Argument :
This paper discusses issues of language diversity and inclusion in the context of bilingual language acquisition with a focus on heritage language speakers and recent efforts toward diversification drawing on the work conducted by the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre (CBRC) at Chinese University of Hong Kong. I will first comment on the lack of diversity and representation in language acquisition research in general (Kidd and Garcia 2022) and bilingual acquisition in particular (Yip and Matthews 2022). Given 7000 languages, there are over 24 million possible language pairs which bilingual children might acquire (Yip, Mai and Matthews 2018). In the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000), the world's largest repository for data of child language acquisition, English and Indo-European languages dominate: even non-Indo-European languages are typically paired with an Indo-European language, and the proportion of pairs including a non- Indo-European language has remained at around 30% over the past 10 years. Only major non-Indo-European languages are represented, with minority and endangered languages especially underrepresented (Matthews and Yip 2022).Whether in bilingual, multilingual or heritage language acquisition, the current trend is to move away from the monolingual norm based on the ideal hearer-speaker toward a more complex understanding of how languages interact and come in contact in the mind. The issue of monolingualism as the norm and the use of monolinguals as controls (Rothman et al 2022) will be taken up. Greater diversity is needed in the heritage languages represented, language pairs and contexts of acquisition.Against this background, I will discuss the contributions made by CBRC to the diversification of the database for bilingual and heritage language research in the creation of multimedia corpora. Examples will be drawn from Chinese-English languages pairs in homeland and heritage contexts (Yip and Matthews 2007, Mai, Matthews and Yip 2018). To work toward diversification, we promote the study of pairs involving dialects like Cantonese and Mandarin that are often mistaken for variants of the same language, and acknowledging that bilingual acquisition contexts such as Hong Kong are in fact trilingual or multilingual.ReferencesMai, Ziyin, Stephen Matthews and Virginia Yip. 2018. Child Heritage Chinese Corpus. Downloadable at the CHILDES website: https://childes.talkbank.org/access/Biling/CHCC.htmlMatthews, Stephen and Virginia Yip. 2022. Language diversity and bilingual first language acquisition. Poster presented at the 14th Conference of the Association for Language Typology (ALT 2022), University of Texas at Austin, USA.Yip, Virginia, Ziyin Mai and Stephen Matthews. 2018. CHILDES for bilingualism. In D. Miller, F. Bayram, J. Rothman and L. Serratrice (eds.) Bilingual Cognition and Language: The State of the Science Across its Subfields. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Yip, Virginia and Stephen Matthews. 2007. The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Yip, Virginia and Stephen Matthews. 2022. Language diversity and bilingual first language acquisition: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022). First Language 42.6. 832–836. https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237221097581
