ABSTRACT
The Czech Republic is home to about 10.5 million people today. In addition, approximately 2.2 million people who live outside the country claim Czech heritage (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, 2011). Among this 2.2 million, only a minority actively use the Czech language. While first-generation immigrants, i.e., people born in the Czech Republic, continue to use the Czech language, subsequent generations typically experience language loss to varying degrees (Fillmore, 1991; Kouritzin, 1999). In the U.S., for instance, descendants of earlier Czech immigrants have often retained only an identification with Czech culture but not necessarily the use of the language (Dutkova-Cope, 2006; Eckert & Hannan, 2009). Since the 1990s, however, with a new wave of immigration beginning from the Czech Republic and the entire region of Central and Eastern Europe, maintenance of heritage languages (HLs) has become an important goal of many of these communities. Although much HL research in the U.S. has focused on Asian and Latin American immigrants, current research documents HL maintenance efforts in Central and Eastern European communities from Romania (Nesteruk, 2010; Petruscu, 2014), Poland (Kozminska, 2015), Turkey (Otcu, 2009), Lithuania (Tamošiūnaitė, 2013), Greece (Aravossitas, 2010), and Ukraine (Chumak-Horbatsch, 1999). Some of these language minorities have access to many well-established HL schools while other groups may lack such educational networks.
