Due to globalization, immigrant populations growing rapidly and international marriages having become common, the language situation in linguistically mixed families is often complex. Language is an important part of child development. Language skills are invaluable for children to achieve success both in their academics and future career. This may be why more and more parents are drawn to the idea of giving their children the gift of bilingualism and multilingualism (Baker 2000). Although multilingualism has numerous advantages, raising multilingual children is believed to be more complicated than raising their monolingual peers (Shin 2017).
It is well-known that when some languages are learned and maintained at home, others are lost. The language choices negotiated in daily interaction are related to which languages are maintained or lost. Some parents assume that language acquisition is beyond their control, whilst others believe that family language activities can be planned and managed.Grosjean (1982) refers to childhood bilingualism as a conscious decision made by parents; extra efforts, patience, and persistence are generally required to ensure the acquisition and the maintenance of two or more languages.
There are many incentives for children to acquire two or more languages. One common one is that immigrant parents wish their children to acquire both the heritage language (a native, home, or ancestral language) and the societal language (a language commonly used in public life in a society). Immigrant families may employ the policies that favor a heritage language to “enable its members to maintain a connection with their past, strengthen a family bond across generations, and protect through adaptation the integrity of the family in response to external forces” (Tannenbaum 2012: 62). In this instance the home environment and parents are the best and often the only sources for transmitting the heritage language and culture to the younger generation which, otherwise, would be deemed to be lost (Fishman 1991).
How parents perceive different languages and how they negotiate the use of the totality of their linguistic repertoires directly affect their children’s acquisition of each of these languages. Making decisions is especially necessary when children are involved in a family where each parent speaks a different native language (King and Fogle
