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.

Research on heritage language maintenance (HLM) first consolidated around questions of intergenerational transmission, language shift, and the conditions under which minority languages are sustained or lost (Fishman, 1991). It later expanded to examine speakers’ motivations, linguistic competence, and identity processes, as well as the role of education in heritage language acquisition and maintenance (Brinton et al., 2008; Montrul, 2016; Polinsky, 2018; Giles & Johnson, 1987).

More recent studies have begun to approach HLM through a genealogical lens, shifting the attention to how language practices are carried forward, interrupted, or reshaped across generations within families, communities, and schools (Curdt-Christiansen, 2009; Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García & Wei, 2014). This perspective foregrounds the temporal depth of heritage language practices, linking everyday language use to longer intergenerational trajectories of memory, belonging, rupture, and continuity, while also accounting for the influence of institutional arrangements and language regimes such as schooling and policy frameworks (Hornberger, 2002; Spolsky, 2004; Ricento, 2006).

Building on and extending this line of inquiry, recent scholarship has foregrounded genealogical analysis as a productive framework for examining heritage language maintenance in contexts marked by mobility, displacement, and historical interruption (Sacré, 2025). This work draws attention to how linguistic inheritances among Indigenous, migrant, and transnational populations are shaped by intergenerational discontinuities, institutional interventions, and power asymmetries.

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 250–500-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).

References

Brinton, D. M., Kagan, O., & Bauckus, S. (2008). Heritage language education: A new field emerging. Routledge.

Creese, A., & Blackledge, A. (2010). Translanguaging in the bilingual classroom: A pedagogy for learning and teaching? The Modern Language Journal, 94(1), 103–115. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2009.00986.x

Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2009). Invisible and visible language planning: Ideological factors in the family language policy of Chinese immigrant families in Quebec. Language Policy, 8(4), 351–375. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-009-9146-7

Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Multilingual Matters.

García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan.

Giles, H., & Johnson, P. (1987). Ethnolinguistic identity theory: A social psychological approach to language maintenance. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 68, 69–99. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.1987.68.69

Hornberger, N. H. (2002). Multilingual language policies and the continua of biliteracy: An ecological approach. Language Policy, 1(1), 27–51. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014548611951

Montrul, S. (2016). The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030502

Polinsky, M. (2018). Heritage languages and their speakers. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107252349

Ricento, T. (2006). An introduction to language policy: Theory and method. Blackwell.

Sacré, H. P. (2025). Reading Derrida’s ‘ontological violence’& Spivak’s ‘enabling violation’ in the adoptee’s journey of heritage language loss and reclamation. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 1-15.

Spolsky, B. (2004). Language policy. Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Hari Prasad Sacré
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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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.

• heritage language maintenance
• family language practices
• community language schools
• multilingual education
• plurilingual pedagogies
• intergenerational language transmission
• language policy frameworks