Inter-generational language shift and maintenance: language practice observed in Guangzhou Hakka families

ABSTRACT

Migration has often led to both social and linguistic changes as migrants want to establish a sense of belonging to the host community by adopting the local culture and language while remaining loyal to mother tongue. For this reason, migrants’ language ideologies and practices at home deserve research attention. This paper reports on a study that explored the language ideologies and practices of three Hakka-speaking families who migrated to Guangzhou (Capital city of Guangdong Province) over different time periods. The study involved the methods of semi-structured interviews, observing family language practices, recording and exploring how identified inter-generational language shifts unfolded. The results suggest that a combined use of Hakka and Putonghua is the most common language practice at home and children’s Hakka development varies. They also reveal that grandparents constitute the source of Hakka input for children and play a significant role in passing the language to the next generation.

KEYWORDS:

• Hakka dialect
• family language policy
• language shift and maintenance

Introduction

Hakka is known as a clan of Han and Hakka dialect is a variety (fangyan) of Chinese language, which shared the same written form, but with different spoken ways of Putonghua (a standard variety of Chinese language). The Hakka people have a long history of migration, and Hakka dialect is nicknamed as the ‘living fossil’ of Chinese language. Even Hakka emigrants who have lived overseas for several generations can still speak the dialect. Hakka is also one of the three major clans living in Guangdong Province. Hakka, Cantonese, Teochew are the three major dialects widely spoken at this area, besides Putonghua as the national lingua franca.

Putonghua was formally designated as the lingua franca of Han nationality for PRC in 1955 when the ‘National Chinese Character Reform Conference’ was held.¹ Since 1978, a massive scale of migration to the urban area has taken place when reform and opening-up policy was practiced in China, at the same time, the large scale of urban migration has brought a great impact on the social change of languages. Putonghua has become the national lingua franca, while the uses of dialects are relatively withering.² So far, there is a lack of research on internal urban-migrants’ language use within family settings. Family is a critical domain where children learn and develop language. Family language planning determines children’s cognitive development, the success of school studies, and the passed on of a certain language.³ The vitality of a heritage language (or dialect) largely depends on whether that language (or dialect) could be passed on to the next generation. The current study observes and analyzes the language practice in three Hakka families living in Guangzhou, who had migrated to Guangzhou from less-developed areas of China due to economic or educational pursuit, in other words, they could be considered as a migrant subordinate group when they first arrived in the city. This study aims to explore factors contributing to such language shift or maintenance among Hakka people.

Literature review

Language ideology, family language policy and planning

According to Spolsky’s definition on language ideology, the members of a community share a set of beliefs, forming consensus on language ideology, assigning values and prestige to various aspects of the language varieties of it. Put it simply, language ideology is language policy with the manager left out, what people think should be done. Language practices, on the other hand, are what people actually do.⁴ In the family domain, parents’ language ideology designates what value parents apply for languages and consciously or unconsciously determine language choice with family members in every-day communication.

Family language planning reflects the language ideology of parents, and, to a larger extent, reflects language attitudes, ideologies, and bringing up styles of society as a whole. Social and family environment plays a key role in the formation of parents’ language ideology and has an effect on parents’ decisions in language management,⁵ namely, parents or caregiver’s explicit and implicit planning for language use and learning at home. However, on the other hand, the initiative of children, that is, children’s choice of language, also greatly affects the actual language use in the family,⁶ which explains why some children refuse to speak mother tongue since they going to school and prefer to use the language of school peers. In Chinese settings where some families with several generations living together, and grandparents taking care of pre-school children, inevitably grandparents became the major language input to children. The study of Curdt-Christiansen⁷ found that in Singapore, grandparents of Chinese families had a subtle influence on children’s acquisition of Chinese language. While in mainland China, the influence of grandparents’ language input on Children’s language development has rarely been discussed.

