The attitudes at the heart of multilingual family language policies

This study focuses on parental language beliefs, which we approach from an attitudes perspective. Language attitudes are at the heart of multilingual family language policies because they shape parents’ language practices and language management – and thereby, ultimately, children’s multilingual development. Based on French and English corpora (over 30,000 words in total) comprising 742 Quebec-based parents’ responses to an open-ended survey question, we present a corpus-assisted discourse study of parental attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. We analyse frequencies and collocations to attest statistically significant patterns, and we examine concordance lines and longer text segments to establish meaning in context. Our findings confirm the multidimensionality of parental attitudes towards childhood multilingualism, providing new insights into the nature of the three previously-established dimensions – status, solidarity, and cognitive development – as well as revealing a potential fourth dimension: personality development. The study thus makes a contribution to the family language policy framework and to language attitude theory more generally. Moreover, the findings show systematic differences between parents transmitting multiple societal languages versus parents transmitting heritage languages alongside one/more societal languages. The study thus also makes a practical contribution by facilitating the development of tailored support measures for different types of multilingual families.