Three Generations Two Languages One Family

This book offers a sociolinguistic study of the Chinese community in Britain. It focuses on generational changes in language choice and code-switching patterns of Chinese immigrant families. The social network model developed in the study is intended to account for the relationship between community norms of language use and conversational strategies of individual speakers, and for the relation of both to the broader social, economic and political context.

Based on an eight-year study of a family on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, this book explores why the children in the family do not often speak Gaelic, despite the adults' best efforts to use the language with them, as well as the children's attendance at a Gaelic immersion school.

Code-switching - the alternating use of several languages by bilingual speakers - does not usually indicate lack of competence on the part of the speaker in any of the languages concerned, but results from complex bilingual skills. The reasons why people switch their codes are as varied as the directions from which linguists approach this issue, and raise many sociological, psychological, and grammatical questions. This volume of essays by leading scholars brings together the main strands of current research in four major areas: the policy implications of code-switching in specific institutional and community settings; the perspective of social theory on code-switching as a form of speech behaviour in particular social contexts; the grammatical analysis of code-switching, including the factors that constrain switching even within a sentence; and the implications of code-switching in bilingual processing and development.

In this volume, Li Wei brings together contributions from well-known and emerging scholars in socio- and anthropological linguistics working on different linguistic and communicative aspects of the Chinese diaspora. The project examines the Chinese diasporic experience from a global, comparative perspective, with a particular focus on transnational links, and local social and multilingual realities. Contributors address the emergence of new forms of Chinese in multilingual contexts, family language policy and practice, language socialization and identity development, multilingual creativity, linguistic attitudes and ideologies, and heritage language maintenance, loss, learning and re-learning. The studies are based on empirical observations and investigations in Chinese communities across the globe, including well-researched (from a sociolinguistic perspective) areas such as North America, Western Europe and Australia, as well as under-explored and under-represented areas such as Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, and the Middle East; the volume also includes detailed ethnographic accounts representing regions with a high concentration of Chinese migration such as Southeast Asia. This volume not only will allow sociolinguists to investigate the link between linguistic phenomena in specific communities and wider socio-cultural processes, but also invites an open dialogue with researchers from other disciplines who are working on migration, diaspora and identity, and those studying other language-based diasporic communities such as the Russian diaspora, the Spanish diaspora, the Portuguese diaspora, and the Arabic diaspora.

Through case studies from around the world, this book illustrates the opportunities and challenges facing families negotiating the issues of language maintenance and language learning in the home. Every family living in a bi/multilingual environment faces the question of what language(s) to speak with their children and must make a decision, consciously or otherwise, about these issues. Exploring links between language policy in the home and wider society in a range of diverse settings, the contributors utilize various research tools, including interviews, questionnaires, observations, and archival document analysis, to explore linguistic ideologies and practices of family members in the home, illuminating how these are shaped by macro-level societal processes.

This book explores language practices, beliefs and management across a group of Polish immigrant families in Australia, drawing on these case studies as a lens through which to unpack dynamics of Family Language Policy (FLP) and their implications for future research on FLP. The volume begins by outlining the historical context of Polish immigration in Australia, charting two key waves of Polish migration in the 20th century and the subsequent unfolding of issues around language and culture maintenance in these families. This discussion paves the way for exploring key themes of language socialization, language ideologies and heritage language maintenance and the affordances of FLP research in elucidating these dynamics at work in the lived experiences of a group of Polish immigrant families in Melbourne. The book highlights the importance of a triangulated approach, integrating qualitative and quantitative methods, in offering nuanced insights into parental approaches and children’s experiences of a bilingual upbringing and the wider impact of FLP on transnational families. Opening up avenues for future research on Family Language Policy and a better understanding of the language practices of specific communities in a globalised world, this book will be of interest to scholars in multilingualism, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.

Past studies of family language socialization often focus on children’s verbal communication skills and are conducted from the parents’ perspective. This book describes a child’s mostly self-directed and near-simultaneous multilingual and multiliterate development from birth to age 8. The present findings thus emphasize the critical role of child agency, and they may redefine and expand on the traditional theoretical framework of family language policy.

Parents who come from different language backgrounds often hope that their children will be able to speak the languages of both their parents. In families where this is the goal, the 'one parent-one language' approach (Ronjat, 1913) is widely used. The 'one parent-one language' approach is relatively effective in promoting active bilingualism among young children in a society where there is little support for the minority language. However, there is a general perception that maintenance of the minority language into middle childhood and beyond is difficult as during this period children's contacts with the outside world expand and the input in the majority language increases. This book examines the sociolinguistic environment and the nature of parental input for children from Japanese-Australian families, who have been exposed to Japanese and English through the 'one parent-one language' approach in Australia. The research on which the book is based identifies factors which account for successful and unsuccessful cases of Japanese language maintenance of children from those families. The major part of this study involves discourse analysis of the conversations between four Japanese mothers and their primary school aged children based on audio-recordings over a period of 21 months. This qualitative approach is complemented by a quantitative study interviewing 25 Japanese mothers about their children's language experience.