Heritage Speakers
This New Yorker article is beautifully written and it touches on being a heritage speaker and having first language attrition (forgetting your first language).1
This video is Maria Polinsky—one of the key researchers on heritage speakers—explaining why studying heritage speakers is interesting from a linguistics perspective.
This podcast episode is filled with first-hand accounts of what it’s like to be a heritage speaker and learn your heritage language.
Human Language
This TED talk does a good job of describing the difference between animal communication and human language. It also goes into Chomsky’s theory of language and why it doesn’t make scientific sense. And goes into the theory that language started as gestures.
There’s a movie called Nim Chimpsky. It’s about linguists in the 1980s who tried to raise a chimp as a human and teach it human language…it’s really weird but interesting. Here’s an article about the movie.
If you get a paywall that doesn’t let you access it, let me know!