Unpacking complex language ideologies toward heritage language maintenance: a case of Chinese migrant families in the US

This study aims to explore how a group of Chinese American families transcend essentialist thinking through negotiating with different ideological orientations toward their heritage language and how these families’ different ideological profiles could influence the home language maintenance. Data were collected through three rounds of semi-structured interviews with six Chinese migrant families in Boston, U.S. Qualitative content analysis was carried out to analyze the complexity of parents’ ideologies. The findings revealed these migrant families’ capability of perceiving their heritage language as a problem, a right, and a resource to cope with real-life problems they encounter in the host country. Moreover, the possible coexistence and contradiction of multiple ideological orientations within each family may be associated with the intergenerational linguistic transmission. The study uncovers the underlying process of language preservation at the micro-level, elicits a more expansive understanding of language ideology as a complex assemblage, and substantiates Ruiz’s tripartite orientations as a practical heuristic for analyzing the interplay of differing beliefs. Crucially, whether to maintain one’s heritage language in migrant families is less of a nostalgia for their home country, but rather more of an ongoing process situated in their agentive attempts for meaning-making as members of their new multilingual society.