This chapter asks whether DOM—which is a vulnerable grammatical area in Spanish in the United States—is also vulnerable in Hindi as a heritage language. The results of the study presented in this chapter show that some Hindi heritage speakers also display omission of DOM in all tasks. But unlike what was found for the Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants in the Spanish study discussed in the previous chapter, there is no indication of ongoing language change in the Hindi spoken in the homeland nor apparent signs of attrition of DOM in the Hindi-speaking adult immigrant group. The sociolinguistic characteristics of the Hindi/Urdu-speaking population in the United States is discussed. The results of the linguistic background questionnaire and the linguistic tasks (oral narrative task, elicited production task, written task, bimodal acceptability judgment task, auditory/written comprehension task) are presented and discussed.

The acquisition of DOM in Spanish monolingual children and Spanish-speaking bilinguals has been intensely investigated in the last two decades. One of the main objectives of the in-depth study of DOM conducted for this project was to confirm and evaluate the strength of previous findings of DOM omission in Spanish-English bilingual children and in young adult heritage speakers. If erosion of DOM in Spanish as a heritage language is indeed a robust phenomenon, it should be documented in other groups of heritage speakers. Although hypotheses about the potential role of the parental generation in contributing to heritage language grammars abound, at the time the Spanish study reported in this book was conceived, there were no studies of potential attrition of DOM in adult immigrants. Therefore, the first-generation immigrant group was included to put the language transmission hypothesis to the test. This chapter presents a brief overview of Spanish in the United States before summarizing the main results of the language background questionnaire, and of the production, comprehension and judgment tasks described in Chapter 5.