1. Family centre

Multicultural Family Support Centres, or Family Centres, have been committed to promoting the smooth settlement and family life of multicultural families residing in Korea since 2006, and are of two primary types: general and integrated. The general centres conduct multicultural family support projects, while the integrated centres serve as comprehensive agencies promoting the well-being of healthy and multicultural families. The integrated centres engage in multicultural family support projects and offer services aligned with relevant legislation (Doosan Encyclopedia, 2023).

Family Centres offers a comprehensive array of services, including family and child education, counselling, interpretation and translation, information dissemination, and support for skill development. These services are designed to empower multicultural families, enabling their active participation in Korean society from an early stage. Their establishment is grounded in the goal of facilitating successful adaptation and fostering social and economic self-sufficiency (Doosan Encyclopedia, 2023).

This study uses the umbrella term ‘Family Centre’ to refer to establishments of this kind because most Multicultural Family Support Centres have been integrated with the Korean Institute for Healthy Family and are now known simply as Family Centre. It was felt that the simpler term offers a biased way to refer to the different types of facility.

2. Heritage language education in Korea

HL education has received increasing attention in the realm of linguistics and education. As societies become more diverse, the education and continued practice of HL carry substantial importance for immigrant and bicultural children to maintain their healthy identities culturally and fostering multilingualism (Cummins, 2001; Park & Sarkar, 2007; TİRYAKİOL, 2023).

Bilingual education in Korea has been in practice since 2009, involving the training of instructors to support students from multicultural backgrounds. As noted by Won (2014), this initiative not only facilitates the adjustment of bicultural children to school life but also aims to preserve their ethnic heritage languages and cultures. It fosters a sense of identity, enabling individuals to bridge the gap between their ethnic heritage country and the host society, thereby contributing to harmonious coexistence (Mo, Lee, Hong, & Lim, 2015; Won, 2014). However, the bilingual education in Korea is still not so well developed or provided for those bicultural and immigrant children for their HL development and maintenance (Park, 2023).

For bicultural heritage children in Korea, achieving proficiency in the dominant language of the host society, such as Korean in a Korean-dominant environment, still is considered more imperative than the development of the HL (Jeong & Shin, 2019; Park, 2023). In contrast to multicultural countries like Canada, Australia, and China, Korean HL education seems to align more closely with the American approach. This emphasis on the dominant language mirrors its American counterpart, highlighting the national language as the primary language for immigrant families and children.

The importance and necessity of maintaining HL are acknowledged among migrant families worldwide (Cummins, 1992; Hong & Oh, 2017; Kim, 2023). Despite the widespread acknowledgment of the significance and necessity of HL maintenance for immigrant and bicultural children globally, the practical implementation of HL education remains a complex challenge. This challenge is particularly pronounced in the effort to maintain cultural identity and motivation for consistent investment in HL education, given the multifaceted exposures to diverse cultural and linguistic environments (TİRYAKİOL, 2023).

Additionally, it is important to define the terminology between bilingual- and heritage language education. Bicultural heritage children in Korea can be described as early bilinguals who are exposed to two different language environments from birth, inheriting this linguistic diversity from their parents’ distinct cultural backgrounds. This is because language acquisition is intricately linked to exposure time, with the language predominantly exposed becoming the child’s first language. The other language may function not only as a second language but potentially as another first language, depending on exposure time. From this perspective, the terminology ‘heritage language education’ is utilised in this study, as the family background of bicultural heritage children is linguistically and culturally distinct from that of common families. Additionally, this term is deemed more appropriate for describing the language education provided to bicultural heritage children, in contrast to the widely used term ‘bilingual education’, which tends to focus more on second- or foreign language education within Korean society.

Hence, it is necessary to consider these distinct family backgrounds when designing and providing appropriate educational support and resources. In this respect, this study aims to identify what support and resources are available and appropriate to develop and maintain HL for bicultural heritage children in South Korea.

3. Relevant statistics

As noted earlier, the population of marriage migrants and their children from bicultural family backgrounds in Korea continues to increase. To provide a comprehensive overview of this trend, key statistics are presented below to support the subsequent analysis and offer insights into the empirical foundation of this study. As shown in Table 1

Similar to the distribution of marriage migrants across provinces, the proportion of bicultural children follows a broadly parallel pattern. Gyeonggi Province has the largest share of bicultural children (26.97%), followed by Seoul (12.53%), Gyeongnam (7.39%), Incheon (6.41%), Gyeongbuk (6.00%), Chungnam (5.92%) and Jeonnam (5.67%). The remaining provinces each account for less than 5% of the total. Within this demographic context, the present study focuses exclusively on Gyeonggi Province, as it hosts the largest proportion of marriage migrants and bicultural children in South Korea.

