Multilingualism, beliefs about language, and language use in the family

ABSTRACT

Attempts to prevent language endangerment seem to have overlooked how families proceed in surrendering the language whose intergenerational transmission is their main responsibility. The present paper envisages language maintenance or loss from the vantage point that beliefs about language are the main referents of language use in the family in multilingual settings, and can, therefore, explain the protracting process of language death. The data were collected through a questionnaire adapted from the BALLI [Horwitz, E. K. (1988). The beliefs about language learning of beginning university foreign language students. Modern Language Journal, 72(3), 283–294.], which was administered in fifty families. These were then analysed through a logistical regression. The findings revealed, among many other things, a strong correlation between the referents people attribute to their indigenous languages and the likelihood of the use of those languages with their children. Some of these included ethnic language acquisition difficulty, the nature of mother tongue acquisition, transmission strategies, acquisition aptitude, and reward. Negative beliefs about indigenous languages, as well as lack of language consciousness as underscored by this study are real matters for concern as these beliefs, more than any other external factor, may accelerate the vanishing of indigenous languages in the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• beliefs
• language use
• family
• language endangerment

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.