Heritage Language Maintenance and family relationship dynamics: A children’s perspective

Abstract

Aims and objectives:

This qualitative research investigates the complexities around Heritage Language Maintenance (HLM) efforts and their implications for family relationships.

Methodology:

The topic was explored via an in-depth case study drawing on narrative data from a Catalan immigrant mother to New Zealand, and her two New-Zealand-born daughters.

Data and analysis:

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, using a narrative inquiry approach that provided a quasi-longitudinal component in the form of retrospective reflections from the participants within their ‘generational unit’. Using a reflexive thematic analysis approach, themed HLM practices involved immersion-method, awareness-raising for the heritage language (HL) and culture, and annual visits to the home country.

Findings and conclusions:

The overall outcome of HLM efforts was generally successful, but the process entailed significant, not always positive, impacts on the participants’ individual lives and their mutual relationships. Some of these pertained to linguistic power struggles, feelings of isolation, and a sense of non-belonging. Findings also suggest that the strong link with their HL and cultural identity played a role in shaping the daughters’ agency to maintain HL, ultimately leading to an improved relationship with their mother and contributing to the family’s overall well-being.

Originality:

Focusing on the (adult) children’s experiences and perspectives on successful HL transmission, the present research deepens our understanding of the family dynamics involved with HLM.

Significance/implications:

This article provides fresh insights into the challenges that immigrant families may be facing as a result of their HL-transmission attempts. Developing a full linguistic repertoire including both the HL and societal-dominant language is essential for children to participate in society and life at home, where HL symbolizes the family’s shared cultural identity. The implications of this study are therefore significant to language policymakers and language education sector whose efforts are aimed at promoting and supporting successful additive bi/multilingualism in children with an HL background.

Introduction

In immigration contexts, heritage language maintenance (HLM) is often not an easy task and only few families manage to succeed, with most parents finding it challenging to negotiate their family relationships when they see a language shift in their children (Barkhuizen, 2006; Berardi-Wiltshire, 2017; Gharibi & Mirvahedi, 2021; Wang, 2023). The confronting reality for these families is that their communication is no longer an obvious and spontaneous occurrence, but a matter that ‘suddenly requires attention’, and language choice becoming ‘extremely significant in these families’ daily life’ in order to negotiate their relationships with each other (Tannenbaum, 2005, p. 250). In this sense, parental HLM efforts are often underpinned by considerations of how language choice and use relate to parents’ and children’s feelings of togetherness and sense of belonging in terms of self-identification with specific language groups (Berardi-Wiltshire, 2017; Gharibi & Mirvahedi, 2021; Tannenbaum & Berkovich, 2005; Wang, 2023; Yates & Terraschke, 2013).

The proven association between family cohesion and well-being and HLM makes it an important area of research that should necessarily include the children’s perspectives as the next generation to expand our understanding of the processes leading to bilingualism and of the relationship dynamics involved in intergenerational heritage language (HL) transmission in the home. The qualitative research on which this article is based investigated one immigrant family’s HLM efforts as an in-depth exploratory case study, particularly focusing on the children’s viewpoint on HLM as emerging from personal narrative retrospective reflections. Its findings uncover the many ways in which parental HLM efforts affected the children, including examples of less-than-positive consequences, such as linguistic power struggles, feelings of isolation, and sense of non-belonging, which have remained relatively underexplored so far. The present article aims to present and discuss these as a way to contribute to our understanding of the relationships between HL maintenance efforts and family relationships and cohesion by offering fresh insights into the challenges that immigrant families may be facing as a result of their HL transmission attempts. This research is original in its kind in that the children-participants are now adults who can offer mature and articulate reflections and insights into their childhood experiences of HLM and of the differences between theirs and their mother’s perspectives on the process. The implications of this study are particularly significant to immigrant parents, policymakers, and the (heritage) language education sector, whose efforts are aimed at promoting and supporting successful additive bi/multilingualism in children of migrant families with an HL background.

Literature review

Family Language Policy and the importance of parental language beliefs

The family domain plays a crucial role in a child’s linguistic formation, and Family Language Policy (FLP) research has identified three components that are important, especially in immigration contexts, to families’ language choices and use: language beliefs, practices, and management (King et al., 2008; Schwartz & Verschik, 2013; Spolsky, 2004, 2012). Among these, parental beliefs or ideologies have been highlighted as the key component when it comes to managing the family’s language maintenance goals, as it is the parental beliefs about language and cultural values, and their attitudes towards bilingualism and language learning that determine language choice within the family (Barkhuizen, 2006). For this reason, parental language ideologies are considered a ‘key driving force behind FLP’, and ‘among the most important predictors of successful language policies’ (Berardi-Wiltshire, 2017, p. 273). This is especially true of parental beliefs about the value of speaking the HL as a symbol of the family’s shared cultural identity, as these can foster a sense of belonging in terms of self-identification with the heritage culture and can become a powerful drive for parents’ HLM efforts. Tawalbeh (2019) rightfully noted that a ‘positive evaluation of the language-identity link may [. . .] exert a strong influence on immigrants’ investment in maintaining and transmitting their languages’ (p. 35). Exemplary of this were the findings in Gharibi and Mirvahedi’s (2021) study that identified three main reasons for their participants’ HLM efforts, that is, to ‘instil and cultivate’ the Iranian identity in their children, to stay connected with the homeland, and to keep the family cohesion.

