Personal histories shape how immigrant families transmit their home language to children

According to Statistics Canada, in 2021, one in four Canadians had at least one mother tongue other than English or French. Many people grow up with their family’s heritage languages — like Mandarin, Punjabi, Spanish or Arabic — as part of their family’s cultural heritage.

Why is it, though, that some families manage to successfully pass their heritage language onto the next generation while other families struggle to do so?

Our recent research highlights that even in the same ethnic community, a heritage language could develop along different paths.

We worked with Vietnamese families (all originally from South Vietnam) who settled in Montréal following the 1975 Fall of Saigon in the Vietnam War. We recruited 38 parent-child pairs from Montréal’s Vietnamese diaspora. Pairs consisted of one immigrant parent, born and raised in Vietnam, and one child, a second-generation Canadian.

We were interested in our participants’ language skills, so we measured how well they spoke Vietnamese. Although all families left Vietnam in the aftermath of the war, this difficult experience affected them differently. We found that families that emigrated primarily to escape political persecution and those who left due to economic hardship took different paths to preserve their home language.

Parents’ beliefs shape children’s learning

In the families that escaped Vietnam due to political turmoil, the Vietnamese language skills in the second generation were predicted by how strongly the parents felt about the importance of their home language and culture. For these families, North Vietnam’s takeover of the south symbolized a threat to the survival of their culture.

In the words of one parent, the military advances of the north to the south also involved an assault on people’s language and identity:

“The [North Vietnamese] brought with them vocabulary from the North … we don’t understand those words, but they forced the southern people to use them.”

It is these strong beliefs about the distinctiveness of their home language that prompted the families of political immigrants to take active roles preserving their language after arriving in Canada.

These parents invested heavily in community projects by founding heritage language schools. They established cultural centres and organized youth associations — all with the goal of helping their children to practise and learn Vietnamese through community-driven activities.

Leaving after economic hardship

In contrast, in the families that left Vietnam due to economic hardship, their children’s Vietnamese language skills were predicted by the parents’ pride in present-day Vietnam.

These families managed to separate the loss of their homeland from their pride in contemporary Vietnam, which for them defined their identity. In the words of one economic immigrant:

“I know that I am still a Vietnamese, I still see the [national flag of Vietnam] representing me in aspects that do not involve politics.”

These parents actively encouraged their children to consume Vietnamese culture from present-day Vietnam. By watching Vietnamese web dramas and listening to Vietnamese pop music, their children improved their Vietnamese skills — all through exposure to age- and interest-appropriate content.

Importance of language contact

Sustained and meaningful communication is key to developing and maintaining language skills.

We therefore also measured the richness of our second-generation participants’ language contact by asking them to give us the total number of friends with whom they used Vietnamese and to indicate if their interaction involved personal issues or more general, everyday topics. Here again we found that language contact depended on each family’s history of immigration.

The children of political immigrants seemed to have particularly benefitted from having a larger community network of fellow Vietnamese speakers. Political immigrants mostly came from an affluent middle class, and they secured prestigious jobs in Canada — as doctors, engineers and business people, for example.

These families also tended to settle near each other, which helped their children meet and befriend other Vietnamese speakers so they could practise the language.

In contrast, economic immigrants tended to work in blue-collar or low-prestige occupations after emigration. These families also resided away from neighbourhoods that were predominantly Vietnamese. This made it more difficult for their children to meet Vietnamese friends outside the home and to interact with people whose language skills were similar or stronger than their own.

Personal relationships matter

Even though the children of economic immigrants had fewer Vietnamese-speaking friends, their relationships with friends were close-knit and their conversations involved personal topics. This was to their advantage, as language tends to develop best through in-depth rather than superficial conversations.

This was not the case, however, for the children of political immigrants. Their communication in Vietnamese involved less personal and less intimate conversations. As explained by one participant, the trauma experienced by their parents got passed on to them, creating feelings of mistrust and even reluctance to deeply engage with their heritage:

“All the communities I know are from my parents, and the population is older. Every time I hear something, there’re conflicts between different groups … they always go against each other. It makes me scared to participate.”

Different pathways

Anyone who has tried learning another language knows it’s not simple. There is similarly no single way to preserve a family’s home language.

Our findings highlight that paths to learning a language are grounded in various social practices which are traceable to each family’s unique past.

This resonates with previous research suggesting that heritage language development reflects the speaker’s upbringing. For example, researchers have noted that how immigrants’ heritage language is preserved is affected by broader issues of sociocultural identity intersecting with race and histories of trauma.

There may be no single best way to pass on a language to the next generation. But if we reflect on each family’s past, we can understand why heritage language speakers might use their home language in certain ways.

Immigrants’ personal histories — such as reasons why they leave their homeland — might have a lasting impact on whether and how they choose to pass their home language onto their children.

By Thao-Nguyen Nina Le & Pavel Trofimovich – The conversation – September 19, 2024