Bilingualism and Multiculturalism in Greek Education: Investigating Ethnic Language Maintenance among Albanian and Egyptian pupils in Athens

"Bilingualism and Multiculturalism in Greek Education investigates the factors affecting language maintenance/shift among second-generation Albanian and Egyptian migrant pupils in Athens. Using a combined quantitative and qualitative methodology, it explores the influence of three sets of variables on language maintenance. These are a) ethnolinguistic vitality, defined by the demography, status and institutional support of each group in Greece, as well as migrant and Greek pupils’ perceptions regarding these factors; b) migrant parents’ attitudes to language maintenance and their role in language transmission in the home; and c) the attitudes of teachers and the institutional approaches of mainstream Greek education to linguistic and cultural diversity. Results indicate that:

• knowledge of Greek is common among today’s children of Albanian and Egyptian immigrants and preference for that language is dominant;

• bilingualism varies slightly between Albanian and Egyptian second-generation pupils with Egyptians being more dominant in the parental language, due to their higher degree of identification with their ethnic group in comparison to the Albanian pupils;

• the school context plays a significant role in the ability of second-generation youths to achieve and maintain bilingual fluency.