Diversifying Family Language Policy 9781350189898, 9781350189928, 9781350189911

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DIVERSIFYING FAMILY LANGUAGE POLICY

Contemporary Studies in Linguistics Series Editor: Li Wei, Chair of Applied Linguistics and Director and Dean of the Institute of Education, University College London, UK The Contemporary Studies in Linguistics series presents state-of-the-art accounts of current research in all areas of linguistics. Written by internationally renowned linguists, the volumes provide a selection of the best scholarship in each area. Each of the chapters appears on the basis of its importance to the field, but also with regards to its wider significance either in terms of methodology, practical application or conclusions. The result is a stimulating contemporary snapshot of the field and a vibrant reader for each of the areas covered the in series.

Titles in the Series: Contemporary Applied Linguistics in Illness and Healthcare Contexts, edited by Zsófia Demjen Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 1, edited by Li Wei and Vivian Cook Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 2, edited by Li Wei and Vivian Cook Contemporary Computer-Assisted Language Learning, edited by Michael Thomas, Hayo Reinders and Mark Warschauer Contemporary Corpus Linguistics, edited by Paul Baker Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, edited by Christopher Hart and Piotr Cap Contemporary Linguistic Parameters, edited by Antonio Fabregas, Jaume Mateu and Michael Putnam Contemporary Media Stylistics, edited by Helen Ringrow and Stephen Pihlaja Contemporary Stylistics, edited by Marina Lambrou and Peter Stockwell Contemporary Task-Based Language Teaching in Asia, edited by Michael Thomas Diversifying Family Language Policy, edited by Lyn Wright and Christina Higgins

DIVERSIFYING FAMILY LANGUAGE POLICY Edited by Lyn Wright and Christina Higgins

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Lyn Wright, Christina Higgins and Contributors, 2022 Lyn Wright and Christina Higgins have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xix constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-8989-8 ePDF: 978-1-3501-8991-1 eBook: 978-1-3501-8990-4 Series: Contemporary Studies in Linguistics Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

L ist of F igures L ist of T ables L ist of C ontributors A cknowledgments 1 Diversifying Family Language Policy Christina Higgins and Lyn Wright

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Part I Diverse Families 2 The Discursive Functions of Kinship Terms in Family Conversation Lyn Wright

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3 Family Language Practices of a New Zealand Adoptive Family Mohammed Nofal and Corinne A. Seals

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4 Making a Family: Language Ideologies and Practices in a Multilingual LGBTQ+ Family with Adopted Children Kinga Kozminska and Zhu Hua

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5 “When Kirogi Speaks Two Languages Perfectly”: Language Policies and Practices in a Korean Diasporic Family Hakyoon Lee

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viContents

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The Formation of ʻOhana in Hawaiian Language Revitalization Christina Higgins

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Part II Diverse Modalities 7

8

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This Is the Normal for Us: Managing the Mobile, Multilingual, Digital Family Åsa Palviainen

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Managing Language Shift through Multimodality: Somali Families in London Sahra Abdullahi and Li Wei

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Researching Family Language Policy in Multilingual Deaf-Hearing Families: Using Autoethnographic, Visual, and Narrative Methods Maartje De Meulder, Annelies Kusters, and Jemina Napier

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Part III Diverse Speakers and Contexts 10 Family Language Policy and Language Maintenance among Turkmen-Persian Bilingual Families in Iran Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi, Mojtaba Rajabi, and Khadijeh Aghaei

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11 Family as a System: Values and Ideologies behind Family Language Policies of Diverse Arabic-Speaking Multilingual Families Fatma F. S. Said

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12 “I Want to Maximize the Benefit for My Children”: Marriage Migrant Families’ Strategic Family Language Policy and Practice in South Korea Bong-gi Sohn

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13 Coloniality and Family Language Policy in an African Multilingual Family 257 Carolyn McKinney and Babalwayashe Molate 14 Beyond Success and Failure: Intergenerational Language Transmission from within Indigenous Families in Southern Chile Marco Espinoza and Gillian Wigglesworth

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Contents

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15 Foundational Questions: Examining the Implications of Diverse Families, Modalities, Speakers, and Contexts for Our Understandings of Family, Language, and Policy 299 Aurolyn Luykx I ndex

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FIGURES

4.1 Marek with open arms facing Benjamin

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4.2 Marek and Benjamin hugging

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4.3 Marek, Benjamin, and Jan walking down the hill

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7.1 Mira at the kitchen table

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7.2 The three data collection cycles in fall 2017 to winter 2018

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8.1 Still from family 2

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8.2 Sequence showing interaction where grandmother is helping grandson get ready for school

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8.3 Continuation of previous sequence

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8.4 Sequence from family 3

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8.5 Image showing grandmother and granddaughter acting out the word “wayn” big to consolidate understanding

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8.6 Sequence showing grandmother nonverbally communicate with daughter and granddaughter using cup

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9.1 Languages used by the families at home and deaf vs. hearing family members

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9.2 Oliver and Roos performing to camera

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xFigures

9.3 Andy having an awkward moment with the camera

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9.4 Final ELAN tier template

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9.5 Maartje signing “mother” on Merel’s face

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9.6 Annelies feeling Oliver’s throat as he speaks

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9.7 Jemina rubbing Tilda’s hand asking her to wait

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9.8 Jemina’s language portrait

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9.9 Aran’s “our languages” bar graph

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9.10 Tilda’s drawing “Our family languages”

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11.1 Family systems model

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13.1 Language socialization spaces

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TABLES

2.1 Calling “Mama” in Recording 17

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5.1 Characteristics of Kirogi Family

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5.2 Demographic Information of Participants

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10.1 Demographic Information

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11.1 Summary of Demographics Survey

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11.2 Language Use

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13.1 Ngxanga Family Language Resources

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14.1 Family Profiles

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CONTRIBUTORS

Sahra Abdullahi is a PhD student and research fellow at the Institute of Education, University College London. She holds an MA in applied linguistics from UCL and has previously worked on an ESRC-funded research project on Family Language Policy. Her research interests are centered around bilingualism, language maintenance, and identity. Khadijeh Aghaei has a PhD in applied linguistics from National University of Malaysia (UKM). Her areas of interest are multilingualism and new literacy studies, discourse and pragmatics in second language education and World Englishes. She has published articles in such journals as Education and Information Technology and Language Related Research. She is currently working as an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages, Gonbad Kavous University, Iran. Maartje De Meulder is senior researcher at University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht in the Netherlands. She is interested in language and communication from applied language studies and Deaf studies perspectives. She coedited (with Luk Van Mensel) the special issue “Exploring the Multilingual Family Repertoire: Ethnographic Approaches” (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2021). She is also involved in a project on family language policy in multilingual signing and speaking families with colleagues Jemina Napier and Annelies Kusters. Marco Espinoza is an applied linguistics lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chile (Universidad de Chile). Currently, his research focuses on the sociolinguistic situation and intergenerational continuation of

xivContributors

Indigenous languages in Chile and on the development of language policies on different scales in the country. Christina Higgins is professor and chair in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and director of the Charlene Junko Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole, and Dialect Studies. She strives to be a sociolinguist for the “real world” and to engage in scholarship that will also effect positive change in society. Her research examines multilingual practices and identities among people who navigate local-global affiliations and tensions, with particular attention to marginalized populations. Kinga Kozminska is Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Oxford. She studies language ideologies and practices among Polish-speaking migrants in South East England through an intersectional lens. During her postdoc at Birkbeck, University of London, she conducted linguistic ethnographic fieldwork among multilingual families in London. She is currently working mainly with audiovisual recordings of daily interactions to understand contemporary soundscapes and everyday offline/online multilingual practices in the globalized world. Annelies Kusters is Associate Professor in Sign Language and Intercultural Research at Heriot-Watt University. She leads a research group undertaking the project “Deaf Mobilities across International Borders: Visualising Intersectionality and Translanguaging (MobileDeaf.org.uk)” (2017–23), funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant. Annelies’s current work focuses on the study of multilingualism, language ideologies, and international mobility. Annelies currently investigates International Sign and sign multilingualism in the context of professional mobility. She also is involved in a project on family language policy in multilingual signing and speaking families with colleagues Jemina Napier and Maartje De Meulder and a project on linguistically diverse creative signing on TV with Jordan Fenlon. Hakyoon Lee is Assistant Professor of Korean in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Georgia State University. She has been teaching Korean at GSU since the fall semester of 2013. Her research interests lie at the intersection of language and identity, sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and immigrant education. She has been researching multilingual practices and identities at homes, schools, communities, and social media. She has published her work in Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics Review, Linguistics and Education, the Korean Language in America, Narrative Inquiry, and Journal of Language, Education, and Identity.