Parents are the main regulators of HL practices at home and even though their efforts to implement, manage, and prioritize these decisions may be wrought with complex emotional processes (Barkhuizen, 2006; Gharibi & Mirvahedi, 2021; Norton, 1998; Torsch, 2022; Wang, 2023; Yates & Terraschke, 2013), they often realize that a shift away from the HL can contribute to the creation of an emotional distance within the family (Schwartz & Verschik, 2013). In fact, parents often consider the use of the HL at home as ‘a symbol of cultural pride and a tool that strengthens family cohesion’, especially when it comes to their children’s socialization into the heritage culture (Schwartz & Verschik, 2013, p. 6). However, according to Harris’ (1995) Group Socialization Theory and as highlighted by the current study, children face context-dependent learning environments that take place both inside and outside the home to become part of the various societal groups they belong to, including, knowing the language and holding the prevailing beliefs and attitudes of those groups. In bilingual situations, this theory is particularly relevant ‘where the usage of the home language is connected to behavioural, cognitive and emotional responses that occurred at home, and the other language to those that occurred outside the home’ (p. 462). Harris’ theory was supported by a case study from Caldas and Caron-Caldas (2000, 2002), who found that bilingual children’s preference for one of the two languages was highly dependent on their environmental context, that is, where they belonged/wanted to belong to, with peer control during their adolescence years having a major influence on their language practice. In addition, as most migrants nowadays remain in contact with their families and HL communities all over the world through the use of modern technology, social media, and the internet, this new dimension plays a major role in (heritage) language maintenance (Hatoss, 2013). For researchers wanting to investigate which HL practices may improve children’s sense of belonging to their HL culture to increase the chances of successful HL transmission, it is therefore also important to reflect on this dimension of fluidity in community and migration contexts when it comes to establishing a cultural identity and sense of belonging to the HL culture.

HLM and the family cohesion factor

Many parents prefer to use HL at home with their children, especially when expressing their emotions and in communications that contain meaningful and intense emotional loads, and studies increasingly suggest that there is a connection between HLM and family cohesion. Research from Tannenbaum and Berkovich (2005), for example, discovered a strong link between family bonds and the LM patterns of immigrant children, which seemed connected to the overall feelings of well-being within the family. This link is even more evident in research where intergenerational language shift within immigrant families is shown to negatively impact family relationships (Norton, 1998; see also Caldas & Caron-Caldas, 2002; Wong Fillmore, 2000). Even in cases where the parents are fluent in the societal-dominant language, the HL is often the language of choice for ‘more authentic and intimate modes of communication’ (Tannenbaum, 2005, p. 249), which is in line with reports of parents’ preference to use the language with which they have the strongest emotional ties in their communications with their kids (Dewaele, 2011; Pavlenko, 2004).

The link between HLM and family cohesion has also been considered from the second-generation HL speakers’ vantagepoint. Tannenbaum and Berkovich (2005), for instance, found early indications that second-generation adolescents’ positive emotional attachment to their parents potentially leads to a more positive attitude towards their parents’ HL ‘as if they are extending a willingness to know and use the language of their parents’ (p. 301). It was even suggested that this link could be circular, that is, harmonious family relations encourage LM, which induces family closeness, etc. (Tannenbaum, 2005; Tannenbaum & Howie, 2002). Tannenbaum’s (2005) case study also reported of strong indicators that children of close-knit families seemed to be more motivated to learn and maintain the HL for the purpose of enhancing this closeness and strengthening their own feelings of family togetherness.

Such connection between family cohesion and LM is particularly highlighted in qualitative studies of HLM. Gharibi and Mirvahedi (2021), for instance, found that HLM was important to keep the family together, with one mother stating that HL helped her ‘keep the child’ (p. 6). Similarly, Berardi-Wiltshire (2017) reported that HL represented the only possible means by which the parents could express their true self and it was ‘the only basis for truly intimate relationships’, not only family internally (i.e., parents–children) but also with Spanish-speaking relatives abroad (Berardi-Wiltshire, 2017, p. 278). Berardi-Wiltshire (2017) concluded that the families held strong beliefs in terms of the value of the HL as ‘a symbol of a shared identity as HL speakers, which is crucial in establishing the degree of emotional closeness normally associated with relationships within the family and thus also important in the maintenance of family cohesion’ (p. 278). The parents in her study rated the affective value of their HL so highly that they perceived it to play an important role in contributing to the children’s overall well-being, that is, where they would have meaningful relationships with other family members but also a sense of belonging as a social identity and a well-developed sense of self as an individual.

