ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a narrative analysis of interviews with seven parents whose children attend community language schools teaching Swedish and Vietnamese. There are few studies exploring parent perceptions of the community language school, the languages taught there and the reasons parents describe for enrolling their children. This study fills this gap. The analysis shows that parents place importance on passing on language, culture and an understanding of diasporic identity to their children. Both dynamic and more static understandings of language and language development underlie parents’ utterances; they do not express an expectation that their children will develop or use the languages they study in the same way as themselves. However, all parents stress that they do not want their language or culture to be lost in their new diasporic context. The schools are also described as places where parents with similar languages and backgrounds can meet. Community language schools in this study can thus be understood as vehicles for transferring the Swedish and Vietnamese language and cultural identity to the next generation as well as a meeting place for adults sharing similar backgrounds.
