The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education

From Innovation to Program Building

Olga E. Kagan, Maria M. Carreira, Claire Hitchens Chik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317541523
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education provides the rapidly growing and globalizing field of heritage language (HL) education with a cohesive overview of HL programs and practices relating to language maintenance and development, setting the stage for future work in the field. Driving this effort is the belief that if research and pedagogical advances in the HL field are to have the greatest impact, HL programs need to become firmly rooted in educational systems. Against a background of cultural and linguistic diversity that characterizes the twenty-first century, the volume outlines key issues in the design and implementation of HL programs across a range of educational sectors, institutional settings, sociolinguistic conditions, and geographical locations, specifically: North and Latin America, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Cambodia. All levels of schooling are included as the teaching of the following languages are discussed: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian (Eastern and Western), Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Czech, French, Hindi-Urdu, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Pasifika languages, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yiddish. These discussions contribute to the development and establishment of HL instructional paradigms through the experiences of "actors on the ground" as they respond to local conditions, instantiate current research and pedagogical findings, and seek solutions that are workable from an organizational standpoint. The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education is an ideal resource for researchers and graduate students interested in heritage language education at home or abroad.

Part I
A Landscape of Heritage/Community Languages

Demographic Surveys

1
The Constellation of Languages in Europe

Comparative Perspectives on Regional Minority and Immigrant Minority Languages

Guus Extra

1 Semantics of the Targeted Field

Linguistic diversity has always been conceived as a constituent characteristic of European identity (Arzoz, 2008). Both the European Commission (established in Brussels, Belgium) and the Council of Europe (established in Strasbourg, France) have published many policy documents in which language diversity is cherished as a key element of the multicultural identity of Europe. This language diversity is considered to be a prerequisite rather than an obstacle for a united European space in which all citizens are equal, but not the same, and enjoy equal rights (Council of Europe, 2000). However, as will be shown in this chapter, some languages play a more important role in the European public and political discourse on “celebrating linguistic diversity,” the motto of the European Year of Languages (Coss, 2001). The constellation of languages in Europe actually functions as a descending hierarchy (Extra & Gorter, 2008; Nic Craith, 2006) with the following ranking of categories:

• English as lingua franca for transnational communication;
• national or official state languages of European countries;
• regional minority (RM) languages across Europe;
• immigrant minority (IM) languages across Europe.

In the official EU discourse, RM languages are referred to as regional or minority languages and IM languages as migrant languages. Whereas the national languages of the EU with English increasingly on top are celebrated most at the EU level, RM languages are celebrated less and IM languages least. IM languages are only marginally covered by EU language promotion programs and, so far, are mainly considered in the context of provisions for learning the national languages of the migrants’ countries of residence.

There is a great need for educational policies in Europe that take new realities of multilingualism into account. Processes of internationalization and globalization have brought European nation-states to the world, but they have also brought the world to European nation-states. This bipolar pattern of change has led to both convergence and divergence of multilingualism across Europe. On the one hand, English is increasingly on the rise as lingua franca for transnational communication across the borders of European nation-states (Jenkins, 2010), at the cost of all other official state languages of Europe, in particular French and German. The upward mobility of English is clearly visible in recent European Commission reports such as Special Eurobarometer 386 (European Commission, 2012) and Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe (Eurostat, 2012). In spite of many objections to the hegemony of English (Phillipson, 2003), this process of convergence is enhanced by the extension of the EU to Eastern Europe. Within the borders of European nation-states, however, there is an increasing divergence of languages at home (often referred to in Europe as “mother tongues”; Extra, 2010) due to large-scale processes of global migration.

Even at the level of (co-)official state languages, Europe’s identity is to a great extent determined by cultural and linguistic diversity (Haarmann, 1995). Table 1.1 serves to illustrate this diversity in terms of EU (candidate) Member States with their estimated populations (ranked in decreasing order) and corresponding (co-)official state languages.

As Table 1.1 makes clear, there are large differences in population size among EU Member States. German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, and Polish belong, in this order, to the six most widely spoken official state languages in the present EU, whereas Turkish would come second to German in an enlarged EU. Table 1.1 also shows the close connection between nation-state references and official state language references. In 27 out of 30 cases, distinct languages are the clearest feature distinguishing one nation-state from its neighbors (Barbour, 2000), the only exceptions (and for different reasons) being Belgium, Austria, and Cyprus. This match between nation-state references and official state language references obscures the existence of other categories of languages spoken across European nation-states (Haberland, 1991; Nic Craith, 2006). While many of these languages are indigenous minority languages with a regional territorial base, many others originate abroad and lack such a base. We will refer to these languages as regional minority (RM) languages and immigrant minority (IM) languages, respectively (Extra & Gorter, 2001), in this way expressing both their shared main property and their major constituent difference. As all of these RM and IM languages are spoken by different language communities and not at statewide levels, it may seem logical to refer to them as “community languages,” a term commonly used in the UK, thus contrasting them with the official languages of nation-states. However, this term would lead to confusion because it is also used to refer to the EU’s official state languages. In that sense, the designation “community languages” is occupied territory, at least in the EU jargon. A final argument in favor of using the term “immigrant” languages is its use on the Ethnologue: Languages of the World website (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2016), a valuable and widely used standard resource of cross-national information on this topic.