As stated earlier, parents regulate the HL practices inside the home in terms of what works for family relationships and cohesion, so it is also interesting to find that in Fogle’s (2013) study the children’s experiences of parental values and practices were re-shaped and re-negotiated by the dynamic processes of interactions taking place outside the home. The study concluded that for these children ‘FLP was not just about language, but a means to bond as a family, establish a family identity and belonging, and find comfort in the differences that could be troublesome [. . .] in other, external spheres’ (p. 197).

Recent research has also pointed towards a positive relationship between bilingualism and child-well-being, particularly in cases where the parents also have high levels of proficiency in the majority language (see Tannenbaum, 2005). This is because even under strong societal pressures towards language shift away from the HL, the language continues to fulfil an important role in fostering children’s well-being ‘as a vessel to transmit cultural beliefs, values, traditions and emotions’ (Müller et al., 2020, p. 1065). Müller et al.’s (2020) conclusion is that proficiency in both HL and L2 seems indeed associated with higher levels of well-being because children need a ‘full linguistic repertoire to feel fully comfortable participating in life at home and in the society’ (p. 1066). Ultimately, this point highlights the importance of awareness-raising among migrant parents about the links between children’s overall language development and their well-being as a way to promote well-informed FLP decisions, as well as the related need for further and more detailed explorations of how such links might manifest and be managed, both in terms of opportunities and challenges, in specific cases of parental efforts towards HL transmission.

Methodology

Design and scope

This case study focused on one immigrant family in New Zealand (NZ): a solo-parent, Catalan-born mother and her two New-Zealand-born daughters. The research adopted a generational view of the FLP framework (Spolsky, 2012), so that participants’ experiences could be captured as relating to two separate generational units. This paper discusses the children’s experiences with HL transmission and while each sister had her own individual views on the HLM journey, the focus remained on capturing their perspectives as reflecting those of a generational unit sharing the same experience.

Participant family

The reason for focusing on this particular family is that all participants successfully achieved trilingualism for themselves (i.e., Catalan, English and Spanish), while living in a predominantly English-oriented society (NZ). This family also had two other key characteristics that have remained relatively underexplored as factors in language maintenance (Tannenbaum & Berkovich, 2005; Yates & Terraschke, 2013): the role of sibling relationships and the fact that the family has been solo parented. The mother’s (pseudonym Mònica) first language is Catalan/Spanish and her second (L2) is English. Her two daughters (pseudonym Sam and Sofia) are bilingual in Catalan and English, with Catalan being their L2. For the purposes of this study, Catalan is described as the family’s HL at home, while they use predominantly English in their NZ communities.

It may be helpful here to point out that the region of Catalonia (situated in territorial Spain) historically once was an autonomous and prosperous province where Catalan was the official language (NB–Catalan takes its roots from Vulgar Latin and is linguistically considered as a separate language, not a dialect of Spanish). However, the region saw the Catalan language banned by the Spanish fascist regime that resulted from the Civil War in 1939. When many migrants from the impoverished south of Spain came to Catalonia after the war, Spanish soon became the lingua franca, which is why many people in that region are now bilingual. Spanish is/was practised by participant family as a third language, at home with mother’s Spanish friends and back at school.

Instruments and data analysis

Two sets of semi-structured interviews were conducted with each of the generational units, that is, two interviews with the mother, and two with the sisters together. They were videorecorded to help with data-triangulation and some of the video-excerpts from the mother’s interviews were used as prompts during the interviews with the daughters to aid the sisters recall early-childhood memories and events. According to Brewin et al. (1993), this technique can help cover lapses in the participants’ early-experience memories, and therefore minimize reliability issues regarding the accuracy of the parents’ recall of their children’s events and achievements. This video-stimulated interviewing (VSI) technique created a powerful recall-and-reflection-stimulus tool to help the children access and reflect on their early childhood memories (Van Braak et al. (2018). Using this strategy proved extremely useful for encouraging narratives from the participants and added a quasi-longitudinal aspect to this research (Estrada-Loehne, 2017; McCracken, 1988), which was particularly important to investigate the sisters’ perspectives on their relationship with one another in relation to the HLM efforts over time. For instance, the participants had memories of certain events, or even remembered the same ones differently, but over time their reflections had evolved and changed their perspective. In fact, the—now adult—sisters were able to see their mother’s perspective more clearly, to notice the immediate differences from their own and to articulate these better than a younger child could. Overall, this led to a richness and depth in the data that is unique for this type of HLM research and uncovered nuances of less-than-positive impacts (e.g., linguistic power struggles, feelings of isolation and sense of non-belonging) that have previously remained unnoticed in research. As the strategies used in the data-collection phase required a constant reflexive mindset from the researcher, a reflexive thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2022) was used to analyse the data before organizing the findings as narratives (Barkhuizen, 2006; Hignett, 2021). In the following section, the HLM practices and their specific impacts are discussed in subsections as emerged themes.

