According to Statistics Canada, in 2021, 1 in 4 Canadians had at least one mother tongue other than English or French. Many people grow up with their family's heritage languages—like Mandarin, Punjabi, Spanish or Arabic—as part of their family's cultural heritage.

Why is it, though, that some families manage to successfully pass their heritage language onto the next generation while other families struggle to do so?

Our recent research highlights that even in the same ethnic community, a heritage language could develop along different paths.

We worked with Vietnamese families (all originally from South Vietnam) who settled in Montréal following the 1975 Fall of Saigon in the Vietnam War. We recruited 38 parent-child pairs from Montréal's Vietnamese diaspora. Pairs consisted of one immigrant parent, born and raised in Vietnam, and one child, a second-generation Canadian.

We were interested in our participants' language skills, so we measured how well they spoke Vietnamese. Although all families left Vietnam in the aftermath of the war, this difficult experience affected them differently. We found that families that emigrated primarily to escape political persecution and those who left due to economic hardship took different paths to preserve their home language.

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