Family Language Policy towards Heritage Language Literacy Acquisition and Maintenance: Iranians in New Zealand

Abstract

The present study investigates Iranian immigrants’ family language policy toward heritage language literacy acquisition and maintenance in New Zealand. Parental beliefs, practices, and efforts toward their children’s minority language (i.e., Persian) literacy acquisition and maintenance are investigated through Spolsky’s (2004) model of language policy. The analysis of the data, i.e., semi-structured interviews with twenty-four parents of Persian-English bilinguals (6–18 year old), reveals that it was very uncommon for the heritage speakers to have high literacy skills, which the parents attributed largely to the lack of community-based heritage language schools in the host country. Additionally, while the parents reported that they would like their children to have high levels of conversational fluency as well as cultural knowledge, few of them believed that literacy can be a vehicle for both.