Article2005

Heritage Languages and Community Identity Building: The Case of a Language of Lesser Status

47 citations0/0 files storedInternational Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Multilingual Education and Policy Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies Education and experiences of immigrants and refugees

Abstract

Diasporic communities formed as a result of recent migration movements face particular issues and challenges in supporting the intergenerational transmission of their heritage language through language maintenance and heritage language education (HLE) initiatives, especially when the language involved is not one that has high visibility and status in the surrounding society. This paper reports on a case study of ongoing action-oriented research to raise awareness and use of the heritage language within the second and third generations of such a community, Maltese-background people in Melbourne, Australia. The community is well established with the ageing first generation having primarily migrated in 1950s and 1960s. Within the community poorer than average educational outcomes for the second generation led to a programme of research and action to enhance ethnic identification and involvement with the heritage language and culture. Questionnaires, interviews and focus groups were conducted to investigate attitudes to and use of Maltese within the community. These data have formed the basis for other ongoing initiatives to strengthen heritage language maintenance and education efforts, described and evaluated below.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 47 citations exist upstream.

References

1985Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism 1982Language and social networks . By Leslie Milroy. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Pp. xii, 218.1989Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective 1981Core values and cultural identity 1990Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective 2001An introductory reader to the writings of Jim Cummins 2002Investigating the role of social networks in language maintenance and shift 1995Immigration and Australia's language resources

Cited by

2010Multilingualism in Australia 2009Contesting heritage: language, legitimacy, and schooling at a weekend Japanese-language school in the United States 2022Paternal agency in heritage language maintenance in Australia: Polish fathers in action 2008The Latent Speaker: Attaining Adult Fluency in an Endangered Language 2016Parents’ reasons for community language schools: insight from a high-shift, non-visible, middle-class community

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.