Heritage language maintenance and education in the Greek sociolinguistic context: Albanian immigrant parents’ views

Abstract

This paper presents data from two studies—a nationwide quantitative research and an ethnographic study—on immigrant parents’ perspectives about heritage language maintenance and education in Greek state schools. The quantitative data come from a large-scale questionnaire survey, which aimed at the investigation of the needs and requirements for the implementation of a pilot programme teaching immigrant languages in Greek state schools. The findings regarding immigrant parents’ perspectives provide an updated, comprehensive view on how they perceive and respond to the issue of the support and teaching of their heritage languages within the Greek context. Complementing and enhancing those findings, the qualitative data from the ethnographic study, through the analysis of immigrant parents’ semi-structured interviews, provides important insights into aspects of the parents’ complex sociolinguistic reality, thus offering an in-depth understanding and interpretation of their language views.

Keywords

• heritage language education
• immigrant parents
• language views