Early Bidialectal Maintenance among Chinese Heritage Learners in Canada

Abstract

Research on Chinese heritage-language maintenance has predominantly focused on Mandarin as the default mother tongue and has largely ignored learners’ dialects or language varieties. As a result, we know little about dialect speakers’ beliefs and practices of maintaining their language varieties other than Mandarin, particularly in the home domain. Using family language policy (FLP) as the theoretical framework, this multiple case study examined six Chinese families’ beliefs and practices in early bidialectal (Mandarin and dialect) maintenance over three years when their children moved through kindergarten to Grade 3. Findings indicated that parents subscribed to the dominant language ideologies and placed their dialects at the bottom of the language hierarchy. However, the parents differed in their beliefs in the value of their dialects; and families who celebrated bidialectalism actively maintained their dialects while those who did not gradually gave up on passing their dialects to their children, even when grandparents were involved in the maintenance efforts. The findings have important implications for supporting and achieving bidialectalism in immigrant countries.