“No more Korean at Home.” Family language policies, language practices, and challenges in Korean immigrant families: Intragroup diversities and intergenerational impacts

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  • This study explores the cases of Korean immigrant families who have different transnational life trajectories. Despite the fast-growing research interests in family language policy, the intragroup diversity of Korean immigrant families and their daily interactions are not yet widely discussed. The goal of this study is to explore intergenerational impacts and intragroup diversities among Korean immigrants. Throughout two years, I conducted several interviews with the families of the 1st generation, consisting of short-term stayers and long-term stayers, and 1.5 generation. I collected language profiles and background questionnaires in addition to family interactions over the dinner table.

  • Though the field of FLP research has been gaining attention, it still lacks in many aspects. FLP is an important area where much remains to be explored in terms of the different types of families, diverse languages, and distinct research methodologies. In addition, despite Korean transnational families’ various implementations of FLP to promote family's bilingualism, not many empirical studies examine intragroup diversity among the same ethnic group and their diverse language practices. To attempt to fill this gap, the current study will explore intragroup diversity among Korean transnational families residing in the same geographical region, who have different immigrant backgrounds, future orientations, and motives for pursuing bilingualism. It also captures the context-specific nature of family language policy, and the complex relations between parental language ideologies and the actual implementation of their FLP in language practices in each group. The findings show the parents’ educational and linguistic choices for their children are based on the family's socio-cultural background, attitudes towards bilingualism, and future orientation. This study reinforces the understanding of how multiple linkages in transnational experiences are orchestrated, and how they may or may not conflict with immigrant families’ language practices.

  • This study reinforces our understanding of how the multiple linkages between transnational life experiences and language ideologies are orchestrated, whether it is in harmony or in conflict, with immigrant families’ language practices. This study also contributes to the existing FLP field by extending the scope of FLP research to not only “what” the particular family's FLP is, but also “how” they construct their FLP in daily interactions. In addition, the multifaceted investigation of intragroup diversity reveals why one immigrant group may maintain its languages while another group does not.

  • This study has implications that it is important to understand the dynamic and complex nature of bilingual children's literacy practices across two languages as an integral part of their learning process in the home, community, and school. Considering the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity with the Korean diaspora in the US, a more nuanced understanding of the transnational students and their families, as well as concrete support informed by empirical research are needed.

Abstract

This ethnographically informed sociolinguistic study examines family language policies (FLP) for language learning at home. It explores the cases of Korean immigrant families with different transnational life trajectories. Despite the fast-growing research interests in FLP, intragroup diversities of Korean immigrant families and their daily interactions are not yet widely discussed. The goal of this study is to explore intergenerational impacts and intragroup diversities among Korean immigrants. Throughout two years, I conducted interviews with the short-term and long-term stayers of the 1st generation and families of the 1.5 generation. I collected language profiles and background questionnaires besides family interactions. The findings demonstrate the intergenerational impact of intragroup diversity on language use, attitudes toward bilingualism, and future orientation. This study reinforces the understanding of how the linkages between transnational life experiences and language choices at home are interwoven, and how they may or may not conflict with immigrant families’ language practices.

Introduction

Globalization and international mobility have made multilingualism and cultural diversity inevitable in our daily lives. These changes also bring diversity in traditions, values, languages and cultures to families and individuals alike. Notably, in the context of migration, where the heritage language is not the same as the dominant language used in the society, different language use among family members, priorities in language selections, and negotiation among family members create a new dynamic in family interactions. Political and ideological components such as how much of one's heritage language is valued in a community or how much bilingual or multilingual ability is respected in a specific immigrant society impact the creation of this dynamic as well.

In the diaspora of the 21st century, which is “superdiverse” (Vertovec, 2007), individuals with different migration motives, educational experiences, and socioeconomic backgrounds join together to create diverse immigrant communities. The increasing number of diverse types of immigrants in the United States (Piller & Cho, 2013) and their unique linguistic and cultural backgrounds bring intragroup diversities in education and society. Korean immigrant families are no exception to this phenomenon. There are different types of immigrant families based on their diverse transnational experiences, linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and language practices.

Educational opportunities for the parents or children, as well as global opportunities more broadly, are the major motivation factors in recent Korean transnational families’ moves. Temporary visits or short-term stays in countries where the dominant language is English have been considered a transnational strategy for learning English successfully (Song, 2012). Such temporal immigrants are called different names: serial migrants or flexible citizens (Duff, 2015), short-term stayers (Song, 2012), or transettlers (Hirsch & Lee, 2018). In this study, I define “short-term” as a period of three years or less, which is relatively “shorter” than permanent immigrants.

