Cherishing the heritage language: Predictors of parental heritage language maintenance efforts

Abstract

Aims: Multilingual families are often challenged with the transmission of their heritage language (HL) to future generations. Departing from this observation, this study aims to investigate which factors correlate with multilingual families’ HL maintenance efforts. The variables taken into account are the families’ language policy (FLP), advice from both Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) professionals and other (informal) sources, the parents’ linguistic and educational resources, as well as their migration generation. Methodology: Exclusively quantitative in nature, the data for this study involve 776 multilingual families in the Flemish community of Belgium. Analysis: These data have subsequentially been subjected to two inferential analyses: a bivariate correlational analysis followed by a logistic regression for a more detailed understanding of the relations at play. Findings: The results indicate a positive correlation between families’ policies and their HL maintenance efforts, in addition to confirming the independence of FLP’s three components (beliefs, practices, and management). Furthermore, contrary to advice from ECCE professionals, advice from other sources is positively and significantly associated with HL maintenance efforts. Finally, families comprised of parents with access to higher linguistic and educational resources are less likely to try and pass on the HL to their children, probably favouring the acquisition of the institutional language (IL). Originality: This paper quantitatively explores factors that correlate with parental HL maintenance efforts using a large and language-diverse sample. This quantitative approach facilitates generalizations for future (qualitative) research and advice-giving bodies to build on. Significance: Our findings bring about greater insights into the motivation of parents concerning HL maintenance and could contribute to the advice given to multilingual families.

Shifting towards the institutional language?

“…In addition, we compare these results with our earlier findings, based on the same dataset, concerning parental heritage language maintenance efforts (i.e. I try to make sure my child hears the heritage language as often as possible) (Hollebeke et al forthcoming 2022) and multilingual exposure efforts (i.e. I try to make sure my child hears the heritage language and Dutch as often as possible) (Hollebeke forthcoming) to examine whether there are different mechanisms at work in steering parents towards either the heritage language, Dutch (the institutional language) or both (i.e.…”

“…institutional or heritage language) on which parents focus. For this comparison we rely on our exploration of parental heritage language exposure efforts, which uses the same dataset (Hollebeke et al forthcoming 2022).…”

The Role of Age Variables in Family Language Policy

“…It comprises three distinct yet interrelated key components (Shohamy 2006;Spolsky 2004Spolsky , 2012. The first component, ideology, focuses on beliefs and attitudes toward the heritage and societal languages (Hollebeke et al 2022). It is considered the driving force of FLP, formed by many factors (Curdt-Christiansen and Huang 2020).…”

Exploring the interplay of semantic knowledge in bilingual children: heritage language and second language

“…Several factors contribute to the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shi in bilingual children's lexical-semantic development. First, sociolinguistic factors, such as the societal status of heritage languages and the linguistic environment within their community, signi cantly impact semantic knowledge development (Li, 2006;Hollebeke et al, 2022). Differences in language exposure could lead to variations in word acquisition opportunities, favoring highfrequency word acquisition in the dominant language.…”