Abstract:

Parental language plays a crucial role in the life of Czech migrant infants. The results reported reveals a complex picture of Czech migrant bilingual children in the age of 6 to 15 who are pupils of London Czech School without Borders in Great Britain and at the same time pupils of the compulsory teaching system in British Schools.

Although the linguistic and related social ability in bilingual children has been analysed by scientists before (Peal and Lambert 1962, Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008), there is a lack of developmental research on Czech children residing in Great Britain in the current 21st century. The particular group in a particular institution was examined through a field survey with the main objective to reveal the linguistic interferences, attitudinal perspectives and identities of these multilingual children.

Considering that the comparative perspectives of children in European environment benefit migrants with multilingual assimilation (Peal and Lambert 1962) the study reveals susceptibility of the impact of pros and drawbacks of children´s bilingual position in the British environment. The children future professional challenges and expectations surface in the correlation of their language background and a life role of their parents.

The linguistic and social consequences can be seen as an inner personal “battle” of the bilingual children because of the sociolinguistic functions which are caused by language mixing are evident in many bilingual communities (MyersScotton,1993, Giles et al., 2004; Kinzler et al. 2007). There is evidence of cognitive advantages of bilingualism on everyday life performing (Bialystok (2006; Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004, María Fernández-López and Manuel Perea 2019, Anthony, & Wallace, 2008, Kovács & Mehler, 2009) so children´s personal perception of favourableness or disadvantageousness of being bilingual in either linguistic or non-linguistic control was also analysed. To embrace the implications of this studied phenomenon the level of the usage of Czech language at children´s homes was contrasted with the inevitable and exclusive official language medium, English.

Keywords:

Czech school, migrant, bilingual, Great Britain, identity.