Given that the mingling and melding of human cultures has become the preeminent conditions of the 21st century, that our families, communities and workplaces are increasingly globally constituted and globally oriented, and that we are increasingly being shaped and contoured by both the strengths and stresses that accompany cultural contact, conflict, and convergence, I propose to examine the development of heritage and second languages as a rhizomatic system (He, 2013; Tan, 2017). The rhizome is a biological term appropriated by Deleuze and Guattari to emphasize the principles of relationality, connectivity and heterogeneity (2004: 7). This concept provides powerful insights into heritage and second languages, which tend to evolve and spread in multiple directions as a result of the interaction between multi-faceted discursive dimensions. This paper further develops the “multiplicity hypothesis” presented by He (2006, 2011) with regard to (heritage) language development, in the sense that neither temporally nor spatially is the speaker/learner’s existence singular, unitary, or non-contradictory. A rhizomatic approach enables us to view heritage and second language speaker behavior as a complex system that is self-organizing, emergent, creative and unpredictable, but bounded by the entire linguistic repertoire of the speaker. It is a collage and calibration of holistic resources (phonemic, morpho-phonemic, syntactic, prosodic, episodic, sequential) from the entire linguistic repertoire simultaneously accessible to speakers engaged in intercultural encounters. Illustrative data will be drawn from Chinese heritage language speakers as well as ESL speakers of Chinese background in the U.S.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2004). A Thousand Plateaus. New York: Continuum.
He, A. W. (2006). Toward an identity-based model for the development of Chinese as a heritage language. The Heritage Language Journal, 4(1), 1-28.
He, A. W. (2011). Heritage language socialization. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs & B. Schieffelin (Eds.), The handbook of language socialization (pp. 587-609). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
He, A. W. (2013). Language of the heart and heritage: A tangled tale. Plenary address delivered at AAAL. March 16-19, Dallas, Texas.
Tan, E. K. (2017). A rhizomatic account of heritage language. In S. Canagarajah (Ed.) The Routledge handbook of migration and language (pp. 468-485). New York: Routeledge.