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Li Wei is Director and Dean of the UCL Institute of Education, University College London (UCL) where he holds the Chair of Applied Linguistics. His research interests cover various aspects of bilingualism and multilingualism. He is editor of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and Applied Linguistics Review. He is also the editor of the Contemporary Studies in Linguistics book series by Bloomsbury. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK. Aurolyn Luykx is a linguistic anthropologist, recently retired from the University of Texas at El Paso. Since the 1980s, her work in Bolivia has examined the intersections among FLP, state language policies, bilingualism, and ethnic and national identity. Her book The Citizen Factory (1999) is a classic in the critical ethnography of schooling as well as Andean studies. She was part of the founding faculty of the Programa de Formación en Educación Intercultural Bilingüe para los Paises Andinos (PROEIB Andes); her former students include indigenous educators, researchers, and policymakers across the Andean region. Carolyn McKinney is Associate Professor in Language Education at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her teaching and research focus on language ideologies and language policy, multilingualism as resource for learning, intersections of language and race as well as critical literacy. Cofounder of bua-lit, language and literacy advocacy collective (www.bua-lit.org.za), she authored Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling: Ideologies in Practice (2017). Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (Multiling), University of Oslo. He is interested in the study of multilingualism with a focus on the interplay between state and institutional language policies and grassroots language ideologies and practices. His recent publications have appeared in Language in Society, Current Issues in Language Planning, International Journal of Multilingualism, and Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. Babalwayashe Molate is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at the University of Cape Town. Her current study explores the language and literacy socialization practices of a Black multilingual family in a dual-household arrangement in South Africa—oscillating between the city and their rural home. Her broader research area is grounded in language socialization, with a keen focus on African languages and multilingualism, family literacies, family language policy, and school language policy. Connected to her main research interest are her experiences in biliteracy club facilitation and family literacies training. She also translates children’s literature into isiXhosa.

xviContributors

Jemina Napier is Chair of Intercultural Communication in the Centre for Translation & Interpreting Studies in Scotland at Heriot-Watt University. She conducts linguistic, social and ethnographic explorations of direct and mediated sign language communication to inform interpreting studies, applied linguistics, and deaf studies theories. She has published extensively and supervised many PhD students on these topics. Her most recent publication is: Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families (2021, Palgrave). Mohammed Nofal completed his PhD at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His PhD project focused on the dynamics of identity construction in heritage language school and family settings. His current research interests include heritage languages, language policy, language and identity, language and religion, and corpus linguistics. He is currently working as an assistant professor of linguistics in the Department of English, Middle East University, Jordan. Åsa Palviainen is Professor of Swedish in the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include bilingualism and multilingualism, family language policy, child language development, technology-mediated language practices, and mediated discourse analysis. She has more than seventy scientific publications to her name and has been the leader of several externally funded projects. She is currently the PI of the four-year research project “What’s in the App? Digitally-Mediated Communication within Contemporary Multilingual Families across Time and Space (WhatsInApp),” financed by the Academy of Finland (2018–22). Mojtaba Rajabi has a PhD in TESL from University of Malaya, Malaysia (UKM). His areas of interest are multilingualism, multiculturalism and multiliteracies, and discourse and semiotics in second language education. He has also published some English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks and some articles in journals like Education and Information Technology and Language Related Research. For the time being, he is working as a faculty member in the Department of Foreign Languages, Gonbad Kavous University, Iran. Fatma F. S. Said is Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at Zayed University, UAE. She researches within sociolinguistics and applied linguistics focusing on the bilingualism of Arabic-English speaking children and their families. The interdisciplinary issues of identity, agency, language development, maintenance, socialization and family language policy inform her work. She has an interest in how current research methodologies can be enhanced to support multilingual data collection and analysis. Fatma is an editorial board member of Multilingua and English Language Teaching. She is the research coordinator of multilingual

Contributors

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childhoods which is part of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association (EECRA). Corinne Seals is Senior Lecturer of Applied Linguistics at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She is also the founding director of the Wellington Translanguaging Project and its resource branch Translanguaging Aotearoa. Corinne’s overall research is focused on language and identity, especially for heritage language speakers. She is the (co)author of several books focused on these topics, including Heritage Language Policies Around the World (2017), Choosing a Mother Tongue: The Politics of Language and Identity in Ukraine (2019), and Embracing Multilingualism across Educational Contexts (2019), among others. Bong-gi Sohn is a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her research focuses on multilingual/minority family language policy and practices and international student mobilization in higher education. In her doctoral study, she elaborates how global chains of care and so-called feminized multilingual development explain new modes of linguistic nationalism within globalization, contributing to current scholarships on migration, language, and education. Her current work focuses on the experience of international/multilingual students in education, and she plays an important role in codesigning a disciplinespecific content-language integrated learning (CLIL) curriculum with teachers and students. Gillian Wigglesworth is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne and chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. She has published widely in both first- and second-language acquisition and bilingualism, and her major research focus is on the languages that Australian Indigenous children living in remote communities are learning and the linguistic challenges they face on entering the English-based school system. Her work focuses on the complexity of their language ecology and the maintenance of their home languages. Lyn Wright is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics/TESOL at the University of Memphis. She has published on topics of family language policy, language and kinship, sexuality and language learning, and engaged learning in TESOL teacher training. She is the author of Critical Perspectives on Language and Kinship in Multilingual Families and Second Language Socialization and Learner Agency: Talk in Three Adoptive Families (2020).

xviiiContributors

Zhu Hua is Chair of Educational Linguistics and Director of MOSAIC group for research in multilingualism in School of Education, University of Birmingham. She is Fellow of Academy of Social Sciences, the UK, and Fellow of the International Academy for Intercultural Research. Her main research interests span across multilingual and intercultural communication and child language.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank commissioning editors Morwenna Scott and Andrew Wardell at Bloomsbury Academic for their support and encouragement during this process. We would also like to thank Li Wei for including this book in the Contemporary Studies in Linguistics series. Becky Holland has provided excellent editorial assistance throughout the project. The anonymous reviewer of the entire edited volume provided useful insights that helped us sharpen the focus of the book. We are also indebted to the reviewers who were willing to read and comment on individual chapters. Graduate students Alaa Alamri and Iratishe Madake at the University of Memphis provided invaluable help in compiling the manuscript. Lyn would like to thank family and friends who provided emotional and intellectual support over the tedious pandemic year of 2020 and especially Noah, who has helped her make this year bearable. She thanks Christina for the initial motivation and continued inspiration for this project and the amazing contributors who stayed on task and met deadlines despite the lockdowns and homeschool. Finally, she would like to thank all of the families who have taken part in these research projects and shared their personal lives and perspectives. Christina would like to mahalo the three mothers who made time to share their stories with her and to entrust her with the details of their lives. She would also like to thank Lyn for being a resilient coeditor during a strange and very long pandemic. Finally, she would like to thank her own family as well as her post-familial family friends, who never cease to reveal their myriad forms of multilingual, multicultural identities, thus giving her many ideas about what to study next.

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CHAPTER ONE

Diversifying Family Language Policy CHRISTINA HIGGINS AND LYN WRIGHT

The volume seeks to expand the boundaries of current knowledge about Family Language Policy (FLP) by broadening the scope of this field. FLP is a line of inquiry that examines family members’ attitudes toward, planning for, and use of language(s) in the home (King and Fogle 2006; King, Fogle, and Logan-Terry 2008). By turning the focus to expanding the range of family types, language repertoires, and geographical settings, we aim to deepen current understandings of the role of family in language practices and to better understand how these practices relate to processes of language learning, language maintenance, and language shift. In far too many studies in the language field and beyond, knowledge is based upon a sliver of the population that is said to represent the topic under study. This research has been described as WEIRD since it is based on a very unrepresentative demographic: people in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. It has been estimated that 95 percent of research in the field of psychology is based on WEIRD populations and that most of this is on people residing in the United States, who are only 5 percent of the world’s population (Arnett 2008). Such research rarely notes the limitations of the generalizability of the research, yet these findings are naturalized as foundational to our understanding of human behavior and cognition (Henrich et al. 2010). Similarly, in the field of second language acquisition, it is estimated that most research is based on the language learning experiences of university students (Plonsky 2017). This means that

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we do not know much about the acquisitional processes among the range of multilingual people in the world who learn languages in other contexts, in childhood and beyond. Researching language among families typically requires contextualizing family language practices within an understanding of social dynamics in communities in order to make sense of what families do. FLP research has therefore been more inclusive of people of various backgrounds in terms of education, social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and language. Nonetheless, the majority of FLP studies have focused on conventional family types located in educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. In a survey of existing studies, Lanza and Gomes (2020) note that of 146 empirical studies published in this area since 2008, 55 studies were situated in the United States, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Moreover, of the 146 studies, English was the focal language in 82 cases. While some of these studies have examined Indigenous languages, minoritized languages, and diasporic communities, being located in WEIRD nations delimits current understandings about how language ideologies and educational policies help to form family language practices. Studies situated in countries such as Cameroon, Hungary, India, and Mexico appear on the list, but they each only represent one study per nation. We know much less about FLP in contexts where English is not a dominant language, or in places where multilingualism is a normative practice. This volume aims to take a step toward redressing this problem and expanding the ontological foundations of FLP in terms of family types, modes of family language use, and range of languages and communities.

PAST RESEARCH IN FLP Before turning to a discussion of how this volume strives to expand current understandings of how families manage and negotiate their languages, we briefly synthesize current themes and key findings in FLP studies. In an early publication, King, Fogle, and Logan-Terry (2008) explained how FLP research emerged to fill gaps between studies on child language acquisition and language policy and planning. They pointed out that while child language acquisition studies had largely been framed from a psycholinguistic perspective and examined microlevel aspects of language learning (e.g., de Houwer 1990; Lanza 1997/2004), language policy and planning studies largely focused on macrolevel aspects of language ideology in public spaces. A key focus in early FLP studies was therefore on how language ideologies become operationalized among family members in the home and what implications this had for language development, maintenance, and shift. A key point was that language ideologies did not always line up or match family language practices (Curdt-Christiansen 2009; King 2000; Ó hIfearnáin 2013).

