Vitality of Heritage Languages and Education

Abstract

One of the concerns of minority/immigrant communities and their members is to maintain their heritage through the intergenerational transmission of their language and culture. Such a process involves not both family language planning and heritage language education (HLE). This chapter examines the vitality of community languages using the Greek language in Canada as a case study. The role of the community in promoting and sustaining heritage language education is the main focus of this study which includes a theoretical and an empirical part. In the first part, we explore the phenomena of language shift and language maintenance and examine parameters that affect the ethnolinguistic vitality of T. Aravossitas (*)