Korean Chinese and Chinese individuals together constitute just over 40% of the total marriage-migrant population in Gyeonggi Province, with 24.03% originating from China and 16.08% from China of Korean descent. They are followed by Vietnamese migrants (17.25%), Japanese (8.89%), Filipino (6.05%), and Thai migrants (5.85%). The remaining groups, including those from Cambodia (1.76%), Mongolia (1.79%), Uzbekistan (1.48%), and Taiwan (1.08%), each comprise less than 2% of the total. Additionally, marriage migrants from other regions—including the United States, Europe, Canada, Oceania, and Africa—collectively account for 11.27%, a smaller proportion compared with those from China and Vietnam. The proportions of marriage migrants from the top countries of origin in Gyeonggi Province are presented in Table 2 below.

Overall, the majority of marriage migrants are concentrated in three metropolitan provinces—Gyeonggi, Seoul, and Incheon. In addition, most marriage migrants originate from Asian countries, as shown in Table 2

1. Descriptive statistics

Gyeonggi Province comprises 28 cities and three county towns, with the majority of marriage migrants concentrated in nine cities—Ansan, Suwon, Hwaseong, Bucheon, Siheung, Goyang, Pyeongtaek, Yongin and Seongnam—in descending order of population size. Together, these nine cities account for approximately 60% of the total marriage migrant population in the province. By contrast, the remaining cities and three county towns each have proportions of less than 5%. The proportion of marriage migrants in each city and county town is presented in Table 4

(Statistics Korea and the Korean Ministry of the Interior and Safety, 2023)

As shown in Table 4, Gyeonggi Province consists of 31 administrative districts, each operating a Family Centre within its respective city or county town. Although the distribution of marriage migrants is wide-ranging and uneven, every district maintains a Family Centre embedded in the local community. Accordingly, this study reviewed the webpages of all 31 Family Centres to examine the types and availability of HL support programs currently offered across the province.

2. HL support by Family centres

The Danuri portal, operated by the Korean Institute for Healthy Family and supported by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, provides essential information about daily life in Korea as well as updates on multicultural communities. The website is available in 13 languages, enabling marriage migrants—including recent arrivals and those still adjusting to a Korean-dominant society—to access information about living in Korea and learning the Korean language and culture. However, it is important to note that if HL support were to be promoted and disseminated solely through Family Centre webpages, some migrant parents might still be unable to obtain these resources for themselves or their children due to limited digital literacy or restricted access to technological facilities.

The examination of HL program development across the 31 Family Centres revealed that 24 centres offered HL classes for bicultural heritage children, with programs generally targeting age groups ranging from preschool to high school students. In contrast, seven centres did not appear to provide any form of bilingual education within their facilities. The HL classes identified across the centres were delivered through two primary modalities: traditional in-person instruction and virtual online classes. However, the availability and accessibility of these classes varied considerably depending on the specific HLs offered and the operational circumstances of each centre. A detailed overview of HL provision by centre is presented in Table 5

Note. The list of cities and county towns is presented in order of the number of HL classes, followed by alphabetical order.

As shown in Table 5, the centres predominantly offer HL classes in Chinese and Vietnamese, with Japanese available in a smaller number of locations. In contrast, Russian, Khmer, Mongolian and English are offered only in a limited number of centres. Across the province, ten centres provide more than three HL classes, although the specific HLs differ according to each community’s linguistic composition. The remaining centres typically offer only one or two HL classes, and several provide no HL instruction at all.

Within this broader landscape, the Icheon centre provides the most comprehensive HL program among all Family Centres examined. Unlike centres that typically offer only one or two HLs, the Icheon centre delivers four HL classes—Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Khmer—addressing the diverse linguistic needs of local bicultural families. This expanded offering includes support for smaller migrant communities, such as Cambodian families, who often have limited access to HL classes elsewhere in Gyeonggi Province. The breadth of HL provision in Icheon therefore reflects a stronger institutional commitment to meeting varied HL needs compared with other centres in the province.

Among the less commonly taught HLs, Icheon and Ansan offer Khmer classes, while Paju and Seongnam provide Mongolian language support. Additionally, the centres in Goyang, Uijeongbu, and Anseong offer Russian HL classes, although these programs are similarly limited in scale and serve relatively small groups of bicultural children. In Seongnam specifically, the Mongolian HL class was delivered four times over the course of one month (approximately once per week). Several other centres—including Gwangmyeong, Gwangju, Dongducheon, Osan, Yongin and Pocheon—offer only Chinese and Vietnamese classes. This pattern likely reflects the demographic characteristics of these cities, where marriage-migrant populations are smaller in size and linguistically concentrated within these two dominant groups. Consequently, HL provision in such locations tends to remain limited in scope and focused on meeting essential community needs rather than delivering broader or more specialised HL instruction. Beyond HL instruction, several centres—including Suwon and Gunpo—also provide English classes as part of their bilingual education programs for bicultural and immigrant children who do not have Chinese, Vietnamese or Japanese heritage backgrounds. These classes typically serve children from the Philippines, Thailand and other minority-language backgrounds, and may include Korean children when enrolment numbers are low.

Complementing these language-focused offerings, many centres implement a range of bilingual family-support initiatives collectively referred to as the Bilingual Family Environment Creation Project. The prominence of this project provides important context for understanding how HL support is currently conceptualised within Family Centres. These initiatives are primarily designed to enrich bilingual home environments and strengthen family interaction, with a particular focus on supporting bicultural and immigrant parents.

