Heritage Language Maintenance: The Case of Bangladeshi Immigrants in Canada.

Immigrant parents not only face assimilation challenges in a new country, but many also find it difficult to connect their children with their heritage culture. As language plays an important in conveying and practicing culture, the challenges associated with preserving heritage language in immigrant families have not received much attention in the literature. In this paper, we focus on the Bangladeshi community in Canada and interview 20 Bangladeshi immigrant parents to explore the various concerns they have regarding preserving their heritage language and discuss two different approaches to learning through the presentation of language acquisition applications. Based on our study, we report the cultural tensions, economic constraints, and infrastructural challenges the immigrant families face while teaching heritage languages to their children. We also provide a set of design implications to better facilitate heritage language maintenance and associate our findings with some broader concerns in the HCI literature around migration, memory, identity, and learning.