Discussion of findings

Overall, the HLM efforts that took place at this family’s home can be summarized into three most salient practices: immersion-method for linguistic and cultural transmission, annual visits to the home country, and awareness-raising for language values and beliefs. As we will see, these efforts had a generally positive outcome even though the process sometimes had significant, not always positive, impacts on the individual family members, their well-being, and their relationship with one another. In order to bring these into focus, the next section begins by discussing the language practices as implemented by the parent through data excerpts from the mother’s narratives interwoven with the daughters’ reported experiences of these practices. It then continues with a discussion of the impacts of the mother’s HLM efforts over time from the daughters’ (retrospective) perspectives. As a note to the reader, quotes or parts of quotes rendered in capitals express the emphasis with which they were spoken.

HLM practices

Immersion method for linguistic and cultural transmission

At the participants’ home, all communications and routines were aimed at creating a Catalan-immersive environment as much as possible to maintain and transmit the Catalan language, its traditions and culture. In Mònica’s view, this approach was the only way to teach her daughters their HL and therefore she did ‘anything that would help not only the language but also the culture, the values, the roots, the connection with the family’. Her view aligns with Caldas (2006), who mentions societal language immersion (i.e., Catalan) as an effective tool to achieve bilingual fluency in children. As far as Sam and Sofia can remember of their childhood before their parents’ divorce, they spoke Catalan to their mother and English to their father. They were always encouraged to speak only in Catalan to their mother and with each other, even when they were in the company of speakers of other languages outside the home:

Sam:

We knew it was always going to be, for all our media, all our games, all our family conversations, they were all going to be NOT in English, and. . .if we played together, at mum’s house, whenever she was around, we would speak Catalan between us.

Especially after their parents’ divorce, ‘Catalan-only’ was rule No. 1 in the home or any other environment where Mònica was present, further intensifying the OPOL (One-Parent, One-Language) arrangements that this family initially had in place as FLP. Sam and Sofia admitted to sometimes defaulting to English with each other but to using Catalan as ‘their secret language’ whenever they wanted to keep their conversations private at their father’s house or from other English-speakers around them. When shown an excerpt where Mònica talks about the time the girls would regularly swap between two households, Sam and Sofia discussed how their parents’ divorce had physically split their linguistic landscape, influencing their language use. Their reflection on the resulting solo-parent FLP associates this with the value that the HL came to hold in their adult life, concluding that the situation probably contributed to its maintenance:

Sofia:

I almost found it easier to preserve the language as mum’s home was just associated with the Catalan environment. . .

Sam:

I agree, the language was perhaps better preserved because we had a domain that was JUST Catalan. . .

Sofia:

I don’t know how well the language would have been preserved in the household for us [having both parents there] . . .It would have been so much more watered down.

The Catalan-only rule enforced by Mònica also meant that the family adhered to specific Catalonian cultural traditions at home, for instance, around Christmastime (Caja Tio), birthdays and other special occasions. As research shows, mothers often regard their HL as a tool to instil and cultivate their cultural identity in the next generation (Gharibi & Mirvahedi, 2021; King et al., 2008; Torsch, 2022; Wang, 2023). Sam and Sofia felt their mother ‘did a great job’ at sticking to Catalonian traditions when they were small, which made them aware of their heritage culture. Mònica’s tenacity aligns with research that associates successful LM with parents whose FLP is grounded in a strong ethnic identification with their culture of origin and who view language as an inseparable of their identity (Berardi-Wiltshire, 2017; Extra & Yagmur, 2010; Holmes et al., 1993; Tawalbeh, 2019; Wurm, 2002, as cited in Bradley, 2002).

Visits to the home country

Travelling to Barcelona on a regular basis became an important means and priority for Mònica to broaden the children’s linguistic and cultural immersion from the limited context of their home to the wider context of their extended Catalan family. These visits were an important way for them to experience the same Catalan traditions that Mònica had grown up with herself. For instance, she would show them how to dance the Sardana, a traditional Catalonian dance, with their grandparents. The annual visits were also an opportunity to source books and videos in Catalan, to be used as language teaching resources back in NZ.

