This chapter examines Gaza’s socio-spatial organization and the demographic features of its population. It presents Gaza’s main urban features during the late Ottoman period, including divisions into neighborhoods, main landmarks and thoroughfares. It then offers an in-depth portrayal of Gazan society, including data on economy and lifestyles, social hierarchies, marriage patterns, migration and health, based on a detailed analysis of the Ottoman census of 1905 and surviving court records (1857–1861), in light of evidence from the literature, maps and images.

Heritage speakers of Slavic languages constitute a large proportion of heritage speaker communities worldwide. Slavic heritage communities manifest a strong feeling of loyalty toward the home language and culture as well as the establishment of institutions (churches, clubs, community schools, etc.) that support language and culture maintenance. Recent research on heritage speakers of Russian in the United States suggests that the preservation of family ties remains the core motivation for language maintenance. On the linguistic level, Slavic heritage languages reveal striking parallels regarding the restructuring, partial reduction, and simplification of phonology, grammar, and the lexicon. While the majority language without doubt exerts a pervasive impact on the respective Slavic heritage grammar and lexicon, parallel developments in the same heritage language spoken in different countries hint at more universal principles of language change being at play in reshaping heritage grammars. As some heritage languages have received more attention than others, more systematic comparative research is needed to shed additional light on these language-independent developments.

Located in Anhui and Jiangxi provinces, the fieldwork counties of Eastern County, Western County, Tranquil County and Jade County shared many characteristics. These included: a devalued ‘rural’ status; a prevalence of low-quality and low-paying local off-farm jobs; histories of economic and educational deprivation manifest in the grandparents’ and parents’ emplaced biographies; and a patriarchal family culture. In the 2010s these counties also had high rates of labour migration with over half of rural children affected by the migration of at least one parent. At the same time, the four fieldwork sites had distinctive features that impacted on the children’s lives. Specifically, the counties each had their own linkages to certain ‘outside’ places and economic sectors that intersected with other aspects of local geographic context such as physical location, the local school regime characteristics – including whether there were school boarding facilities, school lunches and private schools – and customary gender relations and divisions of labour. These factors affected the immediate setting within which families deliberated who should and could migrate and who should and could deliver childcare, which in turn influenced the children’s experiences of daily care and routines in and around school, and their expectations of parental support for their education.