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Part of
New Approaches to Language Attitudes in the Hispanic and Lusophone World
Edited by Talia Bugel and Cecilia Montes-Alcalá
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 25] 2020
► pp. 185–206

Parental language attitudes and language use among Brazilian families in Japan

| University of Canterbury

This chapter presents the results of a survey and interviews administered to Brazilian families living in Japan aiming to capture the use of Brazilian-Portuguese (BP) and Japanese and explore this community’s attitude toward bilingualism. Most of these families come from second or third generations of Japanese emigrants to Brazil who are not familiar with the Japanese language or culture. Their children need special assistance with Japanese at school and do not communicate easily in BP at home. Parents have high expectations for their children to acquire advanced oral and literacy skills in both languages. However, the use of BP at home does not necessarily lead children to use it as much as their parents partly because of assimilative pressures at school.

Keywords: Japanese-Brazilians, bilingualism, home language use, heritage languages
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
  • Research questions and methodology
  • Results
    • Demographic information
    • Profiles of the parents
    • Profiles of the children
    • Profiles of the adults other than the parents
    • Parental views about the two languages
    • Language use patterns at home
    • Portuguese use at home and outside the home
    • Relationship between parental language use patterns and child language use at home
  • Discussion
    • Expectations vs. reality
    • Limitations
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.25.08shi
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