Visiting Barcelona for the first time made the children very excited to hear Catalan being spoken by people outside the boundaries of their home. According to both, these annual trips were ‘key’ to their early childhood understanding of the value of Catalan and of bilingualism, as it made them realize their importance for creating and maintaining connections with their family overseas:

Sam:

I’ve always known that it is important and. . .traveling there was very key in my understanding from a very young age, because that made me realize that I wouldn’t be able to communicate with most of my family if I couldn’t speak to them. . . So, it was not just losing a culture, it was losing many close relationships.

Awareness-raising for language values and beliefs

Another important practice were Mònica’s lessons in language-associated values and beliefs, especially where it concerned the significance of language learning and respecting other people’s languages and cultures. Mònica spoke of languages as an ‘asset’ that would enhance opportunities in life for jobs and travelling, encouraging her daughters to take up Spanish at school as well, where they soon became conversational practice-buddies for fellow students. Sam and Sofia distinctly remembered how this messaging made them aware of how special their situation was and of the importance of language learning. It turned them into little bilingual ambassadors at their school, where they were curious about and keen to connect with other multicultural children. Sofia mentioned loving her language and enjoying feeling unique as a child because of it, even if her mum’s constant messaging about the importance of languages sometimes felt like ‘a broken record that would be drilled into your brain’.

An important part of Mònica’s message when it came to maintaining the HL was that they had a ‘a right to speak it’, and that speaking Catalan was a ‘sign of respect’ towards their roots and cultural identity and that maintenance was important for its survival as a minority language. Sam felt that ‘having an understanding for how special a language and culture is that isn’t the standard’ had made her more open to language learning, and later in life, had her take up Māori studies at university as well. In retrospect, Sam and Sofia considered that Mònica’s lessons, targeted at instilling a similar language-identity connection as their mother’s, were ‘one of the biggest factors in wanting to retain’ their language:

Sam:

So, the cultural identity side of learning a language would come up at the dinner table multiple times a week. . . We would have a conversation about language and all the benefits of being multilingual. [Speaking in Catalan] takes us putting in an effort, but we WANT to. We understand that it is important. We understand the connection it gives us to our culture and to our family and that is WHY we put in the effort. So, it’s because of that MESSAGING that we choose to keep wanting to practice a little more.

Impacts of HLM efforts

Sam and Sofia generally enjoyed growing up with Catalan and they used it as their ‘secret language’ at school or in other environments where they needed to keep their conversations safe and private. It created a special bond between them as sisters which sustained them through challenging times related to the Catalan-only rule at home and which not many of their peers would understand, an aspect also found in the literature (see Fogle, 2013, p. 197; Tannenbaum & Berkovich, 2005; Yates & Terraschke, 2013). For instance, prioritizing Catalan-only at home sometimes caused linguistic power struggles between Mònica and her daughters, resulting in feelings of (linguistic) inferiority and frustration. It also had significant impacts on the family’s social life, creating feelings of isolation and a sense of non-belonging. The next paragraphs discuss these impacts from Sam and Sofia’s perspectives, followed by a discussion of what was pivotal, in their view, for their HLM success and agency.

Language as power struggle

The sisters reported that communication with their mother was sometimes challenging because prioritizing the HL at home could create and exacerbate feelings of (linguistic) inferiority in them. They spoke about this in terms of ‘having another weakness at it’, but also in terms of not always having their ‘interactive-communicative’’ needs met, as they were not always able to articulate and share their emotions as fluently in Catalan as they could in English. For instance, during arguments, Sofia remembered defaulting to English, which represented her ‘little shield’ against her mother’s dominance in Catalan because that was the language, she could defend herself in best. Sam also recalled that for her speaking in English felt like a ‘point of power’ because it meant that Mònica wouldn’t be able to express herself as clearly as she could in Catalan. Sometimes the Catalan-only rule would make Sam refrain from sharing school or work experiences with her mother because she didn’t want the conversation to turn into another ‘lesson’ for her.

Reflecting on these challenging times in terms of their relationship and how this affected their language use, Sofia explained: ‘the relationship with mum would equal my relationship with Catalan’. Sam explained this further by adding that the practicality of her speaking Catalan would sometimes be affected according to the state of their relationship, for example, she would be less inclined to use it when she would be angry at her mother:

Sam:

When we weren’t having a good time with mum, and she was our person we talked to in Catalan every day, more the association then became ‘ah, that means that I gotta talk to mum and I am mad at mum’ . . . It wasn’t that I didn’t feel as good about the language or any less culturally identified with it. I still understood that half of my family overseas is Catalan, I am half Catalan, that never changed, but the WILLINGNESS to speak it day-to-day just with mum, that would sometimes be fluid, depending on how the relationship was with mum.