A number of other issues need to be kept in mind as well. First of all, in spite of their status as minority languages, RM and IM languages in some EU Member States have larger numbers of speakers than many of the official state languages mentioned in Table 1.1. Moreover, RM and IM languages in one EU nation-state may be official state languages in another nation-state. Examples of the former result from language border crossing in adjacent nation-states, such as Finnish in Sweden or Swedish in Finland. Examples of the latter result from processes of migration, in particular from Southern to Northern Europe, such as Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, or Greek. It should also be kept in mind that many, if not most, IM languages in particular European nation-states originate from countries outside Europe. It is the context of migration and minorization that makes our proposed distinction between RM and IM languages ambiguous; however, we see no good alternative. In our opinion, the proposed distinction will lead at least to awareness raising

Table 1.1 Overview of 30 EU (Candidate) Member States with Estimated Populations and (Co-)Official State Languages

Nr	Member States	Population (in millions)	(Co-)official State Language(s)
1	Germany	81.2	German
2	France	66.4	French
3	United Kingdom	64.9	English
4	Italy	60.8	Italian
5	Spain	46.4	Spanish
6	Poland	38.0	Polish
7	Romania	19.9	Roman
8	The Netherlands	16.9	Dutch (Nederlands)
9	Belgium	11.3	Dutch, French, German
10	Greece	10.8	Greek
11	Czech Republic	10.5	Czech
12	Portugal	10.4	Portuguese
13	Hungary	9.8	Hungarian
14	Sweden	9.7	Swedish
15	Austria	8.6	Austrian-German
16	Bulgaria	7.2	Bulgarian
17	Denmark	5.7	Danish
18	Finland	5.5	Finnish, Swedish
19	Slovakia	5.4	Slovak
20	Ireland	4.6	Irish, English
21	Croatia	4.2	Croatian
22	Lithuania	2.9	Lithuanian
23	Slovenia	2.1	Slovenian
24	Latvia	2.0	Latvian
25	Estonia	1.3	Estonian
26	Cyprus	0.8	Greek, Turkish
27	Luxembourg	0.6	Luxemburgish, French, German
28	Malta	0.4	Maltese, English
	Candidate Member States	Population (in millions)	Official State Language
29	Turkey	78.7	Turkish
30	Macedonia	2.1	Macedonian

Note: The June 2016 “Brexit” outcomes of the EU Referendum in the UK will lead to a complex and lengthy disentanglement of the EU and UK, the political and sociolinguistic effects of which could not be foreseen at the time of writing.

Source: “EuroStat Newsrelease 124: EU population estimates at 1 January 2015” by EuroStat (2015).

and may ultimately lead to an inclusive approach in the European conceptualization of minority languages (Extra & Gorter, 2008; Extra & Yağmur, 2012).

2 The Role of Language in Identifying Diversity of Population Groups

Collecting reliable and comparable information about the diversity of population groups in EU countries is no easy task. More interesting than numbers or estimates of the size of particular groups, however, are the criteria used for determining such numbers or estimates. It is common EU practice to present data on RM groups on the basis of home language use and/or ethnicity while data on IM groups is based on nationality and/or country of birth. However, convergence between these criteria for the two groups emerges over time in terms of home language and ethnicity, because of strong intergenerational erosion in the utility of nationality or birth-country statistics for IM groups (Barni & Extra, 2008).

Comparative population figures for EU Member States are available from the EU’s Statistical Office of the EU in Luxembourg (EuroStat). Over the last decades, an overall decrease in the indigenous population has been observed in most EU countries; at the same time, there has been an increase in the IM figures. For a variety of reasons, however, reliable and comparable demographic information on IM groups in EU countries is difficult to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• PART I A Landscape of Heritage/Community Languages: Demographic Surveys
• PART II Community Initiatives: After-School Programs
• PART III Community Initiatives: All-Day Pre-, Primary, and Secondary Schools
• PART IV Language Minority Communities and the Public School System: Opportunities and Challenges
• PART V Maintenance of Heritage/Community Languages in Public Schools: The Impact of Government Policy and Sociopolitical Change
• PART VI Heritage/Community Languages in Higher Education
• Appendices
• Index