Non-Prototypical Heritage Speakers: Italian as L2 in a Sri Lankan Community

This case study investigates specific language phenomena and dominance patterns among second-generation speakers of Sri Lankan origin in Naples within the framework of the HELLO Campania Project. While second generations are typically assumed to be dominant in the societal majority language, the Sri Lankan community—characterized by exceptionally high rates of heritage language maintenance—offers a critical testing ground for this assumption. Drawing on a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with first- and second-generation speakers, the analysis focuses on two morphosyntactic variables that function as indicators of acquisitional development in Italian as L2: verbal morphology and the realization of definite and indefinite articles. Verbal forms were classified along a four-stage developmental scale derived from research on Italian interlanguage, while article use was evaluated through a three-level accuracy scale. Descriptive and inferential statistics reveal a clear asymmetry within the second generation specifically in terms of gender variable. Male speakers display near-native competence consistent with the expected dominance shift toward Italian. In contrast, several female speakers exhibit persistent features—such as infinitive overextension, auxiliary omission in perfective constructions, and residual article omission—patterns more typical of first stages of second-language acquisition than of heritage-speaker dominance. These findings suggest that, in contexts of strong heritage language maintenance and dense ethnic social networks, second-generation speakers may experience incomplete acquisition of the majority language rather than incomplete acquisition of the heritage language. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the importance of integrating perceptual self-reports with production data. Theoretically, it challenges universalist assumptions about second-generation dominance and underscores the need for community-specific, migration-scenario-based analyses in heritage language research.