This notion of language as power struggle came through in the narratives of both generations and is a well-known aspect in LM research (Block, 2007; Bourdieu, 1991; Norton, 1998; Wang, 2023). In line with the hypothesis in Tannenbaum and Berkovich (2005), Sam and Sofia’s willingness to communicate with their mother would be affected by the state of their relationship at any given point, henceforth reducing, or increasing their use of Catalan. Especially during the teenage years, when Sam and Sofia started developing their own views and claiming their independence, the Catalan-only rule made their relationship with their mother especially challenging because language fluency would make a person within the family feel either powerful, or inferior in the disagreements and/or discussions, heightening tension and conflict. That said, Sam and Sofia also admitted that these arguments never negatively impacted how they generally valued the Catalan language or culture, only their willingness to use Catalan would be (temporarily) affected.

Feelings of isolation

The boundaries that were created around the family’s social life to facilitate the immersive effect of the Catalan-only rule at home, put the children in an isolating position. For instance, the strict adherence to the rule meant that Sam and Sofia did not have much say in inviting friends over, or this was discouraged especially if it would make them switch to English at home. Sam conveyed: ‘when you’re outside of the dominant language and culture, it can be quite an isolating feeling’, and this isolation would often be at the root of arguments with their mother who attempted to keep the English ‘threat’ at bay, an aspect also discussed by other researchers (see Gharibi & Mirvahedi, 2021; King et al., 2008; Torsch, 2022; Yates & Terraschke, 2013). For instance, for Sofia, sleepovers were important growing up, but at home it was considered a strange thing to do, and she was told ‘we don’t do sleepovers in our culture’:

Sofia:

I remember feeling like I missed out on this in my childhood . . . We were never the house . . . [that] had big communities. At home with mum, it was a lot more isolating. . .liking her space for her and us. Because there were so few people that mum could speak Catalan with, she really, just wanted time with us. I remember her saying ‘I’m too exhausted to speak English’, so that was the isolating part. . . And a lot more like ‘we’re together, we’re gonna speak this language’, but for me, I was wanting to feel that with other people. . . So that’s where I feel I really missed out on that community in terms of childhood.

In a wider reflection, Sofia is convinced that many bilingual children would recognize this sentiment of being controlled and isolated, saying ‘you feel siloed’, when your HL and culture is not understood apart from ‘the pockets you can find’ and in those cases ‘that [heritage] language is YOU-within-the-walls-of-your-home’. During their visits to Barcelona, Sam and Sofia only ever stayed with their grandparents which felt quite isolating again to a point that even their Catalan competence started to show traces of (linguistic) isolation. Sam and Sofia remembered being teased by their cousins for their ‘old-ladies version of Catalan’ since they mainly practised HL with just their grandparents and their mother, who had left Catalonia in her late twenties:

Sam:

We didn’t have a lot of exposure to young people. I think that was a big thing for both of us. Maybe 2 days out of the month there, we would see our cousins. . . And that was our only exposure to vocabulary used by people that age. When we started to do more trips by ourselves, stayed with these people for a long time. . . We realized that there’s a whole lot of ‘young slang’ that we just don’t know.

Growing up, Sam and Sofia also discovered that some of the HLM practices at home, presented as their Catalonian culture, were in fact not a true representation of the broad culture, but had more to do with some of the family members’ personalities and their parenting idiosyncrasies:

Sofia:

I definitely acted out. So, when mum said, ‘this isn’t Catalan’ . . . It did make me resent. . .it feels awful to say but. . . Because I felt like I grew up with this idea of what it was like to be Catalan, which, for some things. . .wasn’t a very positive experience for me.

Sam:

It made us want to leave THAT Catalan environment quite desperately. I just wanted to seek other, positive, Catalan experiences.

In retrospection, Sam and Sofia now realize that their limited exposure to peers and contemporary Catalonian experiences outside the boundaries of the family realm, had only given them a ‘narrow’, and sometimes outdated, representation of their heritage culture. However, at the time, this realization left teenagers Sam and Sofia feeling controlled, frustrated, and even resentful. Prioritizing the Catalan-only rule limited Sam and Sofia’s opportunities for socialization with and belonging to out-groups in NZ – an aspect also discussed in other research (see Berardi-Wiltshire, 2017; Caldas, 2006; Harris, 1995) – and growing up with the impacts of this ‘self-othering’ resulted in a negative tensions around their Catalan cultural identity, as it made Sam and Sofia feel isolated and controlled to the point where it brought their relationship with their mother almost to a breaking point.

