5 - Heritage and Skills

Summary

The chapter critiques prevailing hierarchies that associate modern European languages with skills and community or home languages with heritage. It reports on engagement work with schools that showed how home multilingualism can be recognised as a potential skill while also embedding a view of language in an ideology of pluralism. A survey of local supplementary schools that teach community languages shows how pluralistic ideologies are embraced as staff engage with clients of multiple backgrounds. Language becomes a disaporic stance, a practice around which networks of connections are built. Reflection on the multilingual environment and on multilingual experiences and encounters offers opportunities to explore the disconnect between language and place and between language and predefined community boundaries.