Heritage language shift in multilingual setting

Past studies suggested that the first generation of immigrants who moved to a foreign country still speaks mother tongue to the second generation, and the second generation of immigrants are usually bilingual but the third generation only speak lingua franca of the host country.⁸ Bratt Paulson⁹ had discussed how language shift happened among minor ethnic groups in multilingual settings, where ethnic groups were divided into four categories, 1) Indigenous superordinate group; 2) Migrant superordinate group; 3) Indigenous subordinate group; 4) Migrant subordinate group.¹⁰ Voluntary migration, especially of individuals and families, results in the most rapid shift of language and migrant subordinate groups are the only groups likely to show rapid rates of mother-tongue shift. Language shift happens much more easily in a bilingual society where, for example, parents are bilingual, but only one language has been passed onto the next generation, then language shift happens.¹¹ The studies which observed linguistic changes, especially shift and maintenance of Chinese as heritage language among immigrant families in United States, Australia and other English-speaking countries¹² indicate that Chinese parents have held a strong commitment to Chinese language as mother tongue even though the second generation of immigrants show favor for language (such as English) of host countries. The reason could be due to strong force from the school where Children receive education in English. For the urban-immigration process happening in China, where most residents move from less economically developed areas to metropolis, this situation is similar to Chinese immigrants moving to US and Europe. Whether bilingual situation or mother-tongue shift would happen among the descents of immigrants takes further exploration.

Hakka-maintenance in regions of China

Since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, the popularizing of Putonghua (the standard Chinese variety) has accomplished great achievements and Putonghua has become a lingual Franca in China.¹³ Now the languages of China have entered a period of ‘dynamic harmony between Putonghua and dialects’.¹⁴ Dialects are still the important nutrition for Putonghua, and the future language situation of China will be a multilingual one, but at the same time Chinese dialects inevitably are declining, in the form of syntax structure and phonology feature being worn out and the communicative function of Chinese dialects are decreasing, concerning the use of frequency.¹⁵

While Hakka dialect, as mentioned above, is declining in Children’s use at school and in the family. A study conducted in Fujian Province, a Hakka area named Longyan, found that over 40% of children using Hakka ‘relatively unskilled’ or ‘very unskilled’.¹⁶ Another study¹⁷ investigated the teenagers using Hakka in Guangxi province showed that these teenagers were proficient both in Hakka and Putonghua, but their mother tongue (Hakka) was not as good as Putonghua, showing a downward trend. And interestingly, they found that family language practice associates with mothers’ education level that as the mothers’ educational level rises, the use of Hakka with their children declines.

More attention might be needed to draw on the language ideology and self-perception of identity in relation to individual language use in dialect-speaking families. The exquisite language use in the family would provide us with more understanding of the conscious or unconscious language choices of family members.

Hakka and Hakka identity

Identity claim, whether at the national or ethnic level, is closely related to language people speak or use. Identity claim is the process of recognizing who I am, a way of classifying people from occupation, sex, knowledge and language or other aspects. It is assumed that everyone belongs to a single identity group,¹⁸ and that with only one social attribution. Limited cognition and identity-discovery are the two major issues of ‘single identity claim’. Limited cognition means that an individual cannot think of his or her identity in any way beyond his community, and his social background is firmly based on ‘community culture’ which determines his cognitive reasoning and ethics. While ‘identity discovery’ is a process of knowing who else a person could become, that is, people define themselves by their changing circumstances. In other words, identity is not fixed for a lifetime and can be chosen and shaped.

In the perspective of language and identity claim, a speaker constructs his social identity by choosing languages at social or cultural level, which is not only a process of recognizing who he is but also a process of continuous discovery of ‘who else he could be’. People can choose which language to speak or not to speak. For example, parents of ethnic minorities decided not to speak mother tongue with their children, not because they do not like the language, but because they want their children to have a better future.¹⁹ ‘Everyone has the right to abandon his past and to choose and shape his continuity or discontinuity with the past, all of which is free’.²⁰ It is true that most of the minority groups living in modern societies tend to move towards the language of the dominant group, although it may not sound pleasant.²¹ A recent study²² conducted in China investigated eight middle-class families living in China, which showed that only one of the eight children being interviewed had acquired Chinese dialect. In terms of identity claim, parents asserted that their children should speak Putonghua (standard variety) and recognized their identity as being Chinese, instead of being classified by speaking local dialects. Wang Xiao Mei’s²³ study among Hakka Catholic in Malaysia suggested that Hakka dialect is undergoing a decline in Catholic families as well as at the church. Strong Chinese identity lead to language shifted from Hakka to Putonghua at the services of the church. Hakka identity is weakening, but Chinese identity is getting strong.

