Three Stories, One Wish: Vietnamese Families’ Endeavours to Nurture Vietnamese Language in Australia

Promoting Asian languages is pivotal for Australia in fostering its country’s wealth, power, and global influence (Aspinall, E., & Crouch, M., 2023). However, despite a growing Vietnamese community in Australia, the Vietnamese language remains marginalised in mainstream education, and language maintenance has been predominantly entrusted to parents. The underlying reasons, strategies, and challenges for parents choosing to teach Vietnamese to their children at home require further attention. Employing a collaborative autoethnographic approach, our study captures the lived experiences of families instilling Vietnamese as a heritage language into their children. We explore the stories and perspectives of three families—one cross-national Australian-Vietnamese family and two Vietnamese families. Using the Family Language Policy framework, our study elucidates the importance of nurturing children’s interest in the Vietnamese language alongside preserving their cultural identity and connections to their homeland. We also highlight parents’ role in maintaining Vietnamese at home and the diversity of home-based teaching practices. Through parent-researchers’ autoethnography, our study aims to reaffirm the importance of heritage language maintenance at home in multicultural Australia, particularly when the language is not commonly taught in schools.