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Accordingly, work in FLP explored both the microlevel practices and the macrolevel ideologies that influenced family members in their daily interactions. Most of this work examined migrant and transnational families (but also some autochthonous and Indigenous contexts) and explored how children learned the language(s) of their parents and grandparents. In the past decade, a key debate has emerged about the goal and focus of FLP research. While early work centered on FLP as central to promoting children’s bilingualism with the goal of establishing what planning and practices led to what outcomes, more recent research has explored the more fluid aspects of language, affect, and relationships in the family with a focus on multilingual repertoires and multilingual experiences of all family members (Zhu Hua and Li Wei 2016; Hiratsuka and Pennycook 2020). This work has drawn attention to the ways in which “heritage” is constructed and contested as a part of FLP (Higgins 2019), and it has paid more attention to children’s agency to better understand the ways that family practices are shaped by rights, roles, and ideologies (Fogle 2012; Said and Zhu Hua 2019; Wilson 2020). Rather than focusing on linguistic outcomes of FLP that idealize multilingual production of more than one language, this work has shown how family members creatively and flexibly use their linguistic repertoires to participate in family life, to achieve interactional goals, and to assert their identities in the family and beyond (Johnsen 2020; van Mensel 2018). In an overview of these emerging perspectives, King (2016) argued that both outcomes-based and experiences-oriented research in FLP were important as, on the one hand, teachers, parents, therapists, and policymakers need to know what works for bilingual families and, on the other, language is intimately tied to the relationships and emotions of family members. Diversifying family language policy by shifting perspectives from the family as an interactional context to kinship itself as a relational process that occurs within and without families across time and space provides greater breadth for the study of FLP (Wright 2020). Thus, this volume maintains an interest in all aspects of family language policy without rejecting the primary construct itself in an effort to theoretically and methodologically expand on an already existing framework, capture more complex family language processes across time and space, and integrate the relational and interactional processes of multilingual families in order to inform understandings of both outcomes and experiences.

DIVERSIFYING FAMILY TYPES A central goal of the volume is to diversify knowledge on FLP in relation to family types. Much FLP research has examined the maintenance of languages in heritage and minority language contexts (e.g., Lanza and Li Wei 2016;

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Macalister and Mirvahedi 2017; Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018), where adult family members act as symbolic and linguistic resources for linguistic and cultural continuity. This research is entirely heteronormative and tends to focus on nuclear family relationships across three generations. However, due to increased rights for minoritized, divorce, transnational separation, interrupted transmission due to political change and upheaval, and other factors, a number of families do not fit a heteronormative nuclear family model in which a three generation transmission pattern can be examined (cf. Fishman 1991; Spolsky 2012). Instead, many twenty-first-century families and family formation processes offer new sets of affordances and challenges for language practices. Researchers have only recently embarked on examining language within these family formations. For example, Fogle’s (2012) research on adoptive families has shown how children take on arguably more active roles in the process of language socialization, such as in their use of a high number of questions in order to understand one another and to get their parents’ attention. Our understanding of language socialization has also been expanded through Coetzee’s (2018) research in the impoverished neighborhoods of Cape Town, South Africa, which illustrated how the children of young parents are raised by their respective extended family networks, rather than by nuclear families. These networks are spread across the city and offer a highly dynamic form of language socialization into a variety of speech styles. In Uganda, research on childheaded households has also shown how language and literacy practices are highly collaborative among siblings since households lack adults who can provide expertise or guidance in these areas (Kendrick et al. 2017). These practices challenge conventional understandings of language socialization models in the family, which treat the transmission of language as a linear, intergenerational process. In terms of underrepresented family types, this volume expands FLP lines of inquiry further by investigating adoptive families (Seals and Nofal; Wright), divorced and single parent families (Palviainen; Wright), LGBTQ-identified families (Zhu Hua and Kozminska), transnational, multisited families (Lee), and new speaker families (Higgins). Seals and Nofal (this volume) and Wright both explore children’s responses to their white adoptive parents’ encouragement to engage with their heritage languages and cultures. Wright shows how terms daddy and your dad are used to identify two boys’ adoptive and biological fathers in an examination of kinship in an American family with two boys who were adopted from Ukraine. Her analysis shows how these terms get used by one of the boys to resist participating in conversations about their Ukrainian family ties. Similarly, in their study of a New Zealand couple’s interaction with their India-born daughter, Seals and Nofal show

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how she often resists her parents’ invitations to acknowledge her Indian identity to avoid being othered within the family unit itself. For both studies, adoptive families provide encouragement but receive resistance from children in acknowledging their languages and cultures because of their ambivalent feelings about their multiple belongings. Zhu Hua and Kozminska (this volume) illustrate how a white married gay couple in the UK who were originally from Poland approached the maintenance of Polish with their biracial adopted sons, who also had Polish heritage on their biological mother’s side. While the parents and the children had a shared linguistic heritage, the FLP of the parents was strongly influenced by their sexual orientation. Due to prevalent discriminatory ideologies and laws against gender and sexual minorities in Poland, the fathers chose not to send their children to the Saturday school in England, for they expected that the school would also expose their children to these harmful ideologies. This circumstance meant that their FLP was dependent on the fathers’ ability to support their children’s development in Polish. Family types have also become diversified as a result of short- and long-term transnational opportunities which separate families from homelands and from family members. Transnational, multisited families also form due to families’ striving to gain socioeconomic mobility, as in the case of kirogi (“goose”) families from South Korea. While this phenomenon is not new (e.g., Lee 2010), it continues to shift family roles due to separation, as mothers take on new identities through their roles as heads of the household which differ from their roles when living with their husbands. In her analysis of kirogi families in the United States, Lee (this volume) finds that such reconfigurations in the family also impact FLP, as Korean mothers she interviewed expressed an inability to impose their own FLPs as single parents. While the mothers expected Korean to be spoken at home, their children often used English with them and used their mothers’ lack of proficiency in English as a means of social control in the family and at school. Family types have sometimes also been entirely reconfigured in conceptual, rather than spatial or biological, terms. Higgins (this volume) examines how multiethnic families who are committed to speaking Hawaiian have created Hawaiian familial ties (ʻohana) through their dedication to the Hawaiian language which are not based on biological relationships. As these families embrace Hawaiian principles and worldviews in their daily life, they find commonalities with others like them who are typically not in their own nuclear or extended families. Since Hawaiian was not transmitted intergenerationally due to pressures to Americanize under US control, these families are headed by new speakers, or adults who learned the language later in life, and not from their own family members. In many ways, their FLPs are a response to

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the losses that Hawaiians and other Indigenous and minoritized families have witnessed in their cultural practices due to autocratic regimes, colonization, and the ensuing effects of oppressive policies on language in education and in other contexts (cf. Mirvahedi 2016; Smith-Christmas 2016).

DIVERSIFYING MODALITIES AND METHODOLOGIES Due to the changing nature of the family and more inclusive research approaches, it is necessary to diversify the modalities and methodologies used in FLP research. In this volume, “modalities” refers to both the modalities of family communication, digital, signed, and spoken, as well as the modalities through which research is conducted, using, for example, visual and digital data (McKee and Smiler 2017). For transnational and migrant families, digital communication or digitally mediated language practices are important resources for constructing a family space where multilingualism can flourish, family members can learn languages, and multilingual identities as well as affinities can be forged (Lanza and Lexander 2019). In her skillful analysis of a white, divorced, transnational family’s multilingual language use during FaceTime calls, Palviainen (this volume) demonstrates the “dynamic ecology of contemporary multilingual families,” that promises new avenues for studying early multilingual development. Abdullahi and Li Wei’s investigation of multimodal communication in Somali families in London further expands on the ways in which language learning, multimodal communication, and intergenerational living works in a Somali diasporic family in London, in spite of a lack of shared languages between the grandparents and the grandchildren due to their complex multisited histories of relocation. While grandparents are oftentimes the catalyst for language maintenance across the generations, the nature of the Somali family’s relocation across multiple nations has made it challenging to maintain family ties, and so it becomes necessary for the grandmother to support her communication with her grandson through gestures, even though she is his main caretaker at certain times of the day. In order to investigate FLP in mixed deaf-hearing families with white and biracial bilingual children, de Meulder et al. (this volume) employ an autoethnographic research design that involves multimodal and visual data including language biographies and portraits of family members, video recordings of family interactions, and extensive field notes. This approach provides a rare glimpse into the multimodal translanguaging in mixed deaf-hearing families that documents longitudinal change and the complex “temporalities” of family language policy. The three chapters in this section employ innovative methodologies to capture the complexities of FLP in coparented, multigenerational, and deaf-hearing families that break ground in researching multisited, visual, and digital family communication.

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DIVERSIFYING LANGUAGES AND COMMUNITIES IN FLP Finally, this volume aims to diversify the languages and contexts that have been studied in FLP. The studies in this section investigate under-researched contexts that bring to light the important role of gender roles and ethnolinguistic identities in FLP processes as well as a need to adopt perspectives on what McKinney and Molate (this volume) term Indigenous multilingualisms that reinterpret family language policy and intergenerational language transmission (Espinoza and Wigglesworth, this volume). Taken together, the studies show how diversifying languages and communities in FLP expands theoretical perspectives by recentering the role of gender in language maintenance and shift (cf. Gal 1978; Luykx 2003) and refocusing the importance of de/coloniality in the discussion of intergenerational language transmission. Numerous studies have focused on the role of mothers and associated “women’s work” (Okita 2002) of minority language maintenance particularly in migratory contexts. In her study of damunhwa (“multicultural”) migrant marriage women in South Korea, Sohn explores how two mothers enact their roles very differently, in light of their visions of the future for their children. While the Korean government encourages damunhwa mothers to teach their children their languages as part of a larger policy to promote multilingualism in the country, the women take very different views on their roles as “language teachers” in their families. Sohn finds that a Japanese mother strives to speak only Japanese to her children at home in order to prepare them to apply to college in Japan, though she often struggles to find time to do so because of the demanding schoolwork the children face. However, a Chinese mother only speaks Korean at home, for she values success in Korean education as her primary goal, in alignment with the conventional role taken by Korean mothers. New data on the role of fathers and differences in gender roles and ethnolinguistic identities are also emerging. Mirvahedi et al. (this volume) explore the language ideologies and reported practices of families in Turkmen Persian families in Iran, where fathers, not mothers, are considered to be the keepers of the minority Turkmen language. These findings are in line with early research in the field as in Gal’s (1978) study where intersectionality of ethnicity, social class, and language in a German-Hungarian village resulted in women’s shift toward German in an effort to change marriage patterns and social positions. In Mirvahedi et al.’s study, Turkmen-Persian women preferred Persian for its symbolic capital (even writing their own wedding invitations in Persian while their grooms’ were in Turkmen), relegating Turkmen language maintenance in the family as the husband’s job. Further, Said’s (this volume) study of Arabic-speaking families in different national contexts (the UK and Saudi Arabia) focuses on the intersection of

