Toward diversification of bilingual acquisition research

Abstract This paper discusses issues of language diversity and inclusion in the context of bilingual language acquisition, with a focus on heritage language development. The lack of diversity and representation in language acquisition research in general and in bilingual acquisition in particular is highlighted. Diversification in our work involves moving from bilingual to trilingual acquisition, and from homeland to heritage contexts in the creation of the Child Heritage Chinese Corpus. Examples are drawn from Chinese-English language pairs in homeland and heritage contexts. A heritage trilingual child’s code-mixed utterances are shown to be more complex than monolingual utterances, providing a novel window into translanguaging in heritage contexts. This suggests that translanguaging enables him to pool his language resources to express more complex content.