Sense of non-belonging

Overall, this controlled nature of social interaction to maximize exposure to Catalan-only environments exacerbated sense of non-belonging in both generations, illustrating the feeling that some migrants describe as ‘feeling a part yet feeling apart’ (Block, 2007, p. 864), and had a deep impact on the girls who were growing up wanting to build relationships with the ‘outside’ world. Sam remembered how she felt this sense of non-belonging also at home in NZ upon return from Barcelona:

Sam:

I would come home and talk about my experience. . .and people around me my age could not relate. I remember feeling different, like I couldn’t fully share how excited I was to be part of a different culture with my friends that didn’t have a multicultural background. There was a lack of understanding there.

This need for belonging, especially after their parents’ divorce, was particularly well illustrated in Sam’s story about childhood toy-rabbit Kuni, which was like an ‘anchor’ for her because ‘there were two parts in me that I could not always reconcile’. Bringing it everywhere, Kuni was her point of consistency between different worlds: ‘it’s a reminder that I am part of all these places, and even though I felt I was two completely different people’. Within the relevant social frameworks (Bourdieu, 1991; Firth & Wagner, 1997, in Block, 2007; Harris, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Norton, 1998; Tawalbeh, 2019), it is recognized that our environments impose constraints on the formation of our identity. In this family’s case, the constraints posed by the family’s language policy created a linguistic and social ecology that had significant impacts on identity formation, that is, for the formation of concept of self in the daughters. In relation to LM and a family’s level of cohesion and feelings of well-being, Berardi-Wiltshire (2017) mentions the importance of sense of belonging as a social identity and a well-developed sense of self as an individual, and from the narratives, it seemed that each family member faced a personal struggle with these concepts, depending on which linguistic ‘space’ they occupied at different times (Block, 2007).

Their annual visits to family in Barcelona seemed to offset any negative impacts of the isolation that Catalan sometimes caused in NZ. They provided a break where Mònica wouldn’t feel the English pressure from society as much and she could release control over Sam and Sofia’s language use because of the immersive environment that naturally existed there. Although the visits initially centred around the grandparents, they were also an important base for the children to build their own societal connections with extended family and peers and acquire ‘the associated worldview and culture-specific traditions and behaviours’ of their heritage culture (Berardi-Wiltshire, 2017; see also Schwartz & Verschik, 2013; Guardado & Becker, 2014, in Wang, 2023).

Solo trips to Catalonia and HLM agency

Sam and Sofia mentioned that travelling back to Catalonia solo, had been a pivotal for them to forge necessary connections with family and friends, and experience the HL, culture, and people, on their own terms. It was not only an opportunity for them to take charge and be responsible for their own HL development, but it also reinforced their genuine desire to embrace their Catalan identity, and to experience the associated sense of belonging:

Sofia:

I only got an appreciation and a ‘want’ to learn after doing two trips by myself to Spain. [Only then] did I really connect, really care, really take my own initiative. . . And THAT’S when I really loved it. When I got my own connections, and I felt that I had a right of identifying as Catalan, and speaking my language and my mom no longer held power in that. . . I got my own family, had my own experiences . . . There is ‘this is MY OWN journey; this is MY OWN identity’.

Other research points out that peer contact is crucial to create a sense of belonging as part of a wider societal group where the HL is spoken and values of that heritage are shared (Caldas, 2006; Harris, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991) and similarly, Yates and Terraschke (2013) stated that ‘the HL can hold important symbolic power as a marker of identity and group membership (p. 105)’. For instance, it was only after interactions with their cousins, that Sam and Sofia realized they spoke an ‘old-ladies version of Catalan’ and held an outdated representation of their heritage culture. Nevertheless, these visits gave the children the freedom and opportunity to explore social realities through out-groups, creating a sense of belonging to the community they had ‘missed out on’ in NZ, which is in line with other HLM research (see Berardi-Wiltshire, 2017; Fogle, 2013; Gharibi & Mirvahedi, 2021; Yates & Terraschke, 2013).

Today, Sam and Sofia see their view of the value of their HL as aligned with their mother’s beliefs ‘as a base’. For instance, Sofia thinks that languages should be respected because ‘that’s someone’s culture’ and Sam considers that her own experiences growing up with a language and culture that wasn’t the ‘standard’ made her more aware of the value of learning Māori as HL in NZ. Sofia confirmed that she is now ‘extending that base’ by teaching her mother contemporary Catalan slang and sharing new developments within their culture. This illustrates the bi-directional nature of intergenerational LM and the potentially circular link between HLM, and harmonious relations/family closeness as suggested in the literature (Tannenbaum, 2005; Tannenbaum & Howie, 2002). Both sisters have renewed the basis of the relationship with their mother because they wanted to share the culture of their roots with her. Their HLM journey resulted in an appreciation for their mother’s efforts and their family bond together, and they both wish to transmit their Catalan heritage should they have children of their own, and they are excited about how this has now become their ‘own journey’ of their Catalan identity.

