Taiying Lee

Ministry of Education, New Zealand

Language attitudes and maintenance in the New Zealand Mandarin speaking community

Key words: language maintenance, Mandarin speakers, immigrant population  

In New Zealand, the ethnic Chinese are one of the largest and continually growing immigrant groups with a consistent stable increase of 36% from the 2006 to 2013 Census. The majority of this population are speakers of Mandarin, and as with most immigrant groups, the population is heterogeneous with immigrants originating from a wide variety of countries such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. Consequently most migrants in New Zealand speak Mandarin as well as one or several other Chinese ‘dialects’.  
In this presentation we report on the attitudes this population holds on Mandarin language and its maintenance in New Zealand. Data was collected from 300 parents of children participating in a project on the phonological development of Mandarin-English bilingual children. Parents were asked, within a structured interview about their attitudes to maintaining Mandarin in a New Zealand context. Findings indicate strong support for the maintenance of Mandarin and as in previous research (Bradley, 2002; Garcia, 2003) factors such as community size, continuing immigration and the use of the home language in cultural and religious events aid language maintenance. Findings also reveal the role of factors specific to this community; these include factors such as family structure, parental age, education and country of origin. Of particular note is the relationship between country of origin and the status of Mandarin and other Chinese ‘dialects’. Families from countries where bi/multilingualism is prevalent, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, generally considered Mandarin and any other Chinese ‘dialects’ to be of equal importance and supported maintenance of all languages. By contrast families from China were more ambivalent about supporting all varieties of Chinese and tended to favour Mandarin. We conclude with a discussion of how variables such as level of Mandarin language use within the family and opportunities to use the language elsewhere inform the differing views on language maintenance within the Mandarin speaking community in New Zealand.

References

Bradley, D. (2002) Language Attitudes: the key factor in language maintenance in D. Bradley & M. Bradley (Eds), Language endangerment and language maintenance: an active approach. London : RoutledgeCurzon  

Garcia, M. (2003). 2. Recent evidence on language maintenance. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23, pp 22-43. Cambridge University Press.