Multilingualism in a Drifting Family

Abstract

This chapter presents a detailed study of a Hokkien family migrating from Fujian to Burma in the 1940s and subsequent emigrations of some members in the next generation from Burma to Macao in 1971 and to San Francisco in 1981. These emigrations typically involved children of a young age. Coping with linguistic scenarios varying from one country to another, the emigrants had to make adjustments to the dominant language in a different society. This longitudinal study of an extended family over a period of almost half a century involves unusually rich linguistic experiences, allowing an analysis of language shift in multilingual settings. This adds a third dimension, an intra-familial one, to the micro-interactional and macro-societal perspectives on studies of bilingualism [cf. Li (Three generations, two languages, one family: language choice and language shift in a Chinese community in Britain, 1994)]. A theory, the Youngest Child Model , is proposed to differentiate subtle differences that may exist between children of the same generation in an immigrant family. This theory highlights the fact that sociolinguistic change occurs on a continuum.