Specifically, the programs offer parents strategies for using HLs at home, guidance on fostering effective bilingual communication, and practical techniques for creating a supportive multilingual family environment. Several centres also provide bilingual teacher-training sessions for marriage migrant parents, which function as mechanisms for community integration and, in some cases, as pathways to enhanced future employment opportunities. Participation in these programs may contribute to parental empowerment and family well-being; however, they are not structured as sustained or systematic language-learning programs for children. As a result, while the project plays a visible role in shaping bilingual practices at the family level, it offers limited direct support for children’s ongoing HL development.

In addition, many Family Centres organise heritage-cultural events and facilitate self-help groups among migrant parents. Self-help groups bring together individuals who face similar challenges and engage in voluntary, non-professional peer support, addressing needs not typically met in formal institutional settings (Dictionary of Psychology Terms, 2014). These cultural events and peer-support activities are generally one-off sessions designed to foster multicultural understanding and strengthen parent–child and family relationships. Notably, most centres demonstrate strong support for cultural events dedicated specifically to bicultural heritage children. However, while these activities contribute to cultural identity formation and family cohesion, they do not substitute for systematic HL instruction.

Taken together, the overall level of HL provision within communities remains limited. Most centres offer only one- or two-hour HL classes per week—insufficient for nurturing and sustaining children’s HL proficiency. In comparison, Canada’s HL support model provides approximately 25 hours of weekly HL activities (Won, 2014), illustrating the significant gap in support available to bicultural and immigrant children in Korea. These findings suggest an urgent need for Family Centres to expand HL programs by diversifying the HLs offered and by differentiating classes according to children’s developmental stages and proficiency levels. At the same time, this study highlights the wide range of programs supporting parents’ bilingual practices and family communication. This observation aligns with Mo et al. (2015), who emphasised the importance of strengthening family-based bilingual environments, though it contrasts with the recommendations in Oh (2018), who argued for greater institutional emphasis on child-centred HL instruction.

3. Focus on Korean language at the expense of HL

Marriage migrant parents consistently emphasise their desire for their children to acquire and maintain their HLs, recognising HL development as essential for sustaining bicultural identities and fostering emotional connections with their cultural origins. Prior studies further highlight that HL maintenance is viewed not only as a family-level cultural practice but also as a resource that can strengthen transnational ties between migrants’ home countries and Korea (Kim & Lee, 2016; Mo et al., 2015; Won, 2014). Despite these aspirations, many parents report difficulties maintaining the HL within the home environment. These challenges are closely connected to the broader societal orientation toward prioritising Korean language proficiency as the primary educational and social goal for bicultural children.

Reflecting this societal priority, Family Centres across Korea provide extensive Korean language programs aimed at supporting marriage migrants, immigrants, and bicultural children. These programs vary across centres but share several common features. For adult learners, particularly marriage migrants and immigrant parents, all centres offer TOPIK preparation courses, as well as Korean language classes across graded levels. These classes cover pronunciation, grammar, speaking, listening, and workplace communication, and some centres incorporate elements of Korean popular culture—such as K-dramas, K-movies, and K-pop—to make the learning environment more accessible. However, the information available on webpages is often limited, making it difficult for potential learners to understand the specific content, structure, or expectations of each course.

For bicultural and immigrant children, Korean language programs are designed to support their integration into Korean society and, particularly, the school environment. Family Centres increasingly offer tailored classes for children who have lived abroad and require additional support to adapt to Korean school curricula. For children from language-minority backgrounds, acquiring sufficient proficiency in the dominant language is essential not only for academic achievement but also for preventing social isolation. This aligns with Jeong and Shin’s (2019) argument that children from multicultural backgrounds require level-differentiated Korean language instruction to address their diverse linguistic starting points. In this sense, Korean language education plays a crucial role in promoting academic progress and reducing performance gaps between bicultural children and their monolingual Korean peers (Mo et al., 2015; Won, 2014).

While the importance of Korean proficiency is undeniable, the predominance of Korean language education in Family Centres often results in HL support being overshadowed or structurally deprioritised. When children receive extensive Korean language input but have limited opportunities to access or develop their HL, their bilingual development becomes unbalanced, reducing their ability to maintain meaningful connections with their cultural heritage. Balanced bilingualism, by contrast, supports healthier identity formation, strengthens emotional bonds within bicultural families, and enhances children’s long-term linguistic and psychological well-being. For this reason, HL education should not be treated as secondary but rather as a complementary component that coexists with Korean language learning.

Consequently, both Korean and HL education play indispensable and mutually reinforcing roles in the lives of bicultural and immigrant children. Korean proficiency facilitates academic success and social integration, while HL proficiency fosters cultural continuity, emotional security, and resilient identity formation. A more holistic approach—one that recognises the equal value of both languages—is essential for supporting the diverse linguistic and cultural realities of bicultural families in Korea.