Gender in the construction and transmission of ethnolinguistic identities and language maintenance in immigrant Australia

The relevance and impact of gender and/or sex roles have long been recognized in thetransmission of languages in situations of language contact. More recent studies ofmultilingualism, second language learning and language maintenance have movedbeyond the investigation of gender roles to looking at gendered identities and questions oflanguage maintenance/shift. Here we build upon these developments and examine theways in which masculinities and femininities constrain and enable language maintenancepractices and transmission of the community language among bilingual womenand men who were born in Australia to immigrant parents (the so-called secondgeneration). In particular we explore the gendered practices of ‘maintaining thecommunity language’ among ‘second-generation’ women and men of Greek and Germandescent and discuss the construction of gendered ethnolinguistic identities and thesurvival of the respective community languages in Australia.