Principal investigators: Martín Guardado, Yvonne Lam, Evangelia Daskalaki, Rika Tsushima

Research assistants: Dulce Aline Carboney, Daniel Escóbar López, Esher Grewal, Misha Macwan, Logan Mahoney, Ariane Camilo Monaco, Minako Noda, Jamie Stewart, Héloïse Torck 

Funding: University of Alberta Office of the Vice-President Research and Innovation ($30,000); University of Alberta Kule Institute for Advanced Study ($7,500)

Immigrant parents face many challenges in using their home language when the host country's language(s) dominates outside the home. At the same time, they display a high degree of heterogeneity both at an individual level (among speakers in the same community) and at a group level (among speakers across different language communities). This project compares heritage language use in four ethnic communities in Edmonton that differ in their size, density, and access to heritage language resource: Japanese (9 families), Brazilian Portuguese (10 families), Hispanic (6 families), and Punjabi (3 families). Drawing on data collected from questionnaires, interviews, and language production tasks, we investigate associations among different aspects such as family background, language practices, proficiency level, language ideologies, and ethnic identity.

Publications

Lam, Y., Stewart, J., Macwan, M., Daskalaki, E. & Guardado, M. (2025). A comparison of heritage language maintenance in four communities in Edmonton. Presented at the Language and Power conference, University of British Columbia Okanagan, May 15, 2025.