When Language Maintenance Means Language Shift: Tibetan as an Heritage Language in Amdo Families in France

This paper explores the initial steps of transgenerational language change in exile by comparing the varieties of “Common” Tibetan as spoken by parents born in Amdo, Tibet, and by their teenager children, born in Tibet or in South Asia, who arrived in France at an early age and who have spent all or most of their schooling in France. In these families, the parents speak a variety of Amdo Tibetan as their first language, which does not allow for inter-comprehension with “Common” Tibetan. They have acquired “Common” Tibetan during their stay in South Asia before they moved to France. The paper follows a descriptive approach to analyze the structural (dis)similarities between the parents’ and the children’s varieties of “Common” Tibetan. It also documents intra-generational variation (1) within the parents’ generation, where we can observe a variable extent of retention for Amdo Tibetic features, and (2) within the children’s generation, where variation is usually due more to the (often contact-induced) linguistic changes than to the retention of some of their parents’ linguistic features.