech-language pathology, and sociology. It also recognises that heritage language maintenance and loss occur within complex sociocultural systems shaped not only by family and community practices but also by structural forces, such as colonial histories, racialised language ideologies, and monolingual norms, that influence access, value, and legitimacy of multilingualism. It invites global perspectives and underrepresented languages, seeking evidence that is inclusive of learners with diverse profiles, applicable to both typical and atypical language development, so that findings can translate into practical guidance for classrooms, clinics, communities, and policy.

The core challenge is fragmentation: evidence is uneven across life stages, settings, and languages, with limited longitudinal and cross-linguistic data, as well as under-examined adult and older-adult trajectories. Monolingual bias in assessment and pedagogy persists; research-to-practice pipelines are weak, especially for scalable models that work across varied sociolinguistic contexts. Structural drivers, such as funding mechanisms, accountability regimes, and language policies, are often treated as background rather than levers for change.

This Research Topic will assemble an integrated body of work to: (1) map heritage language trajectories and turning points across the lifespan; (2) identify risk and protective factors for maintenance versus attrition; (3) evaluate pedagogies, family language planning, and community programmes that build biliteracy; (4) develop and validate equitable assessment and progress-monitoring approaches; (5) test the role of technologies (e.g., digital media, AI-enabled tools) in sustaining use; and (6) analyse policy architectures that normalise bilingualism. This Research Topic also aims to advance interdisciplinary understanding of heritage language maintenance and attrition while explicitly acknowledging the structural and systemic forces, including but not limited to raciolinguistic ideologies, structural oppressions and/or language policy, that contribute to language shift and inequitable linguistic outcomes. We welcome contributions that include, but are not limited to, learners with additional communication needs without placing them in a silo. Expected outputs include design principles for schools and community providers, guidance for families and clinicians, open tools (e.g., corpora, assessment protocols), and policy-ready syntheses that can travel across languages, cultures, and systems.

This Research Topic will assemble an integrated body of work to: (1) map heritage language trajectories and turning points across the lifespan; (2) identify risk and protective factors for maintenance versus attrition; (3) evaluate pedagogies, family language planning, and community programmes that build biliteracy; (4) develop and validate equitable assessment and progress-monitoring approaches; (5) test the role of technologies (e.g., digital media, AI-enabled tools) in sustaining use; and (6) analyse policy architectures that normalise bilingualism. We welcome contributions that include, but are not limited to, learners with additional communication needs without placing them in a silo. Expected outputs include design principles for schools and community providers, guidance for families and clinicians, open tools (e.g., corpora, assessment protocols), and policy-ready syntheses that can travel across languages, cultures, and systems.

This Research Topic focuses on heritage language use, maintenance, and attrition across the lifespan. We invite studies that situate heritage bilingualism within interconnected ecosystems of home, school, community, and health, and that consider how heritage language practices shape wellbeing, identity, and motivation. We are especially interested in work that examines family language policy, peer networks, instructional models for biliteracy, and equitable assessment approaches that challenge monolingual bias, as well as how structural oppression and social power relations shape linguistic experiences, educational opportunities, and assessment practices. Contributions may also address heritage language attrition, reactivation, and the affordances of digital media and AI-enabled tools in sustaining use. Comparative and global policy analyses are welcome, with a particular emphasis on under-researched languages and communities.

Manuscript types: Original Research, Systematic Review, Scoping Review, Mini Review, Brief Research Report, Methods/Methodology, Conceptual Analysis, Hypothesis and Theory, Policy and Practice Reviews, Community Case Study, Perspective, and Opinion. We particularly welcome mixed-methods, longitudinal, corpus-based, experimental, ethnographic, and design-based implementation research, as well as tool and resource papers (e.g., datasets, assessment frameworks). Submissions should make clear, actionable implications for educators, clinicians, families, and policy makers and, where possible, provide open materials to enhance reproducibility and uptake.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review

Keywords: Heritage Language, Language Maintenance, Language Attrition, Second Language Development, Language Disorder

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.