Minority families which are clustered into their ethnic community are often believed to have more chances of maintaining their language than those living far away from the community. Understanding language use in both home-family and neighbourhood-community domains would, therefore, enrich our knowledge about to what extent families and communities can side with one another in facilitating or constraining language maintenance or shift. In this presentation, I will discuss minority youth's agency in choosing languages for interactions with their family and community members in the Vietnamese context, and suggest implications for minority language maintenance and shift in relation to youth agency.
In Vietnam's mainstream education and wider society, languages of ethnic minority groups are not considered to be important or valuable, as compared with Vietnamese, the national language-which is also the language of the Kinh majority people. How minority youth who experience mainstream schooling manage their language use in such a Vietnamese-dominant social environment is an important question to be investigated. I will talk about youth agency in their language choice in communication with people of different ages and in different relations to them in their family and ethnic community, focusing in particular on a group of young minority adults' experience sand perspectives. Through the lens of a power-solidarity matrix (Brown & Gilman, 1960), I will examine four main types of interactions: communication with parents, communication with siblings, communication with young community members, and communication with older community members. The youth's language choice patterns suggest that they tended to perform a kind of "relational agency", where they (re)conceptualised their power and solidarity relationships with the interactants within a temporal-relational home or neighbourhood context (Burkitt, 2018). They exerted this relational agency in setting up their ethnic language as the power code associated with older members of the family and community, and considering Vietnamese, the mainstream language, as the generational solidarity code among young members. These language choice patterns, however, may result in disruption of L1 transmission among generations and perpetuate language shift.
It is commonly known that minority languages can be best preserved through intergenerational transmission within the family and the ethnic community where older members speak and transmit the L1 to younger members. Older family and community members' positive role and action in this process, however, are only half of the language maintenance battle (Smith-Christmas, 2016). Young people too have their own agency which can significantly shape their family and community members' language behaviours. Young people, hence, need to be involved in and play an active part in language maintenance efforts, as they are the future custodian of the vitality of their ethnic language and heritage culture.
References
Brown, R., & Gilman, A. (1960). The pronouns of power and solidarity. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.), Style in language (pp. 253–276). MIT press.
Burkitt, I. (2018). Relational agency. In: Dépelteau, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan,
Smith-Christmas, C. (2016). Family language policy: Maintaining an endangered language in the home. Palgrave Macmillan.