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gender roles and religious beliefs and identities in FLP more specifically. She finds that some Arabic-speaking mothers talk about teaching Arabic to their children as a religious duty. Others, however, particularly in the sojourning family, see Arabic (and specifically colloquial, not Classical, Arabic) as a means for children to reconnect when they return to Saudi Arabia. Said notes that diglossia and religion are important aspects of these families’ FLPs. In the South African context, McKinney and Molate (this volume) consider the effect of post-apartheid language in education policies on FLP in a middle-class family to show how a de/coloniality lens can contribute to FLP studies. Their approach further emphasizes the importance of heteroglossia to parents and family members and the dominance of European monolingualism in shaping language ideologies. Like King’s (2000) study of parents’ use of Quichua in the Ecuadoran Andes, McKinney and Molate demonstrate how the family’s linguistic fluidity in practice does not line up with their stated language ideologies. McKinney and Molate contest the notion that intergenerational language shift is an appropriate model for family multilingualism and argue for a more heteroglossic, fluid understanding of language repertoires in multilingual, and specifically Indigenous, contexts. Similarly, Espinoza and Wigglesworth’s chapter further demonstrates how focusing on “under-researched families,” that is, Chedungun-Spanish bilingual families in Chile, leads to a rejection of reductionist discourses of success and failure and ultimately a need to revise understandings of Intergenerational Language Transmission (ILT), one of the central concepts of FLP work. Espinoza and Wigglesworth’s work provides a model for examining “the heteroglossic realities of bilingual contexts.” As more diverse family types and contexts are included in FLP research (as discussed above) and the goals of inquiry in this field shifts, innovative methodologies, including autoethnography, multimodal designs, and public discourse, are diversifying the research field.

CONCLUSION As the study of family language policy reaches its third decade as a named subfield in linguistics, the chapters in this volume chart innovative and promising avenues for expanding the scope and reach of the field and its relation to understanding societal multilingualism and multilingualism in context more broadly. The inclusion of diverse families (single parent, adoptive, LGBTQ+, and transnational) in these studies brings to light the complex ways in which belonging, for both children in the family and families in the broader society, intersect with FLP processes. The inclusion of diverse contexts expands discussions of gender roles in families across cultures and their relationship to language ideologies and use. Further studying Indigenous, multilingual contexts calls for more fluid accounts of language repertoires across multiple

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sites of family communication. Taken together, the diverse families and contexts researched here involved new multimodal, autoethnographic, and multisited methodologies, emerging perspectives on multilingual repertoires and Indigenous multilingualisms, and engaged discussions about kinship, gender and sexuality, language, and belonging as important aspects of family life the influence family language policy. These avenues lead to potential areas in which family external processes (e.g., gender ideologies, kinship orientations, societal multilingualism, homophobia, and the public construction of family normativities) connect with the family internal, interactional, and ideological processes FLP research has so fruitfully studied. In our view, future research in FLP would continue to strive to document and analyze an even wider range of family types, languages, and geographic contexts in order to understand the role of families in intergenerational transmission, language shift, and language practices in the home. While we have strived to include scholarship by more diverse researchers from different parts of the world and who represent the societies they study, we note that there is still room for improvement here. In particular, we are eager to see future FLP studies in the following contexts: • Research in Indigenous and autochthonous multilingual contexts, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, South America, and the Pacific, where most people speak more than one language as a matter of course (cf. Maseko and Mutasa 2019). • Research on how FLP relates to language practices beyond the home, including schooling but also other domains of social life that impact FLPs, such as sports, community centers, religious domains, and workplaces. • Research that reckons with language revitalization and FLP in endangered language communities. While much of this work is done with adults, there is an increasing number of young people who are committed to their languages, and there are fruitful directions for a coalescence of research on language documentation, conservation, and FLP (cf. Hermes and King 2013; Smith-Christmas 2015). • Research by scholars who are members of families that are underrepresented, including single parents, divorced parents, adoptive families, and LGBTQ families. Going forward, we expect ethnographic research to continue to take a center role, as it is uniquely suited to making sense of how people’s everyday lives are shaped by and shape their language practices. As people’s lives continue to move into digital spaces, we would expect for social media, family videos, text messages, and other digital communications to also take a more central role in

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connecting family members together. These research goals present a challenge in relation to the commitment of both researchers and participants. FLP research relies on relationships of trust between families and researchers; the collection of family conversations and interactions is an intimate process that reveals the personal life of families that is rarely on public display. Working with diverse families in diverse contexts demands transforming our own implicitly held understandings of family and language as well as the training and inclusion of more diverse researchers with in-group connections to these communities.

REFERENCES Arnett, J. J. (2008), “The Neglected 95%: Why American Psychology Needs to Become Less American,” American Psychologist, 63(7): 602–14. Coetzee, F. (2018), “Hy leer dit nie hier nie (‘He Doesn’t Learn It Here’): Talking about Children’s Swearing in Extended Families in Multilingual South Africa,” International Journal of Multilingualism, 15(3): 291–305. Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2009), “Invisible and Visible Language Planning: Ideological Factors in the Family Language Policy of Chinese Immigrant Families in Quebec,” Language Policy, 8(4): 351–75. Curdt-Christiansen, X. L., and Lanza, E. (eds.) (2018), “Language Management in Multilingual Families: Efforts, Measures and Challenges,” Multilingua, 37(2): 123–30. de Houwer, A. (1990), The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth: A Case Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fishman, J. A. (1991), Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Fogle, L. W. (2012), Second Language Socialization and Learner Agency, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Gal, S. (1978), “Peasant Men Can’t Get Wives: Language Change and Sex Roles in a Bilingual Community,” Language in Society, 7(1): 1–16. Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., and Norenzayan, A. (2010), “Most People Are Not WEIRD,” Nature, 466(7302): 29. Hermes, M., and King, K. A. (2013), “Ojibwe Language Revitalization, Multimedia Technology, and Family Language Learning,” Language Learning & Technology, 17(1): 125–44. Higgins, C. (2019), “Introduction: Language, Heritage and Family: A Dynamic Perspective,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 255(1): 1–7. Hiratsuka, A., and Pennycook, A. (2020), “Translingual Family Repertoires: ‘No, Morci is itaiitai panzita, amor,’ ” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41(9): 749–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2019.1645145. Johnsen, R. V. (2020), “Teasing and Policing in a Multilingual Family—Negotiating and Subverting Norms and Social Hierarchies,” Journal of Pragmatics, 158: 1–12. Kendrick, M., and Namazzi, E. (2017), “Family Language Practices as Emergent Policies in Child-Headed Households in Rural Uganda,” in Family Language Policies in a Multilingual World: Opportunities, Challenges, and Consequences, ed. J. Macalister and S. H. Mirvahedi, London: Routledge, pp. 56–73. King (2016), “Language Policy, Multilingual Encounters, and Transnational Families,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 726–33.

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King, K. A. (2000), “Language Ideologies and Heritage Language Education,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 3(3): 167–84. King, K. A., Fogle, L., and Logan-Terry, A. (2008), “Family Language Policy,” Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(5): 907–22. King, K., and Fogle, L. (2006), “Bilingual Parenting as Good Parenting: Parents’ Perspectives on Family Language Policy for Additive Bilingualism,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(6): 695–712. Lanza, E. (1997/2004), Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lanza, E., and Gomes, R. L. (2020), “Family Language Policy: Foundations, Theoretical Perspectives and Critical Approaches,” in Handbook of Home Language Maintenance and Development: Social and Affective Factors, ed. A. C. Schalley and S. A. Eisenchlas, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 153–73. Lanza, E., and Lexander, K. (2019), “Family Language Practices in Multilingual, Transcultural Families,” in Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Multilingualism: The Fundamentals, ed. S. Montanari and S. Quay, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 229–52. Lanza, E., and Li Wei (2016), “Transnational Experience, Aspiration and Family Language Policy,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 655–66. Lee, H. (2010), “ ‘I Am a Kirogi Mother’: Education Exodus and Life Transformation among Korean Transnational Women,” Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 9(4): 250–64. Luykx, A. (2003), “Weaving Languages Together: Family Language Policy and Gender Socialization in Bilingual Aymara Households,” in Language Socialization in Bilingual and Multilingual Societies, ed. R. Bayley and S. Shecter, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 25–43. Macalister, J., and Mirvahedi, S. (eds.) (2017), Family Language Policies in a Multilingual World: Opportunities, Challenges, and Consequences. London: Routledge. Maseko, B., and Mutasa, D. E. (2019), “ ‘Only Tonga Spoken Here!’: Family Language Management among the Tonga in Zimbabwe,” Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 37(4): 289–302. McKee, R., and Smiler, K. (2017), “Family Language Policy for Deaf Children and the Vitality of New Zealand Sign Language,” in Family Language Policies in a Multilingual World, ed. J. Macalister and S. H. Mirvahedi, London: Routledge, pp. 30–55. Mirvahedi, S. H. (2016), “Exploring Family Language Policies among AzerbaijaniSpeaking Families in the City of Tabriz, Iran,” in Family Language Policies in a Multilingual World, ed. J. Macalister and S. H. Mirvahedi, London: Routledge, pp. 74–95. Ó hIfearnáin, T. (2013), “Family Language Policy, First Language Irish Speaker Attitudes and Community-Based Response to Language Shift,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 34(4): 348–65. Okita, T. (2002), Invisible Work: Bilingualism, Language Choice, and Childrearing in Intermarried Families, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Plonsky, L. (2017), “Quantitative Research Methods,” in The Routledge Handbook of Instructed Second Language Acquisition, ed. S. Loewen and M. Sato, New York: Routledge, pp. 505–21. Said, F., and Hua, Zhu (2019), “ ‘No, No Maama! Say “Shaatir ya Ouledee Shaatir”!’ Children’s Agency in Language Use and Socialisation,” International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3): 771–85.

