Arabic as a home language in Sweden: family language practices and beliefs

This paper investigates the language maintenance efforts of Arabic-heritage families whose preschool- and early primary school-age children are growing up bilingually with Arabic and Swedish. As a result of large-scale immigration to Sweden, Arabic has become by far the largest minority language, but very little is known about Arabic as a home language in this population. As part of a broader research project on child multilingualism, a questionnaire survey was administered to the parents of 100 Arabic/Swedish-speaking children. The resulting quantitative data on family language practices and beliefs were complemented by a smaller-scale follow-up interview study 2 years later. Family language practices targeted included parent-parent, parent-child and sibling interaction, language-fostering activities such as shared book reading, storytelling, and enrolment in home language education. Despite much diversity in family types concerning family constellations, parents' education, country of origin, Arabic language variety, and length of residence in Sweden, common traits emerge. Parents generally consider Arabic and Swedish to be equally important for their child to become proficient in. There is a strong focus on the transmission of Arabic in the home, and parents expect children to speak Arabic to them, though not all of them always do. In line with Swedish mainstream convention, most children are enrolled early in preschool. Parent-child interaction is reported to be mostly in Arabic, but in many homes, the agency of child and siblings leads to an increased use of Swedish, as does Swedish media consumption. In their home-language maintenance efforts, parents engage the help of extended family members, libraries, home-language teachers, and/or choose to enroll their child in a bilingual Arabic/Swedish preschool or a school with a particular profile that encourages Arabic. The families in the sample express little anxiety regarding their children's bilingualism and tend not to seek professional counsel in this matter. Swedish schools are reported to generally advise the parents to speak their native language as much as possible to their child. Whilst unusual from an international perspective, this finding is in line with minority-language maintenance advice previously documented for a different ethnolinguistic group in Sweden.