Conclusion

This article has presented a discussion of how some of the HLM practices at home were experienced by Sam and Sofia, the daughters of a Catalan immigrant mother to NZ, and how these practices have impacted their lives and relationship with one another. Even though the study of only one family may carry limitations in its scope, it nonetheless offers valuable insights into micro-level processes of language maintenance and shift with the potential to further knowledge and future research in this area. In fact, the—now adult—children’s retrospective perspectives on the HLM efforts provided very in-depth data that also uncovered negative nuances that previously have remained unnoticed in research. Having the children articulate their experiences and how they affected them as adults contributed towards reaching an understanding of the complexities associated with FLP and parental ambitions for their children’s bilingualism.

The results suggest that certain decisions (in this case prioritizing Catalan immersion) impacted heavily on the children’s social lives within their NZ community, putting familial relationships under tremendous strain, especially when Sam and Sofia were growing up and started to exert some agency as teenagers. The results also suggest that Mònica’s lessons in raising awareness for the value of languages were of ‘major influence’ in Sam and Sofia’s early-childhood understanding of the importance of languages not only in terms of personal and professional investment, but also for their connection to one’s culture and identity (Block, 2007; Bourdieu, 1991; Gharibi & Mirvahedi, 2021; Norton, 1998; Tawalbeh, 2019). Overall, this seemed to have contributed to the children’s thorough understanding of the language-identity link as an essential aspect in HLM, a disposition that stayed with them throughout the challenging years of adolescence, and currently still stands tying them together as a family.

This family adopted a language policy that determined a certain ecology for their language use, that is, only at home in NZ, and in Barcelona with family and the rest of its society there, demonstrating their HLM did not evolve around the classic linguistic domains described by Fishman (1991), where family and community were identified as the main crucial domains to facilitate language maintenance. Rather, their FLP centred around specific practised places (Blommaert, 2010), illustrating the fluidity of their linguistic community of practice under Tawalbeh’s (2019) spatiotemporality framework. In fact, the narratives demonstrated that the annual visits to Barcelona were ‘key’ in making the children realize the value of their HL as it allowed them to establish the connections that gave them the sense of belonging in terms of their heritage cultural identity (Berardi-Wiltshire, 2017). Especially the later, solo visits to the home country appeared to have been crucial for their sense of self, that is, as only after autonomously gained experiences of the heritage culture and language, Sam and Sofia felt they had ‘the right to identify as Catalan’. In other words, it was the personal maturation of the language-identity link inherent in Mònica’s language management in the home that ultimately trigged their individual agency to take charge of their own HLM journey.

Ultimately, the children’s experiences align with other research conveying that ideologies, beliefs, and attitudes are ‘among the most important predicators of successful language policies’ (Berardi-Wiltshire, 2017, p. 273; Gharibi & Mirvahedi, 2021). They also seem to reflect Ogbu’s views on the importance of people’s own identity perception for language learner autonomy, and in this case, Sam and Sofia’s sense of identity stimulated their self-advancement in HLM (Ogbu, 1991, as cited in Oxford, 2003). In final analysis, the study aligns with Müller et al. (2020), who pointed out that developing a full linguistic repertoire to feel comfortable in participating in life at home (i.e., in Catalan) increases the family’s level of well-being.

This study also illustrated that the connections with extended family members and peers living overseas are an important community of practice in the modern-day fluidity of community and migration contexts. These connections were a crucial factor in establishing the language-identity link for the daughters in this case study and ultimately induced their cultural identification with their inherited roots while being fully comfortable with their life at home in NZ. This finding suggests being in alignment with the spatiotemporality framework which highlights the role of fluid contextual practised places (Blommaert, 2010; Tawalbeh, 2019), and it points to the need of including close overseas connections (e.g., cousins, grandparents) in future HLM research.

It is certainly worth noticing that some of this family’s language policy decisions appeared to be born from a lack of local institutional and communal support for HLM efforts, an element which is known to be vital for a successful FLP, and access to helpful resources in the HL seems problematic for many bilingual families (see Doyle, 2013; King et al., 2008). Awareness around the challenges that immigrant families to NZ often face in terms of accessing resources, teaching and institutional/communal support could be areas to explore in further study. While realistically this may not be possible for all the lesser-known heritage languages, shifting the monolinguistic attitude that still dominates NZ ideologies and creating a sense of value towards heritage languages should nevertheless be achievable. This could bring support and understanding for NZ’s immigrants and acknowledge the linguistic dynamics within their families.