A case study of parents' attitudes towards heritage language maintenance of English in the Kanto area of Japan

Abstract

Previous studies on the attitudes towards heritage language maintenance reveal about the importance that families give to heritage language in order to retain their home language legacy (Oriyama, 2010). All of this while they also supporting their children to integrate into the local society. Nonetheless, most of the research regarding heritage language maintenance has been focused on ethnic minorities and aboriginal languages (Brinton, Kagan, & Bauckus, 2008), thus leaving an important research gap regarding immigrant parents whose native language is broadly used, but live in a country where their home language is not spoken. That is the case of English speaking parents who are raising their children in a country where their heritage language is not commonly spoken. This thesis aims at characterizing the attitudes towards heritage language maintenance of English of a group of four native English speaker fathers, each of them is married to a Japanese native speaker and they all live in the Kanto region of Japan. To achieve this objective, a case study was conducted in the form of a face-to-face interview with these parents. The study sought to describe the extent to which the parents’ attitudes might affect the value and encouragement towards the maintenance of English as a heritage language in Japan. The results of the study indicate that most participants showed favorable attitudes towards the language maintenance of English as a heritage language in Japan, revealing that parents considered that the maintenance of English was essential to preserve the cultural and family bond between the English speaker fathers and their children.