Language Transmission within the family in indigenous or minority language situations is increasingly being recognised as one of the key issues which need to be explored if minority languages are to survive. Families in indigenous or minority language situations need advice and guidance on how to raise their children as balanced bilinguals especially if only one parent speaks the indigenous or minority language.
Ensuring continuity in the intergenerational transmission of a language is a crucial element in the process of its maintenance (Joshua A. Fishman, 1991). The problem is, of course, that it is extremely difficult to plan informal social domains. The home, family and neighbourhood - those informal domains which are at the centre of mother tongue transmission - are not easily accessible to social planners. Yet, it is this stage of daily, informal, oral interaction between grandparents, parents and children, which is crucial to the maintenance of a language. The family is the building block of such transmission. Above all, it is in the family that a deep bond with language and language activities is fostered, shared and fashioned into personal and social as well as cultural and linguistic identity. Without mother tongue transmission language maintenance is nigh impossible. In many instances, speakers of an indigenous or a minority language may decide to give up their language, even though they may be favourably disposed to it, by not reproducing it in their children.
Parents may believe that there are economic, employment or educational advantages of speaking a majority language (e.g. Spanish/English/French) to their children and not the minority language. Or that majority language has such high prestige in the neighbourhood that parents feel the minority language has scars. Such attitudes can have an immediate effect on the fate of a language. A lack of family language reproduction is a principal and direct cause of language shift. In this scenario, a minority language can die within a two or three generations unless bilingual education can produce language speakers who then find everyday purposes (e.g. economic, social, religious) for that language.