Maintenance and non-maintenance of community language in immigrant families: the case of Polish parents in the UK

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Polish immigrant parents’ perceptions of their community language value, the factors that shape their approaches to children’s language education, and the different outcomes on the spectrum of language maintenance/non-maintenance they achieve. It focuses on the empirical findings and interprets them with reference to Bourdieu’s theory of practice. It argues that a better understanding of migrants’ diverse experiences can be aided by an analysis of capital interactions and transformations in response to the socio-cultural environment. At the same time, it suggests that the negative impact of anti-migration socio-political structures and discourses on language practices should not be assumed.

KEYWORDS:

• Community languages
• cultural capital
• decision making
• educational practices
• migration
• parents

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jo-Anne Dillabough and Liz Maber for their supervision of this project and Marta Moskal, Oakleigh Welply, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. I also wish to acknowledge the financial support I received from the Broncel Trust, the M.B. Grabowski Fund, and Queens’ College, Cambridge. 

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Community languages (also referred to as ‘minority’, ‘home’, or ‘heritage’ languages) are languages spoken by members of minority communities within a majority language context. In the migration context, community languages refer to mother tongues that immigrants used to speak in their country of origin (Extra and Yagmur 2004).

2 In this study, ‘Polish immigrants’ denotes those migrants who identify themselves as Polish regardless of their official nationality and whether they consider their identities as fully shaped by the Polish culture or see their ‘Polishness’ as a part of their postnational or transnational identity (Hall 1990).

3 In Karolina’s case, Polish is not a necessary resource for communication with family as she moved to the UK with her mother and brother when she was 15 and her relatives speak English fluently. Nevertheless, the family does make an effort to teach Karolina’s son Polish. Alicja, on the other hand, made a conscious decision to limit her son’s understanding of Polish (as discussed later in this paper).