The recently proposed q-rung orthopair fuzzy set (q-ROFS) characterized by a membership degree and a non-membership degree is powerful tool for handling uncertainty and vagueness. This paper proposes the concept of q-rung orthopair linguistic set (q-ROLS) by combining the linguistic term sets with q-ROFSs. Thereafter, we investigate multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) with q-rung orthopair linguistic information. To aggregate q-rung orthopair linguistic numbers ( q-ROLNs), we extend the Heronian mean (HM) to q-ROLSs and propose a family of q-rung orthopair linguistic Heronian mean operators, such as the q-rung orthopair linguistic Heronian mean (q-ROLHM) operator, the q-rung orthopair linguistic weighted Heronian mean (q-ROLWHM) operator, the q-rung orthopair linguistic geometric Heronian mean (q-ROLGHM) operator and the q-rung orthopair linguistic weighted geometric Heronian mean (q-ROLWGHM) operator. Some desirable properties and special cases of the proposed operators are discussed. Further, we develop a novel approach to MAGDM within q-rung orthopair linguistic context based on the proposed operators. A numerical instance is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiorities of the proposed method.