Language maintenance and language shift of the Maltese migrants in Canada

Abstract

It is a widely accepted fact that mother tongue maintenance in immigrant families is not easy when the host country's official language is different from the immigrants' first language. There are a number of studies which have documented language maintenance and/or language loss of different ethnic communities such as the Norwegian-Americans, the French Canadians, the German-Hungarians, the Pennsylvanian-Germans, the Chinese-Canadians, the Albanians living in Greece, the Indian community of Taos in New Mexico, the Lebanese immigrants in Australia and the Maltese-Australians. Similarly, this short study discusses the language use of three generations of the same family of Maltese-Canadians living in Toronto, Canada.