Analysis
From the interviews we can identify the following factors which shape our respondents’ attitude and language choice towards their language:
Prestige
A language is prestigious if it enjoys a high status in society. It directly shapes one’s attitude towards a language. In Mrs Suen’s case, it is evident that she viewed Jiangsu negatively as the it was stigmatised as the language of mainlanders (having a low status). The function and the level of affluence also affect the prestige of a language. (Holmes, 2013) For a language used more widely in daily communication and education, and spoken by a group of wealthier people, it enjoys a higher prestige. Many of our cases reflect that if the mother’s native tongue is not the prestigious one in her living community, the mother would prefer teaching the dominant language to the children for the benefit of their future education.
Economic function
Related to the prestige of a language is its economic function. It includes whether knowing the language can help you find a decent job, whether it is used in commercial activities etc. Like Mrs. Shum, she once turned to Mandarin from Hakka as she considered it an edge in serving customers from Taiwan. Mrs. Wu finds her own language Javanese useful as she can serve Indonesian customers in Hong Kong. Mrs. Ho also considers French useful in her son’s job.
Cultural value
Evans (2010) suggests that culture bonds to the language spoken by the community sharing the same culture. If people treasure their culture and view language as an integral part in it, they would perceive their language more positively. It can be seem from Mrs. Chau’s response that she values her Northern Thai culture highly so that she worries about the loss of Northern Thai very much.
Personal emotion
Our own perception about the language also constitutes our attitude towards it. Mrs. Ho believes French is a beautiful language and sounds much nicer than Cantoneses. Mrs. Wu’s daughter considers Indonesian fun, thereby feeling interested. But these perceptions may be socially construct, like French is usually regarded as an elegant and romantic language among non-speakers.
Sense of belonging (or identity)
Linguistic identity is a strong reason for one to speak his own language despite the presence of more prestigious choice in society. It creates a sense of belonging of the speaking community as a whole. Sometimes it is referred as “covert prestige”. (Holmes, 2013) The cases we found them significant are in Mrs. Chau’s and Mrs. Shum’s case. Mrs. Chau uses both Northern Thai and Standard Thai with her friends in Hong Kong, which shows that there is a community of Thai people here who wish to stay as a group. Mrs. Shum wants her children to know that they are of Hakka descent. She spoke Hakka to her son, but the acquisition is not successful.
While the child’s perception is determined by:
Personal Interest
Personal interest plays a large part in children’s language development. Languages are complex. Learning a language from the very beginning is hard for any individuals. Children are no exceptions. Although studies have long confirmed that children are able to acquire a language with relative ease when compared to adults, language learning requires significant time and effort. Motivation is an important component of effective learning. If children lack the motivation in learning the language, they are likely to stop acquiring new vocabulary and avoid learning more about the language. Children’s language learning is thus stifled by the lack of motivation and personal interest, as they do not see the fun part in it. Taking Mrs. Chau’s son’s case as an example, he is interested in learning Northern Thai and is willing to use it not merely because his mother has used the language with him since he was an infant, but also his experience in Chiang Mai; he enjoys communicating with his Northern Thai-speaking relatives during his one-month stay in Thailand every year. Such a positive experience makes him like his maternal language, encouraging him to continue using it.
Language attitude among peers
Perception of peers towards a language is a determining factor of language learning. Children in the development stage are easily influenced by others. Their peers are especially influential in that they are the ones who children can closely relate to. When children have yet to identify the benefits of being proficient in a language not shared by their peers, they are likely to abandon the language if the use of language between their interaction attracts unfavourable reception. Mrs. Suen and her sisters’ switching from using Jiangsu Hua to using Cantonese among themselves is a good example to illustrate the above point. Mrs. Suen was at first teased by her classmates in Hong Kong when she was 9 years old because she spoke Cantonese with a heavy Jiangsu accent, as mainlanders at that time was looked down on by Cantonese-speaking Hongkongers. Mrs. Suen therefore avoided speaking her native language outside home when she was a teenager. Although she and her two sisters still used the language to communicate with their mother, the three sisters replaced Jiangsu with Cantonese as the language of communication among themselves, reducing their proficiency in their native language. Another example is Mrs. Shum’s son: although Mrs.Shum had used Hakka with her son since his birth, he refused to respond in Hakka when he started going to school as he did not want to be different and teased by his peers.
