A Study on the Emotional Positioning and Social Investment of Family Language Policies: Taking Five Families of European Chinese Heritage Language Learners as Examples

The importance of learning the Chinese heritage language among Chinese immigrants overseas cannot be ignored. Spolsky proposed in his theory of language policy that the family is one of the key areas of language management and also an important place for children's language acquisition. Therefore, the maintenance of heritage language by families is of vital importance, and the research on family language policies also has significant practical and educational significance. Through the in-depth interview method of qualitative research, I explored the family language policies of five groups of overseas Chinese of Zhejiang origin in three European countries (the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium). This study adopted Spolsky's (2004) theory of family language policy, supplemented by Coleman's (1988) theory of social capital, to conduct an analysis of the collected data at different levels, and examined the phenomena and problems existing in these family language policies from three perspectives: language ideology, language practice and language management. The research results show that family language policies play an important role in the process of heritage language learning, as the differences in family language policies lead to different final learning effects. Meanwhile, family, as a kind of social capital, also influences the learning of Chinese heritage language of these people. The results of the current research are conducive to deepening the understanding and exploration of the heritage language practices among different generations of overseas Chinese and their family language policies. Furthermore, the author also noticed that under the new situation of Eurasian cooperation, the theoretical innovation research and application practice of family language policies are facing new challenges and opportunities, and proposed to solve the lack of identity and the realization of social investment through effective inheritance and cultural learning.

Keywords

Family language policy, Chinese heritage language, Social Investment

source

International Journal of Chinese Language Education; Jun 2025; Issue No. 17; p. 127-146

Language

Chinese