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Smith-Christmas, C. (2016), Family Language Policy: Maintaining an Endangered Language in the Home, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Spolsky, B. (2012), “Family Language Policy—the Critical Domain,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 33(1): 3–11. Van Mensel, L. (2018), “ ‘Quiere koffie?’ The Multilingual Familylect of Transcultural Families,” International Journal of Multilingualism, 15(3): 233–48. Wilson, S. (2020), Family Language Policy: Children’s Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, L. (2020), Critical Perspectives on Kinship and Language in Multilingual Families, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Zhu Hua and Li Wei (2016), “Transnational Experience, Aspiration and Family Language Policy,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 655–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2015.1127928.

PART I

Diverse Families

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CHAPTER TWO

The Discursive Functions of Kinship Terms in Family Conversation LYN WRIGHT

Diverse, twenty-first-century families formed through and affected by adoption, reproductive technologies, same-sex marriage, and transnational migration have entailed a renewed interest in the study of kinship across the social sciences (Furstenberg 2020). This renewal is of particular relevance to the study of family language policy (FLP), a field which has historically minimized discussion of nonnormative families and kinship processes in its efforts to paint a homogenized picture of nuclear, ethnolinguistic minority families in order to understand societal language maintenance and shift in communities (cf. Kozminska and Zhu Hua, this volume; Nofal and Seals, this volume; Wright 2020; Zhu Hua and Li Wei 2016). This chapter examines how family configuration and kinship processes intersect with multilingual practices, competencies, and identities to expand the study of FLP. This chapter focuses on the use of the most elemental linguistic aspect of kinship, that is, the kinship term (“mama,” “daddy,” and “your dad”) and its uses in bilingual families. By focusing on families (single parent, adoptive, and immigrant) where the negotiation of normativity is integral to the relational and political goals of its members, I demonstrate how kinterm use functions as an important part of family power negotiations and identity construction that intersects with family multilingualism. More specifically, vocative and

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referential uses of kinterms such as “mama and your dad” are analyzed in the different contexts to demonstrate how they can be used strategically to give children turns at talk, contextualize speech acts such as complaints and requests (in the single parent family), and construct belongings across time and space (in the transnational adoptive family).

KINTERMS Current approaches in kinship studies focus on practice-based accounts in which kinship is something that is done and studied in action and/or interaction (Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Gauthier et al. 2014). From a social semiotic perspective, Agha (2007) describes the shift from structural to practice-based approaches to kinship as a move toward a focus on “kinship behaviors.” This chapter focuses on a specific kinship behavior, the use of kinship terms (or kinterms [Agha 2007]) in interaction as a way to examine how kinship relations frame other discursive processes. Studying kinship in action is important to understanding FLP and multilingual families because language use and development within the family sphere is ultimately tied to family relationships, power dynamics, and language socialization. Work that family members do to transmit minority languages, use multilingual repertoires, or socialize one another into linguistic practices are all embedded in the activity of being and doing family (see also Higgins, this volume), and focusing on kinterms as discursive, affective markers of these relationships can help to better elucidate when families are “doing family” and how kinship roles and relationships shape other activities. In these data, kinterms play a role in constructing and negotiating affective and interactional stances, child agency, and family normativities in discourse. In previous work on kinship and language in multilingual families, I have discussed how the use of kinterms can function to change the language of interaction, allow children to gain turns at talk and change topics, and construct multiple kinships across time and space. I have also demonstrated the importance of talking about kinship in public discourse about immigration and how kinterms can be used to construct evaluative stances in the media (Wright 2020). Following Agha (2007), this chapter goes into more detail about the different forms (vocative vs. referential) kinship terms take and how they relate to doing and being kin in multilingual contexts. In examining how vocative and referential forms of kinterms emerge in family conversations, I present a more comprehensive picture of the work kinterms do to establish kinships, construct and contest normativities, and shape interactions and discourse. Kinship terminology has a long history of study in Anthropology and structural approaches to kinship (Fox 1983). As kinship studies have moved to more practice-based and critical approaches (Franklin and McKinnon 2001),

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kinship terms have largely been dropped as a unit of analysis. In this research, the use of kinterms has been somewhat taken for granted and not a point of study. Agha (2007: 344), however, argues that kinship behavior itself does not exist without the presence of the kinterm: In fact the only evidence for isolating it [kinship] as a distinct realm of social relations is the existence of kinterms and their semiotic and metasemiotic uses. Agha argues that the kinterms are “text fragments” that occur in “multi-modal sign configurations” (p. 345) as a part of kinship behaviors. The fact the kinterm calls into being the kinship relationship makes it a potentially important aspect of family interaction, especially in contexts where family relationships are not taken for granted through biology or genealogy. Kinterms can be used to both reproduce and contradict social norms. In a study of Christian Koreans in Korea, Harkness (2015: 308) demonstrated how the use of new kinterms subverted traditional norms as a way to create new identities as the simplification of Korean forms of address to “two Christian forms” was related to participants’ reflection on the Korean language and “a Christian person’s self-location in relationships, groups, institutions, and world history.” In a similar vein Fisher (2009: 282), in a study of incarcerated Aboriginal Australians’ use of radio call-in shows to talk to family and kin, argues that “kinship reference provides a particularly powerful metacultural language by which Aboriginal Australians both reflect on and reproduce their relationships with one another, and by which they maintain their distinction from a broader Australian society.” Both of these studies point to the important functions of kinterms in interaction as they establish new identities and construct community belongings. While many investigations of kinterms have relied on crosslinguistic comparisons and investigations, there is very little discussion of the use of kinterms in bilingual or multilingual interactions. Harkness (2015) discusses a personal anecdote in which he is addressed by different kinterms than his Korean counterparts because of his English-speaking identity, but the effects or functions of these kinds of practices are largely unknown. The data below suggest that the use of kinterms in bilingual family conversation can play a role in switching languages or calling up different affective stances toward family members (in using the Russian “mama” vs. American English “mom” for example). There are two uses of kinterms that are important in understanding kinship behavior, according to Agha (2007). The first and the most common unit of analysis is the use of third person referring terms where the speaker refers to a community member or themselves using the kinship term. A second, less commonly studied use, however, is the vocative form in which a speaker calls

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another speaker by a kinterm in a direct address situation. The current chapter examines the use of kinterms from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective (Schiffrin 1996) that considers both the sequential consequences of the use of the kinterm (when it is used and what happens next) and the ways in which the use constructs belongings and identities across space, time, and languages in talk within and about families. Following Agha’s (2007) analysis, I explore how kinterms can function to construct interactional stances in discourse. Here Agha describes how a shift in kinterms marks a shift in interactional stance by a speaker toward the addressee: The shift in denotational categories—from kinterms in preceding discourse to pronouns in the current segment—marks a temporary suspension of the invocation of kinrelations in acts of reference. This constitutes a recognizable shift in interactional stance, namely the suspension of affective/solidary relations between speaker and addressee maintained by the earlier pattern of kinrelational reference. In the case at hand, the speaker’s shift to pronouns is a way of marking exasperation. (p. 357) This evaluative function of kinterms is relevant in all of the data presented below. Children use kinterms in interaction to introduce new topics and gain the floor, but also to comment on their parent’s actions, resist or diverge from parent’s requests, and to create solidarity in interaction particularly around questions of importance to the child’s history or identity. Such stances frame the other, bilingual talk ongoing in these families and mark shifts from one language to the other, contextualizing multilingualism as a part of kinship processes in the family. Taken together, these examinations of vocative and referential uses of kinship terms demonstrate how stances are created that contextualize family language processes.

METHODS The data examples in this chapter are drawn from two ethnographic, discourse analytic studies of kinship processes in multilingual contexts that employed language socialization approaches to understanding intersections of language learning and culture learning in the family environment (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984). The two studies focused on bilingual, nonnormative (i.e., single parent and adoptive) families who are in the United States (more details about each family are given below in the analysis sections). The focus of the analysis for this chapter is the use of kinterms in each of the data sets, and the goal of pulling together these different kinds of data and studies is to show how both vocative and referential uses of kinterms operate to contextualize and frame other discourse processes, including bilingual and multilingual language use, related to family.

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In the first study presented below, a Russian-English bilingual single mother (Elena) and daughter (Maria, aged ten) in the United States audio recorded their approximately ten-minute walk to school every day for about two months. The walk to school was a time when the mother noted she was able to use the most Russian with her bilingual daughter. During the walk the daughter often used the kinterm “mom” or “mama” to introduce new topics in the conversation with her mother, and this usage had multiple functions as discussed below. Elena recorded twenty-nine walks to school over a period of about ten weeks. The average length of the walk to school over the twenty-nine recordings was eleven minutes. The terms “mom” and “mama” were identified in the audio files and noted by time stamp in an Excel sheet with a notation of what utterance followed the kinterm. All of the recordings were reviewed aurally, and the time of all uses of “mom” as an attention getter were noted in an Excel sheet (as well as a note about the subsequent discourse—if “mom” initiated a new topic, complaint, narrative, suggestion, etc.). I chose to code uses of “mom” rather than the more obvious switches between English and Russian in the conversations because I wanted to foreground the relationship between the mother and daughter and explore the language use from a kinship perspective. The second study was a language socialization study of an adoptive father and his two sons adopted from Ukraine at ages eight and ten (Fogle 2012). This family self-recorded mealtimes and literacy events at home over the course of eight months and participated in monthly interviews. The original analysis of these data did not focus on kinship or kinterms, but rather on language socialization and narrative events in family conversation as a way of understanding the children’s development. For the current study, one episode in which the family members talked about the children’s past life and kin in Ukraine was excerpted for analysis. This excerpt had been an important moment in the data for me to understand how the single adoptive father’s learning of Russian had connected with his ability to acknowledge and maintain multiple kinships for his children but had not fit into other analyses that have been published from that study. Further details about these families and data, including the number of recordings or texts, transcription, and translation, of the data collection and analysis for these studies can be found in Fogle (2012) and Wright (2020).

