This study explores Vietnamese marriage-migrant mothers' changing attitudes toward heritage language (HL) education in South Korea through narratives collected in an interview setting over a period of four years. The findings show that while the mothers placed some value on HL education, they initially prioritized Korean at home because they…

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the motivations that key policy documents have put forward as justifications for Sweden's mother-tongue instruction in immigrant and historical minority languages as a multicultural policy that has endured for nearly half a century. The diachronic development of these motivations is analysed in four…

The present study examined the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender in 22 bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 13;5 years; Med=9;4 years; STD=2.3) who were born and raised in the United States and acquired Spanish as heritage speakers--that is, they learned Spanish, the minority language, in a home setting (Valdes, 2001). Each of the child…

Diasporic Indian languages in Malaysia are unique and distinguishable from their native variants. Past studies have indicated that dominant languages tend to overpower minority languages in multilingual communities, hence causing languages to shift. The aims of this study are to identify the language choices of Malaysian Tamils and to what extent…

In order to distinguish between language-related ideologies, Ruiz (1984) proposed three language orientations, namely 'language-as-problem', 'language-as-right' and 'language-as-resource'. Although this typology has been applied to various countries and regions around the globe, relevant research in China, a multi-ethnolinguistic country, remains…

The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of regional or minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. The majority of the Hungarian-speaking population in Slovenia lives in the bilingual ethnically mixed area of the Prekmurje region, where both Slovene and Hungarian are…

Bilingualism continues to increase with more than 350 different languages spoken in the United States, and more than 21% of people over the age of five (approximately 66 million people) speaking a language other than English at home (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). Many bilingual children in the US speak a minority first language (L1) and English as…

We investigated the role of socioeconomic status (SES) in the unfolding of vocabulary and text-comprehension skills in language minority bilingual children, who are educated exclusively in their L2. For comparison, a monolingual control group was also tested, consisting of children of the same age and schooling. We administered a synonyms task to…

Numerous studies indicate that the language and literacy development of young children is highly contingent upon the construction of an enriching home literacy environment. Using sociocultural theory as a framework, in this article I explore how a bilingual child's language and literacy acquisition is embedded as a social practice within the home…

Maintaining heritage languages is frequently desired by migrants to continue cultural and social connections to family and identity. However, in imagined monolingual nations such as Australia, efforts to transmit minority languages are seen as a private matter and largely unsupported. Transmission of culture and language is also frequently seen as…

This study explored whether the directionality of the relation between majority language and various facets of socioemotional development (three to 5 years old) differs between children with different language backgrounds. 12,951 children (49% girls; 85% White, 6% Pakistani and Bangladeshi, 3% Black, 3% Mix, 2% Indian) from the British Millennium…

Paradis' (2023) keynote article is a timely documentation of the ongoing shift in focus within childhood bilingualism research from investigating the factors that modulate majority or second language (ML/L2) attainment (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011) to understanding the sources of variation that lead to minority heritage language (HL)…

This article investigates the language orientations in education policy documents for early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Finland and Norway. Finland, an officially bilingual country, and Norway, a predominantly monolingual country, share similar views on ECEC. However, the ECEC field in both countries has undergone major changes in…

This paper engages with the negotiation of insider and outsider researcher identities in the context of Welsh-English bilingualism in Wales. It aims to develop a reflexive approach to researching bilingualism, foregrounding the actions and experiences of doing bilingual research in a minority language context. Taking data from education and…

This article shares helpful, research-backed ways that parents can support minority languages in their children's lives. Many parents around the world face language struggles, including losing heritage languages to the community language or trying to support a foreign language to increase future opportunities. For example, parents in Mexico may…