The development of self-identification in Chinese-Vietnamese children in Australia : the influence of family language practices and changing social environments

This thesis investigates the development of children’s self-identification in minority bi-ethnic migrant families in relation to their multilingual and multicultural practices, within the context of exogamous families in Australia. While these bi-ethnic partnerships implicitly or explicitly implement policies and strategies to encourage the use of home languages, there is scant understanding of the dynamic interrelation between the development of identity in multi-ethnic children and their language development in changing social environments. Bi- and multilingual children’s language acquisition, family language policy and identity issues have been extensively studied internationally. However, these studies do not systematically investigate the connections between identity development in multilingual children, their respective family’s linguistic and cultural input, and their social environments. This thesis examines family language practices and socio-environmental factors impacting young children’s identity construction, to complement previous research on Australian bilingual children. It seeks to contribute to the current debate between essentialist (psychological) versus non-essentialist (socio-linguistic) identity issues by examining children’s expression of self in response to the three languages in their environment, including their families’ referential practices. It also observes the effects of different social contexts and changing circumstances on children’s self-identification. The design of this research is longitudinal, as it aims to gather data from two Australian Cantonese-Vietnamese families over three years. The key finding of this study is that children construct their identity in a dynamic and context-bound way. Results identify three major influencing factors as playing a role in the children’s self-identification: 1) family language input and practices; 2) family ideologies, cultural practices, and family networks, as well as the migrant community and 3) peers and the childcare/school environments. This thesis contributes new empirical data to existing research on family language policy and adds new language pairs to the field of heritage language maintenance and child identity in the Australian context. The data suggests that self-identification develops in a context-bound way parallel to the context-bound language development proposed in Qi and Di Biase (2020). It reveals that children’s self-identification grows not merely under the influence of their family’s linguistic and cultural practices, but also adjusts to changing circumstances and pressures from peers and adult role models in the dominant environment. These findings may play a role in the preservation of heritage languages and family wellbeing