Attendance of Complementary Schools and Other Aspects of Family Language Policy among Albanians in Greece

Raising bilingual and bicultural children in ethnocentric spaces can be particularly challenging. Immigrant families interested in maintaining their language and culture need to engage into certain family language policies to support the ethnic language. Family language policies are here understood as an over, explicit and deliberate attempt to steer language behaviours among family members towards a particular direction (Curdt-Christiansen 2009; Spolsky 2004). The present paper discusses family language policies in a group of Albanian immigrant parents (N=35) who send or have sent their children to ‘complementary’ Albanian schools (Creese & Martin 2010). They form part of a much larger sample of parents investigated through a questionnaire survey in the course of a broader research project on bilingualism (BALED) funded by the European Union and the Greek State and run by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Our study is informed by Spolsky’s (2004; 2012) model of family language policy and the findings we discuss here relate to its three components, namely: (i) language practices among parents and children as well as their degree of competence in Greek and Albanian, (ii) language beliefs and ideologies with regard to the two languages, and (iii) language management , which covers the language socialisation activities of parents and complementary schools (Ferguson 2013). On the one hand, results suggest that the majority language is the children’s dominant and preferred language, a finding commonly found in the literature (Altman et al. 2014; Gogonas 2009; Author & Author 2013). On the other hand, the policies adopted by the parents seem to have played a positive role on ethnic development and frequency of use, something also supported by studies worldwide (e.g. De Houwer 2007; Νesteruk 2010; Schwartz 2008). The discussion focuses on the repercussions such findings might have for the legitimization of minority language education.