How immigrant families pass on their native language to their children depends on their personal history.

According to Statistics Canada, one in four Canadians had at least one native language other than English or French in 2021. Many people grow up with a family heritage language such as Mandarin, Punjabi, Spanish or Arabic as part of their family cultural heritage.

But why are some families successful in passing on their native language to the next generation while others struggle?

Our recent research has revealed that even within the same ethnic community, heritage languages ​​can develop along different paths.

We worked with Vietnamese families (all originally from South Vietnam) who resettled in Montreal after the fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War in 1975. We recruited 38 parent-child pairs from Montreal’s Vietnamese immigrant population. Pairs consisted of immigrant parents born and raised in Vietnam and their children who were second-generation Canadians.

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

Parental beliefs shape children’s learning

For families who fled Vietnam due to political upheaval, second-generation Vietnamese language skills were predicted by how strongly their parents felt about the importance of their native language and culture. For these families, the North Vietnamese occupation of South Vietnam represented a threat to the survival of their culture.

In the words of one parent, the military advance from North to South was also an attack on people’s language and identity.

“(The North Vietnamese) brought with them a vocabulary from the North…we couldn’t understand the language, but they forced the people in the South to use it.”

It was this strong belief in the uniqueness of their native language that prompted political immigrant families to take an active role in preserving their native language after they arrived in Canada.

These parents have invested heavily in community projects by setting up heritage language schools, they have established cultural centres and organised youth associations – all with the aim of helping their children practice and learn Vietnamese through community-led activities.

Leaving after financial difficulties

In contrast, among families who left Vietnam due to economic hardship, children’s Vietnamese language skills were predicted by parents’ current pride in Vietnam.

These families were able to separate the loss of their homeland from the pride they felt in the modern Vietnam that defined their identity. As one economic migrant put it:

“I still consider myself Vietnamese and I still think (the Vietnamese flag) represents me in apolitical ways.”

These parents encouraged their children to actively engage with modern Vietnamese culture. By watching Vietnamese web dramas and listening to Vietnamese pop music, their children improved their Vietnamese language skills by being exposed to content appropriate for their age and interests.

The importance of language contact

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

We therefore also measured the richness of their language contact by asking second-generation participants to indicate the total number of friends with whom they spoke Vietnamese and whether this interaction was for personal matters or more general, everyday topics.Again, we found that language contact varied by each family’s immigration history.

The children of political immigrants seem to particularly benefit from having a large community network of Vietnamese-speaking peers: Many of them come from affluent middle-class backgrounds and hold prestigious jobs in Canada as doctors, engineers or businessmen.

These families tended to live near each other, which allowed their children to meet and make friends with other Vietnamese speakers and practice the language.

In contrast, economic migrants tended to work in blue-collar or lower-status jobs, and their families lived away from predominantly Vietnamese areas, making it more difficult for their children to meet Vietnamese friends outside the home or interact with people who had equal or greater language skills.

Personal Relationships Are Important

Even though the children of economic migrants had fewer Vietnamese-speaking friends, their relationships were close and their conversations were more personal — an advantage for them, because language tends to develop best through deep conversation rather than surface talk.

This was not the case for the children of political migrants, whose communication in Vietnamese was less personal and intimate. As one participant explained, the trauma experienced by their parents was passed on to their children, creating distrust and even a reluctance to engage deeply with their roots.

“All the communities I know are from my parents’ homes and the population is older. Every time I hear something, there’s conflict between different groups… They’re always at each other’s throats. It makes me scared to get involved.”

Different Paths

Anyone who has ever tried to learn another language knows it’s not easy, and similarly, there’s no one way to preserve your family’s native language.

Our findings highlight that pathways to language learning are rooted in different social practices that reach back to each family’s unique past.

This is consistent with previous research suggesting that heritage language development reflects a speaker’s upbringing. For example, researchers have noted that how an immigrant’s heritage language is preserved is influenced by broader issues of sociocultural identity that intersect with histories of race and trauma.

There may not be one best way to pass a language on to the next generation, but looking back at each family’s history can help us understand why heritage language speakers use their native language in a particular way.

Immigrants’ personal histories, such as the reasons they left their home countries, can have a lasting impact on whether and how they choose to pass on their native language to their children.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.