Transnational adoptive children represent an under-explored group of bilinguals which may often be misrepresented as monolingual. Linguists have described adopted children as a kind of subtractive bilinguals, because they simultaneously display a rapidly arrested language development of their first language and a much faster pattern of language learning than other sequential bilinguals. Based on this definition, harmonious (bi)lingual development (De Houwer in International Journal of Bilingualism 19: 169–184, 2015) appears as a very important issue in transnational adoption, and just as much as in other bilingual settings. However, adoptive parents often lack the linguistic understanding to help their children to deal with their multiple identities. To address the complexity of bilingual development of adoptive children, a case study was carried out on one family, in Verona, Italy, who adopted an eight-year-old child from Chile. The results of the analysis gave insights into adoptive parents’ difficult management of the two parallel needs of maintaining the child’s bond with the heritage language and strengthening family unity.
`We Had to Make a Choice': The Contentious Debate Over Language Replacement in Transnational Adoptive Families
Alice Fiorentino
2022-01-01
Abstract
Transnational adoptive children represent an under-explored group of bilinguals which may often be misrepresented as monolingual. Linguists have described adopted children as a kind of subtractive bilinguals, because they simultaneously display a rapidly arrested language development of their first language and a much faster pattern of language learning than other sequential bilinguals. Based on this definition, harmonious (bi)lingual development (De Houwer in International Journal of Bilingualism 19: 169–184, 2015) appears as a very important issue in transnational adoption, and just as much as in other bilingual settings. However, adoptive parents often lack the linguistic understanding to help their children to deal with their multiple identities. To address the complexity of bilingual development of adoptive children, a case study was carried out on one family, in Verona, Italy, who adopted an eight-year-old child from Chile. The results of the analysis gave insights into adoptive parents’ difficult management of the two parallel needs of maintaining the child’s bond with the heritage language and strengthening family unity.
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