As for Hakka clan living in Guangzhou, would they consider Hakka dialect a language that does not fit the era or they would attach values to their dialect as a symbol of identity claim, so far we have little understanding. To sum up, the current study aims to study Hakka dialect in the family setting with three generations living together, to contribute to our knowledge about language shift and maintenance of Hakka dialect as a heritage language.

Research questions

The study aims to answer the following two research questions:

A. How do the Guangzhou Hakka families use languages at home (Hakka, Putonghua, Cantonese and other dialects)?

B. What are the factors contributing to such language practice in the Hakka families?

Data collection

Ethnography is a qualitative research approach in which the researcher attempts to gain access to certain people’s lived realities in an endeavor to see the world through their eyes, to achieve an understanding of these people’s worlds, of their ways of acting and thinking.²⁴ The researcher analyzes texts that have been collected and also explore the contexts of production and reception, relating these specific contexts to a wider social process. The data consist of observation, interviews and other spoken interactions, such as family dialogues family activities, meal and games. Interviews with family members look for understanding with care giver’s language ideology and their perception of Hakka identity. Family visits were paid to observe the actual language practices and parents’ planning for their children’s language learning. Recording of these family dialogues were transcribed to scripts and calculate the proportion of each dialect in language use. The author entered the participants’ family lives and analyzes these families’ language practice, reflecting such practices with a wider social context of current China today.

Participant families

According to the time moving to Guangzhou, the structure of family members, and the characteristics of second-generation marriage, this study selected three Hakka families living in Guangzhou as participants (Table 1).

Table 1. Demographic data of three participant Hakka families

Families	Father’s age, occupation, education	Mother’s age, occupation, education	Grandparents	Children’ name	Children’s age	Time moved to Guangzhou	Habitat environment
Wu	37 Working in Restaurant, Middle school	29 Working in Restaurant, Middle school	Grandparents live nearby and manage restaurant business together.	Jiaxin	7	30 years	The family runs a restaurant on the campus, living in a small Hakka community.
Wang	44 Government official, Bachelor	38 College teacher, Master	Grandparents live together since the child was born	Chenchen	8	11 years	A middle-upscale housing estate located in Tianhe, Guangzhou
Xiao	36 White collar, Bachelor	36 Staff of Spanish consulate, Master	Grandparents from both sides taking care of the child in turns.	Xiaoqi	4	14 years	An urban housing estate located in Huangpu, Guangzhou

Wu’s family has been living in Guangzhou for more than 30 years. Almost soon after the implementation of reform and opening-up policy in China (1978), they came to Guangzhou to seek economic opportunity in the beginning and they did go through, and the second generation has a better start off in Guangzhou. Now the family is running a Chinese Restaurant on the campus where the author was working in. Xiao and Wang’s family came to Guangzhou as the second generation went for college education and settled down in the city.

The marriage of the second generation of three families each has its own feature, Wu’s is a Hakka with Hakka, and the Wang is a combination of Hakka and Ningxia (Northwest of China). Xiao is a little special; a Teochew man (speaking Teochew dialect) married a Hakka woman. In other words, there are two dialects rivaling at Xiao’s home, Teochew dialect and Hakka dialect.

Data collection

For nearly 3 months, the author interviewed participant parents and grandparents several times, as Wu’s family was running a restaurant on the campus. The author often went to eat in their restaurant and chat with them. In addition to formal interviews, mother of Xiao and Wang often chat with the author online to discuss children’s language learning. Besides, children’s homework, English class, football class and other extracurricular activities were engaged for observation. During this period, parents continued to collect and send recordings of family conversations, including video, dialogues of family meals, playing games, and parents tutoring children’s homework (Table 2).

Table 2. Data collection

Families	Grandparents	Parents	Children	Dialogues and videos
Wu	2 Formal and semi-structure interviews.	2 formal and semi-structure interviews. Meet often with the author.	Meet from time to time, as the restaurant of Wu’s is located in the author’s school	6 recordings of family dialogues
Wang	1 Interview with grandma	2 Interviews with mother and chat on line.	Meet the child once, accompanying her to English class	6 recording and videos
Xiao	Telephone interview with grandfather once.	2 formal interviews with mother and often chat on line.	Meet the child once and accompany him to football training class.	9 family dialogues

