Language Maintenance and the Second Generation: Policies and Practices

Abstract

A focus on language maintenance for the second generation in transnational or diasporic contexts evokes discourses about the threats and challenges to linguistic diversity in the face of generational change and concomitant rhetoric of nationalism and social integration. In this chapter, we examine the institutional or policy-based discourses as well as the individual experience-based voices surrounding language maintenance for children of migrating sojourners to Australia. Frequently known as the second generation, they are seen to link the past and the future in numerous ways: as carriers of cultural histories and knowledge directly passed ‘down’ from the first generation, as bodies of integration into, or social cohesion of, the new society. The pivotal nature of the link is demonstrated in the ways in which the second generation are seen as threats or challenges to language maintenance as well as potential transformers for bi/multilingualism and linguistic diversity. Furthermore, the second generation are part of the broader sociocultural and historical landscape, attracting meanings about separation, distinction and difference. Reconsidering the spaces, or locales, occupied by the second-generation migrant/first-generation local (referred to as local second generation in our discussion) has been linked to ‘third spaces’ (Brah, 1996) or hybridity (Hall, 1992) for diasporic populations.

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