This book examines the whys and wherefores of family language transmission from the perspective of parents as language planners and managers of their linguistic resources. It draws on a qualitative, interview-based study of twenty families in which German is, was, or could have been the target language. Successive census analyses have charted a marked decline in the number of German speakers in Australia, indicating that motivation for transmitting German has waned. The situations where it is presently being transmitted are therefore particularly interesting. Data analysis was facilitated by...