A Case Study of Individual, Linguistic and Psychosocial Factors on Heritage Language Maintenance Among Malaysian Chinese

Abstract

Despite Asian immigrants have increasingly received attention in the scholarly study as heritage language learners (Lee, 2003; Kim & Chao, 2009; Dixon et al., 2012; Park et al., 2012), there is still a crucial gap in exploring heritage language (HL) maintenance among the multilingual Chinese descendants in Southeast Asia. This study intends to reveal individual influences as well as linguistic and psychosocial factors in maintaining the Chinese language as a heritage language (CHL) among the new generation of Chinese learners in Malaysia. Sets of questionnaires were distributed to 238 informants ages 16-18 native speakers of Chinese. From the statistical analysis fact, it is concluded that 1) under the postcolonial education system, the diverse education stream or the type of school is one of the most influential individual factors on CHL maintenance level, i.e. SMJK>STPC>SMK in that order when considering the overall achievement on the Chinese language as a core subject, while age and gender had least impacted CHL maintenance; 2) linguistic factor which referring to parental language or dialects did not contribute to the differences in their CHL levels due to the fact that the Chinese language is commonly used in their daily lives and domestic domains; 3) attitudes towards ethnic identity as Malaysian Chinese and Chinese language classroom learning anxiety were significantly contributed to psychosocial factors in the given setting. It is hoped that this study helps to reinforce Chinese language maintenance to a greater connectedness between the young generation of Malaysian HL learners and the Chinese HL community.