Data analysis

The recordings were transcribed into Chinese scripts for semantic analysis using NLPIR and proportional analysis. NLPIR is an on-line semantic analysis website for Chinese discourse analysis with major functions such as frequency-calculating, keywords-extract, events-identify, and emotion-analysis.²⁵ For example, a short dialogue transcript with 2000 words was pasted onto the website of NLPIR; then, the frequency of nouns, verbs and adjectives will be listed and keywords of this dialogue-transcript could be dug out. Frequency-calculating and keywords-extract are the two most commonly used method. Six interviews had been transcribed, up to 33,706 words. Besides, 21 family dialogues from audio and video are marked in sentence units, to calculate the proportion of each dialect, Hakka, Putonghua or Teochew dialect. Then, the proportion of varieties has been roughly calculated, see (Table 3) ‘Family dialogue analysis, proportion of Hakka dialect use between generations’. Once the language used between members has been selected, which would not change easily.

Table 3. Analysis on proportion of dialects used in family dialogues

Table 3 is a rough calculation on the proportion of dialect use among three generations within the three participant families, according to the analysis of audio and video dialogues collected.

Findings

The combined use of Hakka and Putonghua is the common pattern of language practice for the three participant families. While the language development of children, especially concerning the acquisition of Hakka dialect, varies significantly.

Home language practice-A combination of Putonghua and Hakka

Among the three participant families, Putonghua and Hakka are the common language practice at home. Grandparents and parents about above 95% of their conversation speak Hakka, while parents mainly communicate with children in Putonghua, above 70% of their conversations. The findings are consistent with previous literature about inter-generational language shift that the first and second generation still speak the mother tongue, but the third generation may experience language shift.²⁶

Wu’s family has a slightly special situation. It is the child who responds proactively to parents in Putonghua, rather a result of parents’ language planning or management. According to interview with Wu’s parents, they mentioned that since their child (Jiaxin) goes to school, she prefers to speak Putonghua at home, even parents initiate a conversation in Hakka, she responded with Putonghua. Her parents mentioned that Jiaxin’s shift to Putonghua became significant when she goes to primary school here in Guangzhou. In a video recording Jiaxin was eating Tangyuan (Chinese sweet sticky snacks) with her siblings, three kids communicate in Putonghua all the time. Even though since born, Jiaxin’s parents and grandparents spoke Hakka with her and she can understand and speak the dialect but would not to use now.

In Wang’s family, grandparents spoke to grandson in Hakka since Chenchen was born, and grandparents came to live together and took care of the child. Grandparents communicated with the mother of Wang (their daughter) 100% in Hakka, but since the mother of Wang married a non-Hakka husband; they speak Putonghua when the father is present. Chenchen can switch between Putonghua and Hakka amazingly, perfectly correct, and his Hakka is very fluent.

In Xiao’s family, grandparents communicate 100% with the child in Putonghua. Though grandparents from mother’s side speak Hakka at home with the mother, and grandparents from father’s side speak Teochew with their son. But Xiaoqi could not speak a single sentence or word in Hakka or Teochew dialect; though she receives input of dialects, according to observation, video and audio data, Xiaoqi can only speak Putonghua.

Children acquire Hakka dialect in a differentiated way

The situation of each child acquiring Hakka dialect is varied (Table 4). Wu’s family live in a small Hakka community where grandparents, helpers in restaurants, neighbors most of the time speak Hakka and children grow up in a small Hakka-speaking community. Jiaxin can understand and speak Hakka, though she prefers not to. For Wang’s family, grandparents provide the major input of Hakka and now Chenchen can speak fluent Hakka. The situation of Xiao’s family is a little bit subtle, where two dialects, Hakka and Teochew dialects are at a rivalry position. The more powerful Teochew dialect seems have won, as Xiao’s mother mentioned her father-in-law and mother-in-law 80% of the time speak Teochew at home while her own Hakka grandparents who are well-educated university professors, and considerate, that worrying that son-in-law cannot understand Hakka, they choose to speak Putonghua at daughter’s home all the time. Xiaoqi can understand a little Teochew dialect, but not a single sentence of Hakka. She could speak neither.

