When Children Speak Different Languages: The Effects of Sibship Ordering and Family Life Cycle Stage on Children’s Minority Language Usage in Immigrant Households

Gillian Stevens, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Hiromi Ishizawa, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

As the concept of "mother-tongue shift," which implicitly compares the languages spoken by parents and their children, suggests, family members may have different language repertoires. In this paper, we consider the possibility that siblings may have different probabilities of using a minority language at home. Using data from the 1999 Current Population Survey and focusing on the children of immigrant parents, we first show that children’s use of a minority language is strongly predicted by the children’s and their parents’ characteristics. Our analyses then show children’s minority language use is related to sibship ordering and family configuration. Further analyses, using synthetic cohorts, illustrate how "mother tongue shift" may vary over time and family life cycle stage as immigrant households mature in the American context. Our results have implications for the understanding of the process of mother-tongue shift; they also hint at how children "anglicize" households.