Vietnamese-Australian families: Children’s language competence and home language maintenance

Children’s home language maintenance is sustained through integrated language learning between the home and community. Many Vietnamese-Australian families are currently in the second or third generation since migration, when language loss has been noted for many migrants across the world. This chapter reports key findings from VietSpeech (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech), an Australian Research Council Discovery Project that considered Vietnamese-Australian children’s language competence and home language maintenance across four studies. The language profiles of Vietnamese-Australian adults (n = 271) and families (n = 151) will be described, including factors associated with children’s language use and proficiency and parents’ attitudes towards home language maintenance. Families’ successful experience of home language maintenance (n = 7) and consultations from international experts (n = 15) in home language maintenance and children’s language education will be presented, followed by results from the VietSpeech SuperSpeech program (n = 30), an online model for supporting home language maintenance for young children. Finally, the chapter discusses the challenges of home language maintenance in multilingual Australian society and proposes families’ recommendations for government support, including more accessible community language education and raising public awareness of multilingualism.