Table 4. Children’s language development

	Wu – Jiaxin	Wang-Chenchen	Xiao-Xiaoqi
Putonghua	Fluent. Most of the time Jiaxin speaks Putonghua with parents and siblings.	Fluent. Chenchen speaks Putonghua with parents since born.	Fluent. Xiaoqi speaks Putonghua with parents and grandparents all the time.
Hakka or Teo chew dialect	Jiaxin can understand and speak Hakka. Jiaxin speaks Hakka with grandparents, but when mother asks questions in Hakka, she responds with Putonghua.	Fluent Chenchen speaks fluent Hakka with grandparents and he can switch between Hakka and Putonghua precisely.	Xiaoqi can’t say a word in dialects, nor Hakka or Teo chew dialect. She can speak some simple English.

Table 4 lists the language development (Hakka, Teo Chew, Putonghua, English) of the three kids in the participant families

Contributing factors

For the three participant families, the third generation develops their language quite differently. Some factors might contribute to the situation.

Language status perceived by parents

Language maintenance, especially heritage language, is positively related to the status of language perceived that in any bilingual or monolingual society; different languages have different social status, which directly resulted in parents’ language practice and management at home.²⁷ The interviews excerpt below show that mothers want their children to master Putonghua and English, and they even hold the idea that learning Hakka is unnecessary, which is of little value.

Excerpt of interview with three mothers (all the interviews were carried out by the author and the translation was done by the author herself who could speak English, Hakka, Putonghua and Cantonese)

Wu’s mother:

If we go to Hubei or Hunan (other provinces of China), and speak Hakka, do you think we can be understood?

Wang’s mother:

Now I do hope he (Chenchen) can do well in English. Chenchen now is in grade 3, primary school. Though the English teacher is not a native speaker, but the ambience for learning English is nice and he persists on attending English classes and reading English every day. I set an alarm at night and when it is 9 p.m., it is time to read English.

Xiao’s mother:

I think to cultivate interest in English is the first step. When I was a child, I felt that interest is the best motivator. So I sent her to an English class with native English-speaking teacher.

The mothers believe that Putonghua and English are the most useful and important languages for their kids, while Hakka dialect is considered to be of little economic and social value. The mothers communicate with their children in Putonghua most of the time and attach great importance to English learning. Mother of Wu believed that learning Hakka language could not help her children communicate with people from other provinces of China, while the mother of Wang and Xiao attached great importance to English learning. In addition, the author also found that these mothers have some misunderstanding about language learning that they assumed Hakka can be inherited from parents, like gene, therefore, not necessary to learn purposely (see in the below interview except).

The Author:

What if the child grows up without knowing how to speak Hakka?

Mother of Wu:

That was from our ancestors. It was inherited! She (Jiaxin) lives with us, sometimes she speaks Hakka, sometimes Putonghua, both. It is just that she speaks less Hakka now. Yes, this (Hakka) is useless. We are Hakka people already, why should we learn this (Hakka dialect)?

The Author:

Elena, do you want your child to learn your mother tongue (Hakka)?

Mother of Xiao:

Yes, that is my mother tongue after all. And I always thought she could (speak Hakka). Because of the blood tie (the child inherits blood and language), I think so.

This dominant language ideology that Putonghua and English have high social and economic value is basically consistent with their family language practices. Language ideology is the consensus people come to agree, assigning value and prestige to the varieties of languages used. These beliefs both derive from and influence practices. From the study, it can be indicated that these mothers’ language ideology are in accordance with language practice and management at home.

As Curdt-Christiansen points out,²⁸

When caregivers deliberately/unintentionally make language choices in their daily lives, when they tend to use more communicative languages, their chances of acquiring their mother tongue may be greatly reduced. When this happens, language shifts are inevitable.

Exogamy marriage

Exogamy marriage is also one of the main objective reasons for parents’ abandonment of Hakka dialect at their nuclear families. Inter-racial marriage is the most powerful predictor of mother-tongue use.²⁹ A survey of Hakka descendants aged 25–27 in Taiwan showed that exogamy marriage is one of the significant factors relating to Hakka dialect acquisition.³⁰ The three families interviewed were very typical that Putonghua is the dominant language at the nuclear families while Hakka became a language of inefficient communication. For example, Wang and Xiao’s families where their mothers married non-Hakka husbands and Putonghua became the common language used at home. Grandfather of Xiao admitted in an interview that the main reason he did not speak Hakka in his daughter’s home was that he worried his son-in-law who was from Shantou (speaking Teochew dialect) could not understand Hakka.

