What is a heritage language?
What is a heritage language you may ask? This is a specific phenomenon where a language is learnt by a child or a person who isn’t the region’s dominant language, for example, at home with their parents or family. Heritage language as a definition can vary widely.
It’s the case; however, the longer the family who speaks that heritage language remains in a country whose dominant family is a different language, the more likely the language will not be passed down.
So, a lot of people, a lot of them adults; decide to start learning their family’s heritage language to feel more a part of their ancestral culture, for many different reasons.
This was the reason and how I decided to start language learning, I will go further into my journey below my journey of learning my heritage language – Cantonese.
My heritage language learning journey:
Growing up in my family, as a 1st generation BBC (British-born Chinese) and a 3rd generation immigrant from Hong Kong, it was hard to pick up Chinese.
Especially discovered the fact that I had a condition called Autism which made me start speaking at a much later age (3/4) so my parents ultimately decided to push English as the language at home to prepare me for school and the real world in the UK.
I was sent to Chinese complementary school at a young age at the age of 6 for a few years. I discovered that unlike most of my classmates I was unable to speak any Cantonese at the school, which made it hard to learn further there, instead of teaching all 4 skills of Chinese (listening, speaking, reading & writing) they were adamant on just teaching reading & Writing in Chinese.
So I persisted for a few years, And going back to when I was a teenager for a few years until I got busy with A-level exams in sixth form. The other sort of language-learning experience I had was in school learning French for GCSE French mainly to just pass an exam rather than to communicate.
So during my childhood and most of my early 20s I had no interest in learning my family’s heritage language. What I found to be frustrating, however, is when I came across my older relatives, I knew whether it would be my grandparents etc I would be unable to communicate with them if they didn’t speak English.
In my late 20s, I developed a computer game addiction that I tried to eliminate by buying the respawn guide from game quitters. They emphasised the importance of picking up new hobbies and one of the hobbies that I discovered and fell in love with is language learning.
The next few years it became one of my main passions and as of early 2024, I have learnt Cantonese to a C1 / Advanced level and Mandarin to B1 / Intermediate. I also hope to learn more languages in the future. H
However, one thing that may be concerning later is how to maintain multiple languages. It has been cited that once you’re B2 you don’t forget a language, but I would still like to put a system in place to maintain languages.
Heritage language in the general population:
Overall, there is a range of heritage languages, often associated with people who have immigrated from one country to another; where the parents have grown up in a different environment, speaking a different language.
As such, there is a wide range of proficiencies associated with heritage language users. It has been commonly noted that younger bilingual children are more likely to lose fluency in their heritage language than older children. As such, the older the children that have come over from their home country to another area the more likely they are to retain fluency in said language.
Overall though there may be problems related to the children wanting to fit in. Other things etc, as such there may be resistance to using their language and as a result, they may lose their fluency in their heritage language.
Conclusion:
Overall, heritage languages are a real thing, and families want to maintain this language and pass it on to the next generation. However, given this, there may be resistance to this process.
Some people go back to learning their family’s heritage language later on in life (such as me, for example).
What about you? Are you currently trying to or want to learn your family’s heritage language? Or if you don’t have a heritage language does this blog post open your mind to this concept? Let me know in the comments below, thanks.
Leave a Reply