KINTERMS IN THE FAMILY The data examples that I present in this chapter demonstrate both the vocative and referential uses of kinterms as discussed in Agha (2007). Throughout the analysis, the focus is on how the kinterm constructs kinships that are meaningful to the other discursive and interactional processes that are happening in the transcript or text. These examples present a kind of continuum of kinterm usage from purely vocative to purely referential functions in family conversation and

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public discourse. I start with the bilingual walk to school with single mother and daughter, then turn to the single adoptive father and two sons talking about past kinships in Ukraine to examine these processes.

CALLING MOM: VOCATIVE FUNCTIONS OF KINTERMS Elena and Maria lived in a midsized southern city in the United States. Elena had come to the United States for graduate school and stayed in the South as a professor at a university. Her daughter attended public schools in the city and was able to take Russian as a foreign language classes as electives in elementary and middle school. Elena and Maria traveled to Russia in the summers to visit family, and Elena commented in initial interviews about her daughter’s high competence in Russian and her own satisfaction with her FLP (cf. Wright 2020). Elena noted that the walk to school every morning was an important part of the family routine when she and her daughter could use Russian. Walking to school was important to Elena because it reminded her of her own childhood in urban Russia. In general, the walk to school allowed the pair to talk about a variety of topics including Elena’s past in Russia and Russian culture, movies and entertainment, friends, school, and other topics. It was a time when Maria could work out her understanding of herself and the world around her (talking about politics or her Russian American identity) as well as for Elena to encourage her Russian use. Elena spoke almost exclusively in Russian on these walks, but she did not make explicit statements about her language policy (i.e., she did not state language rules) and did not correct Maria if she did not use Russian (though she did sometimes correct her Russian word choice or grammar). Maria uses “mama” (and sometimes “mom”) to introduce turns at talk and sometimes interrupt her mother (who is usually using Russian). Maria’s interruptions are most often in English and can function in a variety of ways. One of the most frequent functions is to introduce a request as in the following short examples taken from one walk to school where Maria called “mama” repetitively provided in Table 2.1. The first two uses of “mama” in Recording 17 are to introduce requests that put some imposition on her mother—pick me up early from an event later in the day and go to Starbucks (a coffee shop). The second two functions (three and four) are slightly different. “I finished the book” is a report about a meaningful event in Maria’s daily life, and the last one, “If we were millionaires,” introduces a future narrative about a hypothetical event. In all four cases here, the use of “mama” changes the topic and language (to English) of conversation, gives Maria the floor, and allows Maria to introduce an issue that is important to her either in relation to planning the day (i.e., the requests) or in reporting or dreaming about events that are relevant to her school life or her ideal self.

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TABLE 2.1  Calling “Mama” in Recording 17 Minute Maria’s utterance 1 2 3 4

4:00 5:01 5:19 6:10

Mama! Can you pick me up earlier than that? Oh, mama, can we go to Starbucks or something? Ooh, mama, I finished the book Ok, mama, if we were millionaires

In the following excerpt, for example, Maria uses “mama” to introduces talk about the future and her own future identity by asking her mother a question, “Do you think I’m gonna look like a Russian girl?” (line 3): Excerpt 2.1. “When I grow up” (Recording 4, minute 4:51) 1 Maria: Mama! 2 Elena: Hm? 3 M: Do you think I’m gonna look like a Russian girl? 4 or American girl? 5 or an American Russian girl 6 E: Ah, /???/ 7 M: When I grow up 8 When I grow up. 9 Like, /???/ do you think I’ll look like a Russian girl? 10 E: Is there a difference between a Russian girl, 11 M: mhm! 12 E: and an American girl? 13 M: because American people usually have like their, 14 cause you can tell (.) if someone’s a Russian /???/ 15 E: Ну (.) часто да, не всегда Nu (.) chasto da, ne vsegda Well, often yes, not always 16 M: Yeah but like do you think I will (.) look more like a - a Russian girl? 17 E: А это от тебя зависит A eto ot tebya zavisit Well that depends on you 18 как ты захочешь, так kak ty zahochesh’, tak how you want to be, so 19 M: no, I can’t like change /???/ 20 E: well, 21 конечно есть Славянские konechno est’ Slavyanskie of course there’s Slavic 22 мама Славянка mama Slavyanka mama is Slavic

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Here Maria and Elena discuss what it means to “look Russian” and how much choice Maria has in this matter. While Elena attributes Maria’s Russian identity to her own choices (“that depends on you,” line 17), Maria herself sees the ascription of a Slavic identity as something she might have no control over, “I can’t like change” (line 19). Calling “mama” in this excerpt then leads to an intense negotiation over Maria’s Russian-American identity, ethnicity, and physical appearance that is possibly tied to negotiating whiteness or her Slavicness in a predominately Anglo-American white society (Wright 2020). In this excerpt, “mama” gives Maria a chance to introduce a topic of importance to her personal life and present and future identities. While most of the examples given so far involve Maria calling “mama” and then asking a question or prompting Elena in English, not all of Maria’s “mama” attention getters resulted in an English-language prompt. In the excerpt below, Maria calls “mama” and asks her prompting question in Russian. This excerpt is similar to the one above in which Maria introduces a topic that is related to the family’s Russian identity and history. Here she is eliciting information about Elena’s past school days, and it may be that the choice of topics (past time in Russia) creates a discursive context to use more Russian. (However, Maria was also noted to use more Russian in the later recordings in the data set [this is #14].) This excerpt introduces an explanation of Elena’s schooling in Russia and is subsequently related to Maria’s own anticipation of what middle school (grades 6–8) will be like for her in the United States and how it is different than her mother’s experience in Russia. Excerpt 2.2. “When you went to school in Russia …” (Recording 14, Minute 7:47) 1 Maria: Mama! 2 Elena: [Mm? 3 M: [когда ты в школу ходила в России [kogda ty v shkolu hodila v Rossii, [when you went to school in Russia, 4 E: mhm, 5 M: ты в классом занималас? ty v klasom zanimalas? Were you in a class? 6 E: ну nu, well, 7 как ска kak ska how to sa -, 8 M: Like did you have different classes and stuff like that? 9 E: Ты имеешь в виду супорт? Ty imeesh’ v vidu suport? Do you mean support?

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A hallmark of the conversations that Maria introduces with her mother (that usually begin with the kinterm and attention getter “mama”) is the inevitable negotiation that occurs either about the language and conversation itself (as above where Elena needs to clarify what Maria is asking in line 9) or about the events that are being talked about or planned. In Excerpt 2.3, Maria again introduces a question about past time (a trip to Cuba) and clarifies what connecting flights they took: Excerpt 2.3. “Mama? When we went to Cuba …” (Recording 4, minute 00:43) 1 M: Mama? 2 E: mm. 3 M: When we went to Cuba was it Memphis to Florida (.) to Cuba, or was it to Atlanta? to Florida to Cuba 4 E: Аа: ну сначала мы летели оттуда в а:, Aa: nu snachala my leteli ottuda v a:, Ah: well first we flew from there to ah:, 5 Майями или /???/? Miami ili /???/? Miami or /???/? 6 Майями [кажется Miami [kazhetsya Miami   [it seems 7 M:      [Yeah.

After some discussion of the order of flights, Maria then later in the recording suggests that they need to leave very early in the morning for an upcoming trip. Here Maria is employing the discussion of the past event to negotiate plans for the future (as she does a lot in conversation with her mother). The vocative use of “mama” in these walk-to-school conversations then stands out as a marker for this kind of negotiation and planning. Taken together, the uses of “mama” by Maria in the bilingual walk-to-school conversations range from very practical markers of requests for action and/ or information to more abstract introductions of narratives and reports about topics that were important to Maria. In all of these examples, there is a subtle negotiation of power and agency that is occurring in the family talk. Requests are by their nature face-threatening acts (Brown and Levinson 1987), and the use of “mama” to introduce them calls into being the kinship relations between Maria and her mother that potentially softens or at least contextualizes the face threat as a part of the mother–daughter relationship. Using the kinterm “mom” is not a neutral attention getter, in addition to the discourse-related functions analyzed above it also appeals to the relationship Maria has with her mother and signifies the kinship between them. This function is apparent when focusing on the types of topics and turns at talk this

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kinterm in particular introduces. When Maria uses “mom” or “mama” to take a turn at talk, she is often preparing for a topic with significant emotional weight (e.g., her mother’s past) or is introducing a negotiation or contradiction of her mother (a face-threatening act) or both. The following two excerpts present such examples as Maria uses “mom” to make a request and to negotiate her mother’s understanding of the future plans. Excerpt 2.4. “Mom. Will you pick me up?” (Recording 2, minute 1:19) 1 M: Mom. /can/ you pick me up from the lock-in? 2 E: ну да! ну (.) слушай! nu da! nu (.) slushai! well yes! well (.) listen! 3 ты же мне написала это телефон бабушки Сyсан что ли? ty zhe mne napisala eto telefon babushki Susan chto li? you wrote down Susan’s grandmother’s telephone number, right? 4 M: Mhm 5 E: потому-что я вижу сообщение, potomu-chto ya vizhu soobshchenie, because I see the message, 6 написано “from Amy”. napisano “from Amy”. it’s written “from Amy”. 7 “Can Amy pick me up from lock-in?” 8 Я в обшей не могу понять Ya v obshei ne mogu ponyat’ I totally can’t understand 9 M: I said I, this is for me 10 E: A::h!

