Globalisation has resulted in European families that have a variety of home languages, leading to the need for heritage language learning (HLL). The purpose of HLL is to ensure that in addition to learning the language of their schools, children with migrant backgrounds also maintain their heritage language (HL). Besides the 'regular' teaching, in…

The complexity of language contact and intercultural communication has generated various issues in relation to language use and education. As one of the many Chinese dialects ("fangyans"), the Chaoshan dialect ("Teochew") has been affected by the extensive promotion of Putonghua, the key lingua franca across China, and English,…

This study is a sociolinguistic exploration into the survival of a transnational language in the United States - a multilingual and multicultural environment. Using an adapted General Ethnicity Questionnaire, it interrogates the social dimensions of heritage language use and the diverse linguistic experiences of 120 first-generation Yorùbá-English…

Research on multilingualism in the home has approached the family as a fixed unit thus neglecting the dynamic view of the family and its intersection with family language practices. The present study aims to address this gap by focusing on Russian-speaking mothers in Finland who have raised their children bilingually in single-parent as well as in…

Early childhood professionals can act as catalysts in encouraging home language maintenance in multilingual families. However, there is a dearth of research on whether these professionals advise parents to speak their home language(s) to their offspring, and furthermore, little is known about what prompts professionals to proffer language advice.…

We examined the influence of language and socioeconomic factors on academic achievement in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC): a multilingual society with a recent history of language revitalisation. We analysed scores obtained by Grade 4 and Grade 10 students on a diagnostic mathematics test administered in either Basque or Spanish in the BAC.…

Cross-nationally, urbanization is associated with the decline of minority languages and a shift towards national and official languages. But the processes that link urbanization with language shift have not been adequately documented. In this paper we consider the relationship between cities and language shift from a sociolinguistic perspective,…

Based on Spolsky's (2004) tripartite framework for language policy, this study explores language practices, language ideology, and language management in relation to minority languages, Putonghua, and English in ethnic minority families in Yunnan, China. Through observations of and interviews with nine interethnic marriage families in Kena Village…

This article discusses family language policy and the tensions between mothers' and children's language beliefs in two Vietnamese immigrant families in Melbourne. These tensions have frequently been discussed from the parental perspective, but it is less common to include the children's voice. We draw on a larger in-depth qualitative study of…

Studies on language shift in Singapore have focused on the language use within ethnic communities. However, despite increasing numbers of interethnic marriages, very few studies have explored the effect of such marriages on LS. This article explores the language practices within Malay-Chinese mixed marriages and examines how language policies in…

Due to the increased mobility and linguistic and cultural diversity internationally, there has been a renewed interest in the linguistic practices of immigrant families. Earlier scholarship focused on the difference between parenting in monolingual contexts and bilingual parenting conceptualised as management of more than one language in a family.…

Drawing on interviews with staff from Language Supplementary Schools (LSS) in Manchester (UK), we discuss the emergence of makeshift ideologies whereby actors seek to legitimise choices and policies of heritage language transmission in the diaspora setting. Actors discuss the use of regional and vernacular varieties, the consideration given to…

Drawing on data from a longitudinal linguistic ethnographic study of a trilingual (English, Japanese, Spanish) family in Australia, this paper suggests that rather than looking at their language use in terms of family language policy, better insights can be gained by exploring the translingual family repertoire. This repertoire is a central…

This is the first large-scale study of resources as a form of "language management" -- that is, a way of influencing children's language practices. We introduce the distinction between child-directed resources (i.e. those providing parents with opportunities to engage with their children in the languages they are transmitting) and…

In the present study, we have explored language learning motivation, attitudes and exposition strategies in participants' L2 and FL in an attempt to adopt a multilingual view that better suits the complex sociolinguistic context of the Basque Country. The study includes 200 young multilinguals from the Basque Country. Most of them have Basque as…