Language, Education, and Genealogy: Heritage Language Maintenance in Families, Communities, and Schools

Dear Colleagues,

As migration, globalisation, and multilingualism continue to reshape social life, heritage language maintenance (HLM) has become an essential anchor for individuals and groups navigating the social transformations of a world in motion. Families, communities, and schools each provide distinct yet interconnected settings in which linguistic heritage is upheld, marginalised, or strategically reorganised.

Building on the substantial body of work that has examined motivations, attitudes, and identity processes in HLM, this Special Issue turns its focus to the educational and genealogical dimensions of heritage language maintenance. We are particularly interested in work that adopts a genealogical lens to trace how families, communities, and schools sustain, modify, or reconfigure heritage language practices across generations. Such an approach also highlights how these trajectories intersect with local, national, and institutional language policies. In addition, it brings into view the intergenerational dynamics of memory, belonging, rupture, and continuity that underpin heritage language maintenance.

We invite contributions that illuminate these genealogies of heritage language practice as they unfold in familial, communal, educational, and policy contexts. Submissions focusing on how migrant, Indigenous, mobile or dispersed populations negotiate their linguistic inheritances within dominant language regimes and shifting policy environments are especially welcome.

Possible topics include the following (non-exhaustive):

• Family-based practices of heritage language maintenance, identity preservation, heritage revitalisation, and intergenerational transmission.
• Grassroots or community-led infrastructures that sustain heritage language use, belonging, identity, and linguistic socialisation.
• School-based research on bilingual and heritage language education, plurilingual pedagogies, mother-tongue instruction, teacher awareness, and classroom interaction.
• Quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-method analyses of language shift, language use, mobility trajectories, identity negotiation, and linguistic continuity.
• Policy-focused studies examining national, regional, local, or school-level policies, and their effects on heritage language opportunities, constraints, and governance.
• Research on heritage language communities facing precarious transmission conditions (e.g., Romani, First Nations, Adivasi, Māori, and Pacific Indigenous peoples) and people separated from their linguistic communities through adoption, displacement, or state intervention.

Authors are invited to submit a 500-word abstract outlining the focus, methodology, and relevance of their contribution to Dr. Hari Prasad Sacré. Abstracts can be submitted on a rolling basis at any time before the final deadline of 1 September 2026. Each abstract will be reviewed within three weeks of receipt, and authors will be notified whether they are invited to develop a full paper.

Following the acceptance of the abstract, authors will then have three months to prepare and submit their full manuscript, following the journal’s template and submission guidelines on the Genealogy (MDPI) platform. The final deadline for full manuscript submission is 1 December 2026.

Manuscripts undergo double-blind peer review and follow the regular procedures of the journal Genealogy. Ideally, final manuscripts should be between 7000 and 10,000 words, and illustrations are welcome (with the proper permissions).

Dr. Hari Prasad Sacré
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.