Abstract
This article investigates Chinese-Australian parents’ ideologies and visions about the maintenance of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) as well as their struggles in using family language policy (FLP) as defence and coping mechanisms to address tensions associated with the transgenerational transmission of CHL. Language policy defined as an assemblage of ideologies, practices and management and parental agency understood as parents’ capacity to pursue their visions are deployed within Curdt-Christiansen’s dynamic model of FLP that accommodates a complex interplay of internal and external factors. The study focuses on 15 parents who were committed to and made agentive efforts to maintain CHL and transmit it to their next generations. Using interviews, parents’ visions based on their children’s future CHL proficiency and their agentive efforts around CHL transmission were examined. The findings revealed sharp contrasts between parents’ future visions and their lived experiences of struggles at present. Anticipating the eventual loss of CHL among their future generations in the Australian context, the parents struggled to negotiate FLP to combat the foreseeable language shift and defend their visions. The findings have implications for individuals, families, communities, institutions, and policies concerning the maintenance of heritage languages in Australia and globally.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: language, work and affective capitalism
- The pedagogy of love: a register of precarised English teachers in Chile
- Genealogies of reflexivity: register formations and the making of affective workers
- Language, (em)power(ment) and affective capitalism: the case of an entrepreneurship workshop for refugees in Germany
- Scripting Swiss smiles: a sociolinguistic analysis of affective-discursive practices in a Swiss call centre
- Empowerment narratives and sticky affects: the workings of affective capitalism in Philippine call centers
- Varia
- Intergenerational communication and family language policy of multicultural families in Japan
- Who texts what to whom and when? Patterning of texting in four multilingual minoritized language communities and a preliminary proposal for the language repertoire matrix
- Journey towards an unreachable destiny: parental struggles in the intergenerational transmission of Chinese as a heritage language in Australia