On blood tie, rather than on language

The language used for communication whether at national, ethnic or family level, relates to identity claim, however, Hakka identity claimed by the participants of the study focus on kinship rather than on language. Semantic NLPIR analysis found that Hakka, children, Hakka dialect are the keywords mentioned with high frequency in the interview. Grandparents hold the view that Hakka identity is determined by their children’s kinship, rather by the language they spoke. For example, Wu’s grandmother stated that her daughter married a man from Jiangsu province (located in the Southeast part of China); therefore, she would not consider her granddaughter a Hakka. Grandparents identify Hakka ethnicity with emphasis on blood tie, rather than on language! They also believe that language could be inherited, and it is written in genes. This patriarchal concept has nothing to do with educational level. Wu’s grandmother and Xiao’s grandfather (university professor) are very different in education level, but similar in the view of consanguinity, see in the below interview excerpt.

The Author:

Would you worry that your grand-child grow up without knowing how to speak Hakka?

Wu’s grandmother:

Anyway, Putonghua is OK.

Putonghua is also used all over the country, isn’t it?

The Author:

But if the child cannot speak Hakka, would you think he is still a Hakka people?

Wu’s grandmother:

Whatever. It depends on their blood.

The Author:

For example, if a child grows up, but he cannot speak Hakka, do you think he is still Hakka people?

Xiao’s grandfather:

Yeah. That’s in the bone. However, I think she (Xiaoqi) may recognize herself as Shantou people a little bit more. (Xiaoqi’s father is from Shantou where Teochew dialect is the local dialect)

Furthermore, even though the second generation of Hakka recognizes their Hakka identity, their language choice for their children might be in conflict with the language ideology they claimed. For example, Xiao’s mother, Elena, she also expressed in the interview that she hoped her child could learn Hakka-her mother tongue, and she herself is fluent in Hakka too, but according to the author’s observation, she had never spoken a Hakka sentence to her child. Instead, she spent almost every night with her child to learn English, cultivating children’s interest in learning a foreign language.

Pay visit to Hakka hometown

The Hakka people hold a strong ancestral belief and each year all three families bring their children back to Hakka hometown. Back to hometown, the children had plenty of opportunities to come into contact with local people speaking Hakka. Then, Hakka dialect was no longer a language that could only be heard at home. The scope of Hakka dialect use has been greatly expanded and there is tremendous Hakka input. Similarly, because lack of dialect environment, three children cannot speak Cantonese even though they live in a Canton town – Guangzhou. When asked about the Cantonese environment, the parents responded that in school the students and teachers communicate in Putonghua and the media language including programme on television, games kids played on electronic devices, are all in Putonghua, without much Cantonese input.

Discussion and conclusion

The study using ethnography research method observes three Hakka families living in Guangzhou and found that combined use of Putonghua and Hakka is the common language practice for the participant families, while the development of Hakka dialect among the third generation varied, some children speaking fluent Hakka, while some cannot even utter a single word. Language management at home by parents and grandparents, exogamy marriage, and language environment of the community contributes to such result.

Language royalty, language ideology and practice

In the study, grandparents indeed provided a major input of Hakka dialect at home, which significantly result in Children’s Hakka dialect acquisition; however, grandparents speaking Hakka dialect at home does not necessarily mean they consider Hakka dialect as a symbol of being Hakka. In other words, their Hakka language royalty is not as much strong as imagined. Language royalty reflects the sense of national or ethnic identity. The issue of Hakka language royalty needs exploration in the future. In the study, Xiao’s grandparents deliberately speak Putonghua with Xiaoqi, and Wu’s grandparents keep an indifferent attitude towards whether speaking Hakka or Putonghua. Even though grandparents communicate with their grandchildren in Hakka dialect, it does not seem that they have held a strong belief in maintaining heritage language, or extending cultural values buried with the language. Rather, the symbol of being Hakka focus on kinship (blood tie), instead of language, which is beyond the discovery of previous literature.

