ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Southeast Asian marriage-migrant women’s attitudes and behaviour regarding their children’s heritage language development, and discusses the challenges they face in teaching their children their heritage language in South Korea. The multi-ethnic children in this study have Korean fathers and Vietnamese or Cambodian mothers. The findings suggest that the participants’ children experience tremendous pressure to abandon their heritage languages, which are undervalued and considered inferior to Korean and even detrimental to their education. In addition, the women’s emphasis on their children’s educational and societal success has led them to promote Korean within the household, contributing to their children’s heritage language loss. Their strong desire for their children to assimilate is shaped by the mainstream society in which multi-ethnic children are vulnerable to discrimination against their ethnicity and language. The study offers insights into how multilingualism can develop in a largely monolingual and monocultural society.
