Maintaining Chinese, losing the heritage language? Mandarinisation and substitutive maintenance in family language policy

Research on Chinese heritage language maintenance often treats Chinese as a single intergenerational transmission target. This framing can conceal a second shift occurring inside the category: families may sustain a Chinese ethnolinguistic affiliation while replacing an inherited Sinitic variety with standard Mandarin. This critical integrative review examines how family language policy research represents Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew, Fuzhounese, Wenzhounese and other fangyan across migration and internal-mobility contexts. An OpenAlex search and citation/conceptual extension assembled 50 sources. A revision-stage access audit excluded ten records whose articles or chapters could not be verified, leaving 40 full-text-assessed sources for synthesis. The synthesis identifies three recurrent mechanisms: categorical compression of diverse varieties into ‘Chinese’; capital conversion of affective and kinship value into the educational and mobility value of Mandarin; and institutional relays through schooling, examinations and media. Intergenerational re-anchoring of Chinese identity around a newly acquired standard is an outcome. The article proposes substitutive maintenance for cases in which umbrella ethnolinguistic continuity is achieved through displacement of an inherited related variety. Political histories shape these mechanisms without uniformly determining choices or outcomes. It distinguishes substitution from additive Mandarin learning and argues that maintenance should be evaluated at variety, repertoire, literacy and relationship levels.