ABSTRACT
This chapter examines features of communication in American households where Chinese is used as a heritage language against this backdrop of global migration. It focuses on everyday interactions that take place in Chinese heritage language (CHL) speaking households. It aims to address the following two broad questions: how is discourse in heritage language speaking households impacted by immigration, cultural and linguistic contact/conflict/convergence, and global information networks; and what is the role of child heritage language (HL) speakers in shaping their family discourse. The chapter presents the ways in which child HL speakers shape their parent's language forms. It then highlights the discourse strategies of reformulation and repair that are used by the participants during language mediation both among themselves and with the outside world. HL speaking households thus refer to families where there are at least two generations who have different linguistic and cultural upbringings and who speak the HL to varying degrees and at varying proficiency levels.
