Family language policy, Russian language use, maintenance, and transmission in Cyprus and Sweden

Abstract

The focus of our research is the language of immigration in Cyprus and Sweden, family language policy in immigrant families, language maintenance and transmission. Since access to the minority language is often limited to the family, the importance of family interactions for language maintenance cannot be underestimated. Thus, systematic analysis should be implemented with a focus on the language of immigration and the ways in which parents transmit languages to their children (Spolsky 2012: 7). Using interviews, questionnaires and ethnolinguistic observations as a tool of inquiry, this chapter provides an overview of the linguistic and sociolinguistic profiles of the Russian immigrant community in Sweden and Cyprus and investigates how parents cope with the task of bilingual child-rearing. We apply the insights gained from FLP studies (Fogle, 2013

King et al., 2008

Spolsky, 2012), and we present an integrated approach as to how languages are learned and negotiated within individual families (see King et al. 2008: 907). Our informants are mostly highly educated people who have lived in the country of immigration for many years and tend to be well integrated and identify themselves with both languages and cultures. Our results show that multilingualism and the maintenance of the Russian language and culture are usually desired by the parents. However, not all of the efforts result in successful home language transmission. The parental strategy used for communication with the children is usually one-parent-one-language, also considered to be the most successful and most frequently used strategy among the informants. Encouragement and support within family is considered to be the main prerequisite for language maintenance.