Heritage language acquisition and maintenance in Chinese heritage families

Abstract

For many Chinese immigrant families in English-speaking countries, it is important to pass on the heritage language to the second generation because it marks the ancestry and carries cultural identity. In ongoing work, we explore how Chinese is acquired by the generation born in overseas communities such as the USA and UK. The Child Heritage Chinese Corpus (CHCC) compiled by Mai, Matthews and Yip (2018) documents the language development of American-born Chinese children who were exposed to their heritage language (Mandarin and/or Cantonese) at home, and the societal majority language English at school and at home. The corpus currently contains longitudinal data covering the age range from 1;07-4;01 from three children: Luna, Avia and Winston (see https://childes.talkbank.org/access/Biling/CHCC.html). These children successfully acquire Mandarin and/or Cantonese in their preschool years, while developing a bilingual identity. In later childhood and adolescence, such children typically experience attrition of their heritage language. A common pattern is for the ancestral language to be lost in the course of three generations in a process of intergenerational language shift. A case study by Li, Matthews and Yip (in preparation) shows that language shift in such cases is far from inevitable, but can be reversed as proposed by Fishman (1991). In the family studied, the second generation has resumed acquisition and use of Mandarin in order to transmit the language to the third generation. We focus on the role of the first and second generations and of new communications technology in enabling transmission of the ancestral language. The reversal of language shift is motivated by an emergent American-Chinese identity as well as an appreciation of the benefits of bilingualism.