Attitudes, beliefs and responsibility for heritage language maintenance in the UK

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I draw on interview data with multilingual British South-Asian English language teachers to examine their language attitudes and beliefs about the responsibility for heritage language maintenance in the UK. While all the participants feel that it is important for heritage languages to be maintained, differences emerged with respect to the level of responsibility that the mainstream education sector has in this maintenance. Irrespective of the role of local education authorities, the primary responsibility is seen as being with parents and families. This paper argues that this stems from several factors including the lack of heritage language support for families and the ideological construction of heritage languages as being primarily a community and parental responsibility. In addition, the strong links between heritage languages and culture, religion and ethnicity contribute to characterise heritage languages as being outside children’s formal education.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage languages
• attitudes
• responsibility
• South-Asian

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jennifer Jenkins for comments on a previous version of this paper and two anonymous reviewers. The author would also like to thank Claire Molloy for her contributions to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Robert Weekly is a Teaching Fellow in the School of English at University of Nottingham Ningbo, Ningbo, China.

ORCID

Robert Weekly http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2929-1951

Notes

1 Respondents to the 2011 census were asked ‘What is your main language?’ If the respondents reported a language other than English, they were asked a follow up question ‘How well can you speak English?’ with four tick boxes: ‘very well,’ ‘well,’ ‘not well’ and ‘not at all.’

2 GCSE is a general certificate of secondary education, an exam that students complete in secondary school usually at the age of 16.

3 A further education college is for post-compulsory and adult education.

4 Sikh Turban.