Against the Odds : The challenges of bilingualism in a monolingual environment

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study has been to describe the reasoning of five immigrant parents with Swedish partners who raise their child to become bilingual. Having interviewed the informants, three central themes became apparent: bilingualism, identity and the environment. All five families reason that they raise their child with the mother tongue of the mother and the mother tongue of the father and that it is natural. Discussions about identity and culture are made in specific reference to the surrounding monolingual environment, which is often perceived as an obstacle to bilingualism.