Heritage Language Journal

The HLJ, an online blind peer-reviewed journal, was established in 2002 to provide a forum for scholars to disseminate research and knowledge about heritage and community languages. HLJ is published by the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA. The journal seeks submissions focused on acquisition and pedagogy of heritage and community languages from any of the following perspectives:

• applied linguistics
• theoretical linguistics
• sociolinguistics
• language pedagogy
• language policy
• other relevant fields

HLJ is published continuously through Brill Publishers.

View the Heritage Language Journal on the Brill website.

The Heritage Language Journal

Origins, Impact, and Legacy

When the Heritage Language Journal (HLJ) launched at UCLA in 2002, nothing like it existed anywhere. It was the first blind peer-reviewed journal devoted entirely to the research and teaching of heritage and community languages — the languages people grow up speaking at home but seldom get to study in school. From its first issue in 2003, HLJ gave the field a home it had been waiting for: a dedicated venue for work at the crossroads of linguistics, educational policy and practice, and identity. But the journal did not appear out of nowhere. In the years before that first issue, a series of foundational meetings at UCLA had been quietly shaping a research agenda, sharpening arguments, and building the case that would make HLJ not just possible but necessary.

That case had deep roots. The 1999 Research Priority Conference gathered linguists and educators around an argument traceable to Guadalupe Valdés’s pioneering work in the 1970s on U.S. Hispanic bilinguals in Spanish-language classrooms. As the new millennium approached, it rang truer than ever: heritage learners are their own distinct population — not imperfect native speakers, not foreign-language students, but a group worth studying on its own terms. It was in these conversations that the idea of a dedicated peer-reviewed journal first took shape.

The First National Conference on Heritage Languages in 2002, convened just as plans for HLJ were being finalized, established the National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC) as the field’s center of gravity. Out of these meetings came the “UCLA model,” which held that heritage languages were no mere curiosity but a window into fundamental linguistic processes — cross-linguistic transfer, distinctive routes of acquisition, and particular language practices. That conviction became the theoretical foundation still shaping the journal’s editorial standards today. From the start, HLJ set out to bridge theoretical and applied linguistics with classroom practice, documenting how heritage speakers acquire and sustain their languages across communities and across lifetimes.

So goes the institutional story. The human one belongs to two people: Olga Kagan at UCLA and Maria Polinsky at UCSD. They came to heritage languages from opposite directions — Olga as an educator whose driving concern was helping heritage speakers develop their skills, Maria as a linguist asking what remains of a language when so much of it appears to have been forgotten. Different questions, but a deep mutual respect and a shared willingness to chart new territory. Together they knocked on door after door, lobbying administrators, courting prominent scholars whose endorsement carried weight, and pressing their deans. In the end, their relentless, impassioned appeals wore down the Dean of Humanities at UCLA and the Dean of Social Sciences at UCSD, who each agreed to fund the venture.

The inaugural issue was a real achievement — for Olga and Maria, for UCLA and UCSD, and for the field as a whole. It opened with an editors’ introduction by Olga, backed by Maria and Kathleen Dillon, while Russell Campbell and Richard Schmidt lent the founding editorial board names that signaled HLJ was a serious enterprise. Crucially, the editors chose to publish online and open-access. That meant a teacher at a community language school anywhere in the country could read exactly the same research as a doctoral student or professor at a research university across the world — a quiet act of democratization that still defines the journal.

Alongside the scholarship ran a parallel effort. Susan Bauckus, a staff researcher at the UCLA Center for World Languages, built much of HLJ’s academic infrastructure in close collaboration with a project called LA Language World, championing the idea that language should be studied from both humanistic and social-scientific angles. Kevin Matthews, a senior writer at the International Institute, edited LA Language World’s community-facing publication, translating the linguistic complexity of the city into prose for a general readership. The two were less parallel projects than mirrors: HLJ’s research on cross-linguistic transfer and simultaneous bilingualism was the scholarly account of the very phenomena LA Language World was documenting on the ground, from a more personal angle.

The momentum of HLJ, together with the framework built through the NHLRC, gave rise to the Heritage Language Program at UCSD — which treated heritage language courses not as a remedial track but as rigorous academic study in their own right. Where UCLA had the multilingual sprawl of Los Angeles to draw on, UCSD had the border: an environment that made Spanish not just an object of study but a daily reality, alongside the widely spoken Cantonese and Tagalog.

