A comparison of heritage language ideologies in interaction

Abstract

In Canada, the notion of a heritage language ideology is often conceived of as a natural by-product of official multiculturalism. By contrast, Germany has long struggled with its status as a multilingual and multicultural country. By comparing two corpora of interviews with immigrants to each of these two countries (Canadians of German heritage and Germans of Vietnamese heritage), this paper aims to explore to what extent these different language ideologies are reconstructed in the interviews. It will be argued that the interviewees construct different sociolinguistic spaces and take up different positions within them in terms of centre and periphery. Our analysis shows that the German-Canadian interviewees construct public sociolinguistic spaces in which they position themselves as German even when they do not have an active knowledge of their heritage language. By contrast, despite the monolingual habitus in Germany, the German-Vietnamese respondents endorse a heritage language ideology; the space they claim for speaking Vietnamese, however, is restricted to private or family conversations.