Heritage Language Institute
Held June 22-26, 2002, UCLA
Does Heritage Language Loss Affect Family Relationships?
Janet Oh, UCLA
A linguistic minority child is encouraged to speak her/his heritage language in order to communicate with family members, especially parents. If children instead speak the majority language, parents may be forced to communicate to their children in a language in which they may not be able to fully and freely express their thoughts. Other parents may resort to speaking in the heritage language to their children even though their children speak only the majority language. One would suspect that these patterns of language use would seriously disrupt family relationships. In this talk, I present evidence that this is the case and evidence suggesting that mental health in general can also be affected. This underscores the importance of further examining the effects of heritage language loss on linguistic minority families.