The use of majority language (Putonghua) in the home domain is a powerful sign of ongoing language shift. Parents’ decision in language management at home reflects their language ideology, namely the value and prestige attached to language varieties. The parent generation obviously lack the motivation to maintain Hakka dialect at home. Parents choose Putonghua to communicate with their children at home though they own high fluency in the dialect. They attached great importance to Putonghua and English, dictating the ‘major’ status of Putonghua while Hakka dialect is considered to be ‘minor language’. It should be noted that different from the grandparent generation, the parent generation consciously and explicitly plan and manage language choice and practice for their children, namely explicit family language planning. In the study, even if parents claim Hakka identity but in language practice, they attach much more importance to children’s learning of Putonghua and English. Language practice may or may not be in accordance with claimed language ideology. The contradictory between language ideology and language practice could exit. As parents or caregivers sought to provide better economic and educational opportunities for their children and deliberately choose a language for their children and give up mother tongue, in those cases, language shift is inevitably happening.

Attitudes towards Hakka dialect, contradictory between language ideology and language practice, and the seemed weak language royalty, all these factors are associated with the language shift of Hakka dialect in Guangzhou Hakka families.

The dilemma of Hakka dialect maintenance

The massive power of Putonghua leaves little room for dialects in regard to communicative scope, frequency and development. If a language is only used at home, it may not have enough resources to develop continually, for example, some words simply do not exist in the dialect, and in long term, dialects would become barren without supplement of resources, such as vocabulary. In the study, dialects are submerged in the wave of Putonghua in community, school and media. From the study, Hakka dialect is only spoken or heard at home, or partly used at home, as there is very limited access to Hakka dialect in the community. The strong force of Putonghua from school or media results in that some children refuse to speak family language when they return from school. But, on the other hand, Putonghua and Hakka dialect are not on a contradictory battle. In the study, a child named Chenchen, from Wang’s family, he can speak fluent Hakka, which has no bad effect on his Putonghua or English learning. Chenchen’s family succeeded in passing on the dialect to the third generation, which is not a coincidence. His grandparents are taking care of him since he was born and insist on speaking Hakka dialect at home. Grandparents play a significant role in providing dialect input for the children. Also, some families bring their kids back to Hakka hometown from time to time, thus creating an incentive situation for dialect maintenance.

Early multilingualism is not linked to any delay in acquisition of mother tongue or major language and that being multilingual might hurt language learning was nonsense. Some parents or grandparents still hold the view that the mother tongue can be inherited from gene, which was too innocent thinking. Maintaining heritage language takes efforts, positive attitude towards minority language and cultures, and opportunities in language practices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chunyan Zou

Ms. Chunyan ZOU is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Institute of African and Asian Studies of Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Her research focuses on the LPP language policy and planning in family domain, heritage language maintenance or shift.

Notes

1. Shen, “A Comprehensive Review,” 93–101.

2. Li, “On Endangered Dialects”; and “The Decline of Chinese Dialects,” 25–31.

3. King et al., “Family Language Policy,” 907–922.

4. Spolsky, Language Policy (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics).

5. Curdt-Christiansen, Family Language Policy.

6. Li and Sun, “Canadian Chinese Immigrants’ Family Language Policies,” 46–56.

7. Curdt-Christiansen, “Implicit Learning and Imperceptible Influence,” 348–70.

8. Fishman, Reversing Language Shift.

9. Brat Paulston, Linguistic Minorities in Multilingual Settings.

10. Lieberson et al., “The Course of Mother Tongue Diversity in Nations,” 34–61.

11. Matiki, “Language Shift and Maintenance,” 1–25.

12. Studies of Chinese as Heritage maintenance in other countries, see Zhang, “Language Maintenance and Language Shift,” 42–60; Wang, “Language Maintenance or Language Shift,” 273–88; and Oriyama, “Community of Practice and Family Language Policy,” 289–307.

13. Guo, “A Ten-year Review,” 2–11.

14. Yu, “Sixty Years of Popularizing Putonghua,” 46–52.

15. Li, On Endangered Dialects.

16. Shi and Guo, “On Hakka Dialect Heritage and Relevant Proposals,” 10–4.

17. Huang and Li, “The Popularization of Putonghua and the Maintenance of Hakka Dialect”, 24–31.

18. Liu reviewed on Sen, A.’s single identity theory, “Why Should Identity be Valued by Economists.”

19. Kaufmann, “Language Maintenance and Reversing Language Shift,” 2431–42.

20. Fishman, “Concluding Comments,” 444–54.

21. Bratt Paulston, Linguistic Minorities in Multilingual Settings, 9.

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