In this first part of the conversation, Maria introduces the topic of the lock-in (an overnight party at the school) and the plans on how she would get home the next day. Maria simply asks if her mother will pick her up. She introduces this question with “mom,” and she does not make a request as in the examples above but rather asks for clarification of her mother’s plans. Elena responds that she has not understood the communication about the event. In the following excerpt, however, Maria asserts her own agency as she herself revises the plans by suggesting an alternative to what her mother wants to do. Excerpt 2.5. No let’s um … (Recording 2, minute 2:30) 1 Maria: No let’s - um, I’ll ask Susan to pick me up from lock-in, 2 she can take me home to get the gifts - gifts! 3 E: [uh-huh 4 M: [and then um, can you just grab a backpack or something?

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Here Maria clearly contradicts her mother’s idea with “no” (line 1) and continues with her own plan. This exchange then evolves into a long series of events that Maria has planned for the weekend as she instructs her mother when and where she will go with her friends. Elena at first continues to say she doesn’t understand, but finally she understands Maria’s intentions and co-collaborates to finish the plans for the weekend: Excerpt 2.6. “Ok, I understand!” (Recording 2, minute 3:39) 1 Maria: but then she said I’ll /???/ like 2 I want to see her cheerleading practice 3 Elena: Ах! Вот! Ah! Vot! Ah! Got it! 4 всё, /???/ я понимаю. vsyo, /???/ ya ponimayu. ok, /???/ I understand. 5 хорошо, ладно. horosho, ladno. that’s fine, sure. 6 M: /???/ HER birthday party. then we’ll quickly um, go to her house, I will drop the birthday present for birthday party 7 E: mhm 8 M: and then (.) uh (.) we’ll go to cheerleading practice 9 and then - um (.) and then 10 [and then 11 E: [потом вы поедете на - на Мэган [potom vy poyedete na - na Meghan [then you will go to – to Meghan 12 мм на день рождения Мэган um, na den’ rozhdeniya Meghan um, to Meghan’s birthday 13 M: /???/ taking her 14 We need to pack a swimsuit!

Reflecting on this long negotiation of how Maria is going to get from place to place over the weekend then suggests that original use (in Excerpt 2.4) of “mom” and the question “can you pick me up” in the very start of this conversation functioned to introduce a negotiation sequence in which Maria has a plan for the future events (i.e., going to the birthday party and cheerleading) that she skillfully leads her mother to agree to. The function of “mom” here, as in the above examples, is to contextualize Maria’s exercise of agency in relation to the mother–daughter relationship, soften the clarification and negotiation that Maria needs to do to get what she wants, and frame the potentially face-threatening or challenging conversation.

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As with many single parent families where children are afforded agency in decision-making (Poveda et al. 2014), Maria had agency in many aspects of her life with her mother, including her choice of extracurricular activities, when she spoke Russian, and, in this example, how she managed her social life. Maria is able and allowed to negotiate daily activities as well as the topic and language of the conversation. Her mother is accommodating and willing to let Maria make family decisions. She talks about difficult topics, and she allows Maria to use the language of her choice (though she herself maintains Russian in these interactions). When Maria launches her agency, she often frames it with a kinterm in these conversations. For the single mother–daughter relationship then, Maria’s appeal to her relationship with her mother allows for the introduction of emotional and rapport building activities in the interaction. In Tannen’s (2007) terms, the use of the kinterm is the rapport building feature that can introduce a potential face threat or divergence in the interaction (which we will also see below). Vocative uses of kinterms then function to signal what family relationship(s) is/are important before the talk is introduced and to contextualize the following narrative/request/speech act within the kinship relationship. Considering the function of kinterms in family interactions, then, allows for a greater understanding of how families do family as well as how other activities, including bilingual language use or translanguaging, are contextualized and framed as family events.

“YOUR DAD” VERSUS “DADDY”: CONTRASTING REFERENTIAL AND VOCATIVE USE IN ONE CONVERSATION As the vocative use of the kinterm mom/mama was important in contextualizing discursive acts in the mother–daughter relationship above, in this section I demonstrate how contrasting use of vocative and referential kinterms can work together to construct multiple kinships across time and space in a family conversation. Here I draw on data from one adoptive family in which the single father is talking to his two sons (Dima, age ten, and Sasha, age eight) about their history and past kinships in their birth country of Ukraine. In particular, they are researching the oldest son’s (Dima, a pseudonym) unique name online to locate it geographically and linguistically and discussing the boys’ biological father’s possible national origins and language background. In this conversation the adoptive father John refers to the biological father as “your dad,” while the children call out to John using the kinterm “daddy.” This contrast of “your dad” and “daddy” in the same conversation provides a way to better understand how vocative and referential kinterms function in adoptive family talk where multiple kinships are important to children’s identities and histories.

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I have written about the Zimmerman family and their language practices in several publications (cf. Fogle 2012; Wright 2020). The father in this family was a psychotherapist and had an interest in participating in research (and I learned a great deal from him about parenting by listening to his recordings and talking to him on a regular basis about the interactional patterns in his home). John was exceptional among the adoptive parents I worked with in the early 2000s because he had learned Russian prior to adopting the children and could communicate with them in their first language. He was also able to maintain ties with their biological grandmother in Ukraine. John promoted academic literacy practices at home, he was interested in the boys being able to talk about their experiences and feelings, and he often placed himself as the listener or observer of their past lives (cf. Fogle 2012). This is the mood of the excerpts provided here, where mealtime becomes an opportunity to research the children’s pasts and locate their origins. While some psychologists at the time recommended that Russian adoptees not be exposed to the language or anything that reminded them of their past pre-adoptive lives (cf. Fogle 2013), much research concludes that adoptees’ ability to reconstruct their past histories and belongings is important to identity development (Homans et al. 2018; Yngvesson 2010). In the case of transnational adoptees, language competence can be an important component of belonging in cultures of origin and the adoptive family (Higgins and Stoker 2011; Lo and Kim 2011; Shin 2014). In the examples below, the father’s competence in Russian allows the family to do some genealogical Google searching to research the boys’ possible history. They are not sure where the boys’ biological father is from as both boys’ real names are not Russian, and their father was from a Central Asian country, they believed. The boys did speak Russian or Surzhyk (mixed Ukrainian and Russian) when they arrived from Ukraine where they had lived with their biological grandmother. In these discussions, the father John constructs the children’s past kinships and belongings in the mealtime Google session: Excerpt 2.7. Daddy (May, 2006) 1 John: 2 3 4 5 6 Dima: 7 J: 8 D: 9 Sasha: 10 J:

That’s right. That’s enough, Dima. We just wanted to check on (.) your name. So it’s interesting, there are clearly some connections to Tajikistan. Which we think might be where your dad is from. I don’t think so. Where do you think he’s from? I don’t know. Daddy, that’s interesting, because, на каком языке [он -а - говорил он]? na kakom yazike [on - uh - govoril on]?

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11 12 13 14: 15 16

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S: D: S: J: S: D:

What language did [he – did he speak]? [Daddy, the first], excuse me [daddy]?                              [I don’t know]. The first, What language did you talk to him in? [Daddy, in Ukrain -] [I don’t kno::w, daddy].

In Excerpt 2.7, John refers to “your dad” in line 5 not referring to himself (the children’s adoptive dad or current/present dad) but rather to refer to the son’s birth father. “Dad” here is less formal than “father” and denotes a familiar relationship between the boys and their birth father. By using this term, John momentarily excludes himself from the group of people who could be “your dad”—he doesn’t refer to “your birth dad” or “your Russian/Ukrainian dad.” On the one hand, this use of “your dad” to refer to the birth father in a different place and time allows the children to acknowledge and talk about their past kinships. However, the exclusion of himself from category of “dad” in this conversation also potentially threatens his adoptive paternal relationship. That is, if the man in Tajikistan is “your dad,” then who exactly is John? In the continuation of the conversation, Dima rejects the notion that “your dad” is from Tajikistan and resists continuing the conversation (line 6—“I don’t think so”). In addition, both he and his younger brother use “daddy” in different ways to negotiate the conversation away from the topic of Tajikistan. The vocative use of “daddy” in this excerpt contrasts with the referential “your dad” as the children call on their here-and-now father in order to gain the floor and change the topic of conversation (as we saw above with Maria and Elena). The boys use “daddy” five times in this excerpt, which makes it the most repeated word in the short piece of conversation. Many parents can identify with this quick repetition of “mom” or “dad” as an attention getter as discussed above. Here, the younger son Sasha uses “daddy” in line 9 to interrupt the ongoing conversation between John and Dima and introduce a new topic as Maria does with her mother above. His first bid for the floor and topic change was rejected as John switches to Russian to continue the conversation with Dima. In line 11, Sasha tries again “Daddy, the first …” and then uses a more polite interruption strategy, “excuse me,” with “daddy” again. This still does not work as John holds the floor and asks Dima the same question in English (“What language did you talk to him in?”). Sasha uses “daddy” again to interrupt and try to get his topic heard. At this point, Dima finally responds to the question about his biological father’s language by saying, “I don’t know, Daddy.” This use of “daddy” (line 16), in contrast to Sasha’s use, functions to close the conversation with his father and punctuates the

