Vietnamese Heritage Language Socialization in Catholic Communities

This chapter describes the role of Vietnamese as a heritage language (HL) in Catholic religious contexts in the United Kingdom and the mutualistic relationship between religious practice and heritage language practices. The research setting is a network of Catholic congregations in the north of the UK that conducts Vietnamese-language services and also funds and maintains a Vietnamese language school for children. Examples are drawn from Vietnamese language practices in religious services in Birmingham and Manchester, as well as from heritage language classrooms inside the Vietnamese Catholic chaplaincy in Birmingham. The analysis shows a mutually reinforcing relationship between religious practice and heritage language practices through the community socialization taking place in those settings. On the one hand, religious community socialization incorporates and encourages the use and acquisition of Vietnamese elements. On the other hand, Vietnamese heritage language socialization also includes religious community socialization, and classroom practices repeatedly expose the pupils to religious behavior and serve to normalize it. The study emphasizes religion as an important dimension of everyday HL usage in diasporic contexts and demonstrates the interplay between language and religion as a key component of diasporic identity construction.