ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the maintenance and intergenerational transmission of their heritage language issue and reviews the development of the field with a particular focus on those issues where sociolinguistic theory informs language awareness research. Some of these issues include parents' and children's attitudes towards their immigrant language, their awareness of language shift and the factors contributing to this. The study of language awareness in diasporic contexts is centred on the social and socio-affective factors of language choice and the longer term consequences of language maintenance and shift. Research in the field is concerned with the power-relations between heritage and mainstream languages, issues of authenticity and legitimacy and related attitudes and ideologies vis-a-vis the speech of second-generation speakers and accented speech. The chapter also reviews relevant conceptual and methodological developments from an international perspective many of the examples are from the Australian context.
