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The current paper describes a study that sought to determine the beliefs, practices, and needs of parents living in Montreal, Quebec, who were raising their children bi/multilingually. The parents (N = 27) participated in a total of nine focus group and individual interviews in which they discussed their family language policies (language ideologies, practices, and actions taken to maintain a language). Through rounds of deductive and inductive coding and analysis, family language policies regarding English and/or French were compared with policies regarding heritage languages. The participants' family language policies were further examined in light of Quebec's official language policy of interculturalism. Findings indicate a complex co-existence of family and official language policy in which parents both support Quebec's official language policy by converging towards French as a common public language and questioning the policy's stance on official institutional support for heritage languages.

Many parents express concerns for their children's multilingual development, yet little is known about the nature and strength of these concerns – especially among parents in multilingual societies. This pre-registered, questionnaire-based study addresses this gap by examining the concerns of 821 Quebec-based parents raising infants and toddlers aged 0–4 years with multiple languages in the home. Factor analysis of parents' Likert-scale responses revealed that parents had (1) concerns regarding the effect of children's multilingualism on their cognition, and (2) concerns regarding children's exposure to and attainment of fluency in their languages. Concern strength was moderate to weak, and cognition concerns were weaker than exposure-fluency concerns. Transmission of a heritage language, transmission of three or more languages, presence of developmental issues, and less positive parental attitudes towards childhood multilingualism were associated with stronger concerns. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications: they advance our understanding of parental concerns and facilitate the development of support for multilingual families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first large-scale, quantitative study of the evaluative dimensions and potential predictors of Quebec-based parents' attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. Such attitudes are assumed to constitute a determinant of parental language choices, and thereby influence children's multilingual development. The newly-developed Attitudes towards Childhood Multilingualism Questionnaire was used to gather data from 825 participants raising an infant/toddler aged 0–4 years with multiple languages in the home. The results revealed three separate dimensions: status and solidarity (the same dimensions found in attitudes towards individual languages) as well as cognitive development (not previously attested as a separate dimension). Participants' approach to promoting multilingualism (specifically, whether they used the one-person-one-language-approach) and the combination of languages transmitted (specifically, whether this included a heritage language) correlated significantly with parental attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. Parents' linguistic background and location within Quebec were not significant predictors of attitudes. The paper discusses implications and directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]