Scholars moved freely between the two campuses, and UCSD’s program became a testing ground for ideas first shaped in HLJ — above all the distinction between heritage speakers and second-language learners, a question with real consequences for how courses were designed and taught. By the mid-2000s, what had begun as a handful of conversations and experiments had hardened into what people were calling the “Southern California corridor” for heritage linguistics. Working in tandem, UCLA and UCSD moved heritage languages from the margins of ethnic studies to the center of formal linguistic inquiry — a shift that would not have happened without HLJ.

For its first decade, HLJ published occasional issues. That changed in 2013, when Andrew Lynch (University of Miami) took over as editor and put the journal on a steady schedule of three issues a year, in April, August, and December. As HLJ gained visibility under his leadership, its growing reach made the case for a major academic publisher. With Olga and Maria’s encouragement, Andrew drafted a formal proposal and began exploring options — an effort that paid off in 2021, when UCLA and Brill Publishers signed an agreement bringing the journal to its current form: continuous, yearlong online publication with a global readership.

The high point of Andrew’s tenure came in November 2022, when HLJ was accepted into the Web of Science after an eighteen-month review. Uri Tadmor of Brill captured the moment in a note to Andrew: “As you know, this is the world’s most prestigious abstracting and indexing service, and the only one which awards impact factors. Acceptance to the Web of Science is the pinnacle of achievements for an academic journal, and is due to your dedicated excellent work as editor. It is the best parting gift any journal editor could wish for.” After a decade of work that made HLJ both the premier venue for heritage language research and a reference point in linguistics more broadly, Andrew handed the baton to Rajiv Rao (University of Wisconsin–Madison), who took over at the start of 2024 after serving as an associate editor under Andrew from 2019 to 2023.

Throughout its early years, the journal enjoyed strong editorial support from Susan, and in later years, Sanja Lacan and Arturo Díaz, who ensured that all the articles were thoroughly edited, well presented, and that all the editorial activities ran smoothly. It is hard to overestimate the importance of the managing editor role in smaller publications, in the days that predate AI, but without the commitment and dedication of these individuals the journal would not have been able to expand.

Building on the stable foundation and strong reputation Andrew left behind — and on his mentorship — Rajiv, working closely with managing editor Arturo, has turned much of his energy outward: publicizing the journal across online channels and in person at conferences, the annual Heritage Language Research Institute, and most recently the Fifth International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages. Running through all of it is a principle Andrew traced back to Olga herself — that the journal exists to give a voice to early-career scholars, to encourage and support their work, and to connect heritage language researchers and heritage language practitioners in a meaningful way.

That outreach is already bearing fruit. A unique special issue on heritage languages in war zones will appear in 2026, with further special issues in the pipeline on understudied bilingual pairings, new geographic contexts, and the linguistic and sociocultural dimensions of heritage languages. Submissions have climbed so sharply that the team of associate editors has grown to seven — its largest ever — drawing on prolific scholars based in Australia, Europe, and North America.

The journal has also widened what it publishes. Earlier this year it introduced a new category, the methods piece, inspired by lively discussions at past research institutes on corpus, experimental, and classroom-based approaches, and on building bridges between scholars and community stakeholders. And its reach keeps expanding: in just the past year, HLJ has published articles on heritage varieties of Indigenous languages of the Americas and on heritage languages in and from Africa — both firsts for the journal, and both pushing the field into new ground.

Looking back over this history — and ahead to what comes next — it is hard to imagine that Olga, Maria, and the other pioneers of the late 1990s could have dreamed of what the HLJ has become. Its growth and range are a source of real pride. But the journal’s animating spirit has not changed since that first open-access issue: to make the best research on heritage and community languages freely available to everyone who needs it, and to give the field’s newest voices a place to be heard. The journal started out and continues to be a meeting place for all the constituencies invested in heritage languages, from parents to communities to researchers to teachers.

Whether you are a researcher, a teacher, a student, or simply someone curious about the languages spoken in homes and communities around the world, the Heritage Language Journal invites you to read, to contribute, and to be part of what comes next.

A Timeline of the Field