heritage language maintenance

In a monolingual nation like Australia where English is predominant in almost every domain, bilingual parents’ efforts to transmit their heritage language (HL) to their children becomes challenging. The main culprit is that young minority group speakers barely see advantages in learning their own language (Holmes & Wilson, 2017). This is probably because they are more open to the dominant English that undoubtedly benefits their status, prestige, social well-being and economic success. For the purpose of successful assimilation, some adolescents even feel pressured to shift entirely to English in public places, since speaking different languages can be regarded as threatening by the majority group. For this reason, the context of using their mother tongue is restricted to private homes only. Due to the lack of access to wider speech communities, alongside the shrinking of the domains in which HL can be used, young generations will become less proficient in HL, leading to their probable language loss. To help children maintain their HL into adulthood, parents should be determined and consistent in enriching their home environment with HL from children’s childhood (Oriyama, 2016). As Holmes and Wilson (2017) stated that pride in their ethnic identity and culture can contribute to language maintenance, parents should expose their kids to various culture-related contents in HL. Some effective strategies for raising children’s interest in their culture are daily books reading in HL, playing traditional DVDs with dances and songs in HL, watching entertaining movies in HL, etc. (Holmes & Wilson, 2017). Although parental efforts are important, Oriyame (2016) suggested that it is insufficient without support from HL community practice. He insisted that HL community groups with common values, attitudes, norms, and goals should be established. These places will encourage children’s HL literacy improvement through socialization and active engagement in sharing common interests. If children can feel a sense of belonging to their minority group, they will highly value their HL and be more willing to maintain it. Since children also have more domains and contexts to use their minority language, HL maintenance will be facilitated (Holmes & Wilson, 2017).