What is it about?
This study explores how Hungarian-speaking families in Israel maintain their heritage language across generations. Through surveys of 51 multilingual parents, we found that families successfully balance Hungarian with Hebrew by emphasizing cultural practices, literacy, and family connections with the home country, especially with grandparents. Parents who minimized code-switching and actively transmitted cultural heritage were most successful in keeping Hungarian alive. The findings highlight how small immigrant communities can sustain their language through intentional family practices and strong intergenerational bonds.
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Why is it important?
This paper makes significant theoretical contributions to the Family Language Policy (FLP) framework by demonstrating how cultural heritage transmission and pragmatic considerations operate as empirically distinct yet interconnected dimensions in language maintenance. Through PCA analysis, the study validates that cultural practices function as active mechanisms rather than mere contextual factors, while revealing that parental attitudes toward code-switching, conceptualized here as a marker of family language ideology, negatively predict heritage language maintenance. Furthermore, by foregrounding the role of transnational family networks, particularly grandparents who serve as co-constructors of language policy across borders, the research challenges nuclear family-centric FLP models and positions extended family as active agents rather than passive motivators. These insights are particularly valuable for theorizing heritage language maintenance in small, dispersed diaspora communities where institutional support is limited, thus expanding FLP theory beyond its current frameworks to better account for multilingual families navigating transnational spaces.
Perspectives
Understanding of how families maintain heritage languages is multidimensional. The study shows that cultural practices and everyday language choices work together in specific ways that can be measured and identified. Interestingly, it finds that when parents have negative attitudes toward mixing languages (code-switching), are not always more successful in maintaining the heritage language. The research also shows that grandparents and extended family aren't just motivators from afar, but they actively shape language policies even across borders. This is especially important for small immigrant communities that don't have schools or community centers supporting their language, which most research overlooks. Together, these findings help us better understand how multilingual families maintain their heritage language when they're scattered in small numbers across a new country.
Professor Sharon Armon-Lotem
Bar Ilan University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Resilient heritage language maintenance: the interplay of family, culture, and pragmatic choices, Frontiers in Psychology, April 2025, Frontiers,
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1550704.
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