How does family socioeconomic status affect home and mainstream language?

While considerable numbers of studies have investigated the language processes of bilingual children from various angles, there is little research focusing on the family characteristics in detail. In this study, we concentrate on the family-related variables, such as socioeconomic status and family structure, through a corpus collected in a project that investigates young Turkish-Dutch bilinguals’ early lexical development. Turning our attention in this project to the data collection tools “The Family Information Form“ and “The Inventory of Home Language Use”, we analysed the language-use patterns and family composition in detail in line with family socioeconomic status. Analyses reveal that young Turkish-Dutch bilinguals originate in very heterogeneous families from different perspectives. Socio-demographically diverse families observed in this study highlight the importance of a family-language policy-based approach