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fact that he doesn’t want to or can’t answer the question his father is asking. Dima’s participation in family conversation was often interpreted as resistant by John (Fogle, 2012), and this is an example of Dima rejecting John’s assumptions that his father was from Tajikistan and the whole conversation about his family ties (perhaps because it questioned his American kinship and identity). The younger son, Sasha, on the other hand, is engaged in the topic and goes on to talk about the letters in the name “Dima” (a pseudonym that does not replicate the actual phonetics of the original name) in Cyrillic, which is a different spelling than English. Dima switches topics to his video game after this episode. This contrast of the referential “your dad” and the vocative “daddy” scales the use of different kinterms across space and time. In this conversation, “your dad” existed in a different place and time, while the diminutive vocative term “daddy” invokes the children’s relationship to their adoptive father in a way that both engages and resists interaction with John in the current context. In both cases, that is, Sasha’s attention getters and Dima’s complaint, “daddy” is a way for the children to assert their own interests and achieve agency in the family conversation. That is, calling the kinship relation into being offers opportunities for the children to change and reject topics of conversation. Taken together, the referential and vocative uses of the kinterms “dad” and “daddy” in this conversation allow for the construction of kinships that fall out of the conventional Western nuclear family norms, that is, to have two fathers in different places and times and also position the here-and-now father as the diminutized, familiar relation “daddy” and the distant then-and-there father as familiar, but less so. Contextualizing the use of “dad” and “daddy” within the larger discourse, the use of Russian, and the children’s contribution to the talk about their past lives allow for a better understanding of how adoptive belongings and kinships for children tie into everyday family discourse. In this excerpt, the boys and John negotiate the past and the present as well as each other’s belongings in these times and places. Dima shows interest in the original Google research about his name, but then rejects John’s hypotheses about his origins. Dima preferred English and was invested in his American identity. Language and everyday activities were important to Dima’s belonging in John’s family. Sasha, however, in this excerpt focuses on the Cyrillic alphabet and the words on the screen. He is excited about Tajikistan and engages John further in the Google research, and his engagement demonstrates an involvement with John’s efforts to (re)construct the children’s past belongings. Using Russian and initiating the research further places John as an expert and constructs his own identity as shifting and transformative in response to the adoption and his children. Shin (2014) discusses how adoptive parents’ learning of children’s languages can situate them as a bilingual family. This short interaction engages the family

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members’ stances toward past and present belongings, and kinterms serve to index these alignments in the family discourse. In short, the kinterms used here point to kinship behaviors of the transnational adoptive family where bilingualism and online research facilitate the construction of multiple and simultaneous kinships.

CONCLUSION The data presented in this chapter demonstrated a range of functions of kinterms from negotiating interactions with parents by children, achieving agency and power in family decision-making, and acknowledging kinship histories. Although not discussed here, kinterms can also serve to establish evaluative stances toward individual actors and construct certain types of families (nuclear vs. extended; monolingual vs. multilingual) in public discourse as I have shown in news reporting about the Trump family in previous work (Wright 2020). In all of these examples the kinterm does discursive work to establish belonging or rapport or exclusion and distance in interaction or, as the case may be, text. In examining the function of vocative uses of kinterms, it is clear that calling “mom” or “daddy” as in the first two sections above is more than a simple attention getting device. These calls do kinship work in interaction to contextualize the negotiation of roles and relationships in ongoing family conversation. Referential uses of kinterms in the data further pointed to the ways in which kinship relations and normativities were constructed in discourse that made nonnormative (adoptive) kinships possible. As we continue to diversify FLP studies, it is important to consider what families we are studying and what language practices and processes we examine. Kinship terms are important as markers of kinship relations and processes ongoing in family communication and public discourse about family, and they are used to contextualize a wide range of evaluative and interactional stances in which bilingual and translingual language use are embedded and contextualized. Doing FLP is a part of doing family, and we need more comprehensive, multiscalar approaches that consider these processes together.

REFERENCES Agha, A. (2007), Language and Social Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, P., and Levinson, S. (1987), Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, New York: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, D. (2009), “Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia,” Cultural Anthropology, 24(2): 280–312. Fogle, L. W. (2012), Second Language Socialization and Learner Agency: Adoptive Family Talk, Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

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Fogle, L. W. (2013), “Parental Ethnotheories and Family Language Policy in Transnational Adoptive Families,” Language Policy, 12(1): 83–102. Fox, R. (1983), Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Franklin, S., and McKinnon, S. (eds.) (2001), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Furstenberg, F. F. (2020), “Kinship Reconsidered: Research on a Neglected Topic,” Journal of Marriage and Family, 82(1): 364–82. Gauthier, R., and J. Moody (2014), “Anatomies of Kinship: Preliminary Network Models for Change and Diversity in the Formal Structure of American Families,” in Emerging Methods in Family Research, ed. S. M. McHale, P. Amato, and A. Booth, 73–93, New York: Springer International. Harkness, N. (2015), “Basic Kinship Terms: Christian Relations, Chronotopic Formulations, and a Korean Confrontation of Language,” Anthropological Quarterly, 88(2): 305–36. Higgins, C., and Stoker, K. (2011), “Language Learning as a Site for Belonging: A Narrative Analysis of Korean Adoptee-Returnees,” International Journal of Bilingual Education & Bilingualism, 14(4): 399–412. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.201 1.573064. Homans, M., Phelan, P., Ellerby, J. M., Walker, E., Balcom, K., Myers, K., Nelson, K. P., Briggs, L., Callahan, C., Peñta, R., Wesseling, E., Perreau, B., Curzon, L., Leighton, K., and Yngvesson, B. ( 2018), “Critical Adoption Studies: Conversation in Progress,” Adoption & Culture, 6(1): 1–49. Lo, A., and Kim, J. (2011), “Manufacturing Citizenship: Metapragmatic Framings of Language Competencies in Media Images of Mixed Race Men in South Korea,” Discourse & Society, 22(4): 440–57. Ochs, E., and B. Schieffelin (1984), “Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories and Their Implications,” in Culture Theory: Essays on mind, self, and emotion, ed. R. Shweder and R. LeVine, 276–320, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poveda, D., Jociles, M. I., and Rivas, A. M. (2014), “Socialization into Single-Parent-byChoice Family Life,” Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(3): 319–44. Schiffrin, D. (1996), “Interactional Sociolinguistics,” in Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching, ed. S. L. McKay and N. H. Hornberger, 307–28, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shin, S. (2014), “Language Learning as Culture Keeping: Family Language Policies of Transnational Adoptive Parents,” International Multilingual Research Journal, 8(3): 189–207. Tannen, D. (2007), “Power Maneuvers and Connection Maneuvers in Family Interaction,” in Family Talk: Discourse and Identity in Four American Families, ed. D. Tannen, S. Kendall, and C. Gordon, 27–48, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tannen, D., Kendall, S., and Gordon, C. (eds.) (2007), Family Talk: Discourse and Identity in Four American Families, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, L. (2020). Critical Perspectives on Language and Kinship in Multilingual Families, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Yngvesson, B. (2010), Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zhu Hua and Li Wei (2016), “Transnational Experience, Aspiration and Family Language Policy,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 655–66.

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TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS (Adapted from Tannen, Kendall, and Gordon [2007]) Line breaks indicate the end of an utterance (.) [ CAPS :: hhh /???/

() . , ? !

noticeable pause brackets indicate overlapping speech emphatic stress vowel or consonant lengthening speaker retraces or self-corrects laughter unintelligible word or phrase nonverbal vocalization comment by analyst at the end of utterance falling intonation at the end of utterance continuing or slight rising intonation at end of utterance rising intonation, not necessarily a question at end of utterance animated intonation, not necessarily exclamation

CHAPTER THREE

Family Language Practices of a New Zealand Adoptive Family MOHAMMED NOFAL AND CORINNE A. SEALS

INTRODUCTION This chapter draws on a case study of one family’s language policy (FLP), specifically focusing on their family language practices. This case study involves an adoptive family in New Zealand, with the aim of delving into the family’s dynamic identity negotiations in complex, and at times contradictory, discourses of belonging. This chapter argues that investigating contexts where the child’s heritage language (HL) is not spoken by caregivers contributes to an understanding of how diverse family structures are and how adopted children and parents interact with heritage cultures and language identities in everyday interaction. With the momentum FLP is gaining as an area of research, home language practices in HL research have also been attracting increasing attention. FLP research has typically focused on contexts where children are socialized in the parents’ native language(s) and/or language(s) of the wider community (King and Logan-Terry 2008; Smith-Christmas 2017). These contexts were further expanded in Fogle’s (2012) seminal work on adoptive families, turning attention to nontraditional family configurations (e.g., Fogle 2013; Kendrick and Namazzi 2017; Shin 2014; Smith-Christmas 2017). However, language

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practices of adoptive families remain under-researched. In the New Zealand context in particular, FLP researchers have actively engaged with a sundry of communities to enrich our understanding of the complexities of FLPs (e.g., Gharibi and Seals 2019; Kim 2019; McKee and Smiler 2017; Navarro and Macalister 2017; Revis 2017b). Yet, there is no known research into the family language policies of adoptive families in the New Zealand context. Additionally, recent studies have delved into children’s agency in shaping FLP (Fogle and King 2013; Obojska 2019; Obojska and Purkarthofer 2018; Seals 2017). While these studies take children’s agency as a driving force toward negotiating language choice when being socialized, nontraditional family formations (as in the case of adoptive families) exemplify a new line of research (King 2016) where the caregivers raise their adopted children in languages the caregivers do not necessarily themselves speak (see also De Meulder, Napier, and Kusters, this volume), nor are these languages spoken by the majority of the wider society in which the family lives (Smith-Christmas 2017). This chapter contributes to FLP research in which child agency and identity, as well as family formation, are understood to be enacted through language (King 2016; King and Lanza 2017). This chapter addresses the above-discussed research gaps by describing and analyzing the language practices of a New Zealand adoptive family to demonstrate children’s agency in shaping FLP, particularly in terms of negotiating their sense of belonging in meta-discourse. Additionally, this chapter showcases how the top-down adoption policies in the country, which will be reviewed in the following section, shape family language practices (cf. King and Fogle 2017).

ADOPTION IN NEW ZEALAND: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND New Zealand was the first country in the British Empire to make adoption legal through passing the Adoption Act 1881 (Haenga-Collins 2011). