Family Language Policy among Expat Families in the Brainport Region

Family Language Policy (FLP henceforth) is about implicit and explicit language planning in the family context. Parents who bring up children in a multilingual environment deal with the questions such as which language they should speak with their children, how they help their children with home language maintenance and mainstream language learning and how they get support from externals including teachers and other professionals. The principal investigator of this application researched FLP extensively during her PhD project. The investigation focused on second-generation bilingual families who came from a labour migration background, and from low socio-economic backgrounds. The discourse in these families focused mainly on 2 languages (the mainstream language and the heritage language). From the sociolinguistic perspective, their heritage languages and home language maintenance efforts were perceived negatively by the mainstream society, due to the negative images of labour-migrants in the country. Over the last few years, the Brainport region (Eindhoven and its surroundings) attracts a different wave of migration to the Netherlands from all around the world. These migrants are expats, who are highly educated people including engineers, scholars and medical professionals. They have different sociolinguistic characteristics from families with a labour-migrant background. English is the medium of communication in work settings for parents. Children learn Dutch at school, and socialize in multiple languages including Dutch, English and their home language. Expat-friendly schools are more open to the use of multilingual practices in the school environment. This study aims to explore the FLP among language ideologies, practices and management, and factors influencing these among expat families in this unique region.