Extent of use among local people and local media
People and media in the local community may benefit language learning behaviour. Whether a language is used in the society provides incentives to learning languages that are not dominant in a society. Even if a language that is prestigious with a considerable amount of speakers in the world, a language could have as little influence as a tribal language in certain places. These languages are not part of the lives of the local people in that there is no media or a community in support. Books are written in the dominant language. Radio and television programmes are conducted in the dominant language. Lyrics of pop music is composed with the dominant language. Peripheral languages in certain places are spoken by nobody in the community. Children have no access to the language and no one to talk to with the use of the language. Their voices are not heard. As languages are defined largely by its functional ability to facilitate human communication, the missing links in media and in community could force people to give up the use of these languages in the end. Among our 6 interviewees, Mrs. Chau was the only mother who could transmit her native language to her child because her son visits her hometown every year and is immersed in a Northern Thai-speaking environment. In Hong Kong, apart from Cantonese, English and Putonghua, other languages are rarely used in the media, so the second generation of intermarriage families have very limited opportunity to be exposed to their mother’s native language besides communicating with their mothers. Children such as Mrs. Shum’s son and Mrs. Ho’s son not exposed to their mother’s native language found the language not useful and stopped acquiring it.
Institutional endorsement
Support by the government is positive to language diversity in a society. This can be done by promoting language education or implementing bilingual education, funding training programmes for language teachers and translators, and recruiting non-local members in government organization. While promoting and funding language education improves the quality of the local language minorities, recruiting non-local members in government organization may provide a more accommodating environment for local language minorities in a particular place. There will be a higher chance for the voice of local language minorities to be heard. Increasing the coverage of language minorities in different social sectors. Concerning the situation in Hong Kong, only Cantonese, English and Putonghua are taught in the mainstream local schools, while international schools offer foreign languages (mostly European languages) and non-mainstream local schools offer minority languages such as Hindi and Urdu to South Asian students. Children from intermarriage families do not learn their mother’s native languages at school, as the government does not include those languages as part of the syllabus when their respective communities are not large enough.
Whether a child can successfully pick up the language depends on:
Linguistic environment
A baby picks up its first language when it is exposed to the language from the point of birth. With sufficient immersion, the child will normally become fluent gradually in the first 5 years of his lifer. As a result, what the family speaks plays a crucial role in determining whether a child can acquire a specific language or not in the first two years. What the community speaks will also be picked up by a child with sufficient immersion (e.g. pre-school socialising and schooling). The latter point is quite sound in our interview: all the children know how to speak Cantonese, which is the paternal language. However, only Mrs. Chau’s son can successfully speak his mother’s native language; in all the other cases, the failure is at least partially related to limited exposure from their mothers.
Attitude
A child’s perception on the language is a strong factor of whether he or she will successfully acquire a language, in a multilingual setting. Evans (1995) reports a case in Australia that children are very sensitive to the relative prestige of a language in a community; if they gauge that speaking a certain language is inferior, the child will abandon it quickly. It is evident in Mrs. Shum’s son responded to her mother only in Cantonese after the family moved to Hong Kong. It is quite probable that Hakka and Mandarin were frown upon by his classmates and were associated with stigmatisation. In contrast, Mrs. Wu’s daughter finds Javanese interesting and is willing to listen to Indonesian songs.
Most mothers want to pass their native language on but failed. Why?
Limited (early) exposure
There is a general belief among the interviewees that language can be acquired naturally at any stages of human lives, and that any individual is able to master a language without early exposure to the language. But this is hardly true in reality. Numerous studies have provided evidence that children are more capable of acquiring a language than adults. The stage before the ability to acquire a language declines is called the critical period. Parents prefer teaching the children the most dominant language during their early days of development to enable the children to concentrate on catching up the progress of their counterparts rather than ‘wasting’ time on learning additional languages which can only benefit their children at a relatively later stages of development. Language learning is deferred and considered as secondary to the development of children. When they recognize the need to learn the language, it maybe too late for remediation, as evidenced by the fact that only children who learned their language in their early days can master the native minority language of the mother.
Lack of interest/motivation in children
Transmission of cultural heritage is one special feature that goes along with learning a language. Often, cultural value of language is the source of satisfaction for children. Their interest often stem from the special cultural by-products of language like music, literature, drawings,etc. Although the appreciation of arts and culture of the language origin does not necessarily encourage children to learn the language, its effects of attracting their interest in the language is beyond doubt. As it is personal satisfaction that children value most, it is perhaps impossible for the children to learn a language without having interest themselves.