“Taza Qazaqsha” or Translanguaging? Exploring heritage language maintenance strategies among Central Asian Kazakh immigrant families in California

Abstract

This study applies Conversation Analysis to examine heritage language maintenance among Central Asian Kazakh families in the United States. The study analyzes naturally occurring conversations between a parent and toddler drawn from two Kazakh immigrant families from China and Kazakhstan. While both parents aspire to teach their children Taza Qazaqsha (“pure/clean Kazakh language”), both integrate translanguaging into their daily interactions, designing them around children’s interests and linguistic competencies to elicit children’s orientation toward learning Kazakh. Children exert agency in derailing the mothers’ Kazakh-learning communicative project, both implicitly, through responding almost entirely in English despite exhibiting understanding, as well as explicitly, through derailing the project of “saying” things in Kazakh when the mothers explicitly orient to this. Results point to children’s agency and the realities of maintaining Indigenous heritage languages in transnational settings.