A sociolinguistic profile of 100 mothers from middle to upper-middle socio-economic backgrounds in Penang-Chinese community: what languages do they speak at home with their children?

摘要

This paper reports the findings of a survey of 100 mothers of Chinese children aged between 6 and 36 months from middle to upper-middle socio-economic backgrounds in Penang, Malaysia. The findings include the language backgrounds of these mothers, their contextual uses of multiple languages and their language choices with their children. Through this survey, the mothers' multilingual language use practices with their young children were profiled. The primary function of this profiling was to identify the type of language learning context experienced by the mothers' young Penang-Chinese children and to assist in predicting the pattern of language shift taking place in their households.