The Role of Parents' Social Background in Home Language Practices: A Family Language Policy Perspective

Abstract

Departing from Indonesia’s unique and complex multilingual environment, our study sought to investigate the role of the social background of multilingual parents in implementing home language use. Specifically, we ask whether home language practice is shaped by parents’ education level, ethnicity, and occupation, particularly in parent-child interaction. Our analysis draws from an online survey of 1.344 multilingual parents from different parts of Indonesia, with the survey being mainly distributed to over 28 provinces, including NAD, North Sumatra (North & West), Lampung, Bangka Belitung, Jambi, Bengkulu, Jakarta, West Java, Central, and East Java, Yogyakarta, Maluku, Kalimantan (North, South, West, East, and Central), Riau, Sulawesi (North, South, and Southeast), Bali, Nusa Tenggara (West and East), West Papua, and Papua. A single paragraph of 200 words maximum. Our findings indicate that education, ethnicity, and occupation significantly shape parents’ decisions to manage home language practice with their children. Keywords: social background, multilingual parents, home language practices