‘Maintenance and Shift among Chinese Heritage Speakers in Flanders’
Funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC)
PhD candidate: Qiqi Huang
2024 – 2028
Supervisors: Rik Vosters (VUB) & Jianwei Xu (VUB)
Language sociological research in Belgium has predominantly focused on the dichotomy between the officially recognized majority languages—Dutch and French—while heritage languages, particularly Chinese as a heritage language (CHL), remain underexplored. Existing CHL research has centered largely on Brussels (Guo & Vosters, 2022; Li et al., 2022; Li & Shen, 2024), Belgium’s most multilingual city, due to its official bilingualism (French and Dutch) and its status as a hub for international migration. In contrast, Flanders, the northern Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, has received far less scholarly attention as a migration destination for the Chinese diaspora. Therefore, this project aims to contribute in this regard. It adopts a mixed-methods approach to investigate the changing patterns of CHL use within the Chinese diaspora in both urban and rural areas of Flanders. Through a sociolinguistic lens, it also aims to provide insights into the maintenance and shift of CHL in the domains of education, family, and friendship.