Chronotopes in heritage language maintenance: intergenerational language transmission of an extended ethnic Russian family in Australia

While much research on language maintenance and shift focuses on the first and second generations of immigrant families, studies on the third and fourth generations remain relatively underexplored. By applying the lens of chronotopes, this case study explores the intergenerational transmission of heritage language within an extended ethnic Russian family across four generations, spanning the onward migration trajectory from Russia to China in the 1920s and later to Australia in the 1950s. The paper takes a qualitative approach, drawing on semi-structured interviews with three members of the family with due embeddedness in the sociohistorical contexts. The interviews were designed to span several generations of family history, with a focus on how each generation used and maintained Russian as their heritage language across China and Australia. Their narratives have enhanced our understanding of how family members reflect on their language maintenance efforts through chronotopic references and how these chronotopes function as a heuristic to explore participants’ dispositions towards their heritage language trajectories. Their accounts highlight the dynamic interplay between external (social, political and environmental) and internal (agency) factors that shape language maintenance. This study contributes methodologically by using a chronotopic lens to examine heritage language maintenance across generations in sociolinguistic research.