Modersmål: Investering eller pligt? En undersøgelse af polske forældres og Københavns Kommunes syn på modersmålsundervisning

Resumé

In this article I investigate Polish parents living in Denmark and their motivations for letting their children participate in mother tongue education by looking at how their investment (or lack of investment) is linked to aspects of socio-economics, identity, and language ideology.

I use Norton´s (1995, 2000, 2013) notions regarding motivation not being a primary factor in language acquisition in my investigation of contextual power relations and parental investment. I apply Duchêne and Heller’s (2012) distinction between pride and profit to determine what values parents associate with mother tongue.

I find no statistically significant correlation between the children´s participation in mother tongue education and their parents´ education and employment. Sociolinguistic parameters like gender and age are relatively identical for children who attend mother tongue education and those who do not. Subsequently I have to look at language ideology to discover the differences.

I find that parents who send children to mother tongue classes are driven by language ideology. They express pride and profit values connected to the mother tongue and learning Polish is considered to be an investment. I find the parent’s perspective to differ from the one of the Copenhagen Municipality and I discuss the possible consequences of this difference.