Immigrants arriving in a new country typically have varying ideas about the relative status of their native language and the language of the receiving society, and some have strategies for dealing with maintenance and shift. In all cases there are differences between the immigrants' language experiences in the two countries. This paper reports on a study which investigated what it is that Afrikaans speakers who have immigrated to New Zealand miss about speaking Afrikaans post-immigration; that is, the focus is on the participants' emotional responses to diminished exposure to and opportunities for using Afrikaans and the possible consequences of these circumstances, or what the researchers have termed ‘linguistic longing’. The study also explores the strategies implemented by the participants to deal with this longing. The findings indicate that most of the participants claim to miss a variety of linguistic aspects previously available to them in their home country, that some of them consciously implement maintenance strategies in order to fill this gap, but that inevitably signs of linguistic longing are signs of language loss/shift.
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