Social and child-driven factors and actors influencing family language policy and heritage language maintenance

This paper reports findings from a study on multilingual families aimed at targeting three main research questions: (Q1) Which social factors and actors potentially influencing family language policy (FLP) recur in parents’ discourses? (Q2) Do direct encouragements and indirect ideological pressures not to use heritage language (HL) relate to parents’ domestic language use and HL perceived value? (Q3) Do children’s language preferences–as reported by their parents–relate to adults’ HL use and valorisation? Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with mothers and/or fathers of 81 families of preschool children living in Italy. As for Q1, cycles of thematic analysis were conducted via NVivo; multivariate regression analyses were run to answer Q2 and Q3. The results show that a variety of social actors potentially influence FLP, even if most parents maintain to set their language policy autonomously. Both direct encouragements and indirect ideological pressures lead to favour the majority language for domestic language uses and/or to undervalue the HL, even if patterns of conditioning vary. Finally, parents are influenced by their children’s agency, when agency manifests itself through explicit language preferences, but are not affected by the youngsters’ general attitudes towards the HL.