Keeping a heritage language when school is English

Short answer: protect the hours school cannot take: the morning routine, bedtime, weekends, and grandparent calls. Make the heritage language the only home language for the adults who can speak it. Move literacy in the heritage language into a game. Check the weekly split, and expect the share to fall from half to about a third by six without disappearing.

What changes at school#

Before school, you control the whole 84-hour week. After school starts, 25 to 35 of those hours go to English, and English arrives with friends, songs, and status. The heritage language does not lose because school is bad. It loses because its hours were never protected and nobody noticed until the child stopped answering in it.

The hours you can protect#

Slot	Hours a week	Who
Wake, dress, breakfast	5 to 7	A parent or a heritage-speaking grandparent
Bedtime routine and book	5 to 7	A parent, every night
Weekend days	15 to 20	Both parents, in the language, including to each other
Grandparent calls	2 to 3	Scheduled, with a task
Cooking, walking, chores	3 to 5	Whoever does them

Add those up and the heritage language keeps 30 to 40 hours a week, about a third to a half of waking time. That is enough to keep it productive if the adults are consistent.

The rule that matters most#

Parents who can speak the heritage language speak it at home, always, including to each other in the child's hearing. This is the hardest rule and the one that does the work. English from those parents happens only during a planned English block, such as the after-school book, and outside the home in English settings.

Answering in English#

Around four or five, many children begin to answer in the school language. Keep going. Recast: "You want the red one. Here is the red one," in the heritage language. Do not demand. Do not translate everything twice. Give the language a life she wants: cousins, jokes, songs, a grandparent who only understands that one.

Literacy as a game#

From four, letters and sounds in the heritage script alongside English phonics, five minutes, as play: sandpaper letters, a sand tray, labels on the shelf in both scripts, a word book you make together. From five, short decodable texts. The aim by six is a child who can read simple things in both scripts, not a fluent reader in the heritage language.

Watch the split, not the feeling#

Feelings say the language is fine because she understood grandma. Hours say it fell to 12 percent in a month with two birthday parties and a school trip. Log the blocks, look at the pie on Sunday, and move one block back. A language kept above about a fifth of input survives; one that drifts below it fades within a year.