Review of Piotr Romanowski Family Language Policy in the Polish Diaspora. A Focus on Australia

Over the last decade, the majority of publications on Polish emigration have concentrated on the postaccession EU migrations, with particular emphasis on the UK and Ireland as evidenced by the extensive database of publications on Polish migration compiled by Prof. Anne White (University College London). In his monograph, however, Piotr Romanowski turns his attention to the lesserknown destination of Polish migrants, namely Greater Melbourne, which has the highest concentration of Polish immigrants in Australia. While there have been studies on the historical and sociological aspects of Polish migration to Australia over the last 50 years, only a few studies have attempted to investigate the role of the heritage language (HL) in the lives of Polish migrants in Australia (Dębski, 2009; Drozd, 2001; Leunert, 2007; Smolicz, Wozniak, Smolicz, Secombe, & Uszyńska, 1993). Family Language Policy in the Polish Diaspora: A Focus on Australia is an excellent study on the maintenance of Polish as a heritage language in mixed transnational families in the 21st century and a valuable contribution to the growing field of family language policy (FLP). It consists of an introduction, 10 thematic chapters, each subdivided into several sections, an extensive bibliography with over 600 entries, four appendices, and an index. In Chapter 1, the author provides an overview of the history of Polish migration to Australia within the context of Australia’s Immigration Policy over the last hundred years with an emphasis on Polish language and cultural maintenance. The author briefly discusses the two main waves of Polish migrants – the post-WWII and the so-called Solidarity migrants of the 1980s (i.e., political migrants whose primary impetus for emigration was the introduction of martial law, introduced on December 13, 1981, and abolished on July 22, 1983). He then went on to discuss the differences in attitudes toward integration in Australia between the two Polish waves of migrants. The final section of this chapter is an overview of previous studies on the maintenance of language and culture of Polish immigrant communities in Australia. The studies discussed provide evidence that the Polish language constitutes a vital part of the identity of the Polish diaspora. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a comprehensive overview of the theoretical aspects of the study presented in this monograph. In Chapter 2, the author deals with issues of bilingualism in children of immigrant families. The chapter begins with an overview of bilingual language acquisition and bilingual development in children, then goes on to discuss language socialization, and ends with a discussion on heritage language studies. Chapter 3 focuses on family language policy. The reader is not only provided with an overview of the history of this important field of studies but also introduced to such salient concepts as language management and language ideologies. Both chapters contain a thorough and readable discussion of the theoretical foundations of the study, together with the history of research and the current state of knowledge. Hence, these chapters could be used by students and researchers as initial background reading and a springboard for further research. The focus of Chapter 4 is the methodology employed in the study conducted by Romanowski among Polish-Australian families with school-aged children born in Australia. The research conducted during two fieldwork trips in 2014 and 2018 employed quantitative (online questionnaire) and qualitative (in-depth, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, language portraits) data