Following Hirsch and Lee (2018), I argue transnational as an ‘umbrella term’ that includes both people with initial projected permanency, immigrants, and people with less permanent intentions, settlers. These transnationals are often motivated by linguistic and educational advances in a given time and context. In this sense, I refer to a Korean family in this study as a transnational family. Transnational migration does not necessarily indicate a one-directional flow of people, and it does not involve a single destination. With the evolving views on globalization and migration, diverse types of relocated people have different degrees of transnational ties, and it is arguably difficult to understand them within the traditional sense of migration from one country to another. The participants in this study have different degrees of connection with other family members in Korea, and they often anchor their orientation there in various ways. Some families may have a tighter connection to their home countries than others. Moreover, some have a greater probability of returning to Korea in the future.

Previous studies on Korean-American immigrants mainly focused on language socialization, loss of their first language (Ventureyra, Pallier & Yoo, 2004), or maintenance of their heritage language. In particular, the topic of Korean immigrants’ maintenance of their heritage language has been explored in diverse social contexts including community schools (You, 2005), ethnic churches (Park, 2013), and homes (Brown, 2011; Chung, 2019). The majority of these studies underscore the parents’ beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes about the heritage language maintenance. In addition to existing research, we still need more studies analyzing the Korean families’ interaction as well as the complexities found in intragroup diversities. This study explores intragroup diversities in multiple linkages of transnational experiences, language uses, and family language policies.

Section snippets

Family Language Policy (FLP)

This study is grounded on the idea that the family is the crucial place where languages are learned, exchanged, and negotiated (Fishman, 1991; Lee, 2019; Li, 2009). Family is the first and most important locus of socialization, and family is at the center of language learning and heritage language maintenance. This study agrees with the idea that the family is the main site for language transmission and maintenance despite increasing prominence of other online communities and different heritage

Korean Transnational Families

There are a number of studies that explore issues that Korean transnational families face in today’s multilingual world. Amid various issues, language is one of the key concerns to Korean transnational families. The selection of which language they use at home, parents’ involvement in language education, and investment in maintenance of heritage language are major topics of the studies on Korean transnational families (Kang, 2013, 2015; Song, 2016a, 2016b; Suh, 2020).

Two significant concepts to

This study

This is an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic study that investigates how Korean immigrant families with different immigrant backgrounds experience and maintain their heritage language and culture. Ethnographically informed sociolinguistic studies attend to local, contextual knowledge (Eckert, 2000; Lawson, 2014), and they take a bottom-up perspective of the social construct, developing a better understanding of language constituting a part of identity.

This study also explores to what

Data

Multiple processes of data collection were implemented for this study. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted to examine how the participants shape or police their language at home. The interview questions were comprised of the participants’ ideas and experiences of language learning and use in their past and present, as well as their future plans and orientation (More details on interview questions are found in Appendix 2). Interviews do not merely act as a medium that provides

Data analysis

Data analysis follows inductive and comparative processing of qualitative research (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Once data were collected and transcribed, they were color-coded to highlight meaningful family language episodes. With FLP as a theoretical lens, I conceptualized preliminary, common portions of data about language, culture, identity, and ideology. These themes commonly emerged from the participants’ interviews and self-recorded audio data. To secure validity and credibility, the data

Intergenerational Impacts on Family Language Practices

The first section focuses on how language practices at home are impacted by diverse intergenerational factors including the parents’ language learning experiences and life trajectories. A family is a key domain for intergenerational language transmission (Fishman, 1991), and language learning and practices occurring at home are often related to the family members’ ideas of language learning and maintenance. This intergenerational influence is realized in distinctive ways across different

Discussion

This study illustrated the dynamic nature of FLP and intragroup diversities of Korean immigrant families by examining socio-cultural and linguistic profiles of the families and their interactions. All families in this study acknowledged the importance of bilingualism for their children and chose to maintain the Korean-English bilingual environment at home. However, this study captures the complexities of the Korean families with different backgrounds. The influence of intergenerational aspects,

Conclusion

This study presents empirical evidence on how Korean transnational families manage their linguistic and cultural heritage in a contemporary urban city in the US. It shows how Korean families with different immigration status adopt, reject, and modify ideological discourses on bilingualism and various language practices. What constitutes ‘legitimate practices’ can be related to various language ideologies and future orientations. Each family wrestles with different values of bilingualism. This

Funding

This work was supported by Korean Studies Grant from the Academy of Korean Studies, South Korea (AKS-2017-R- 22 (17R22), Competitive Research).,This project, “Family Language policies, Practices, and Challenges: Case Studies of Transnational Families.” was approved by the institutional review board (IRB number: H17636).

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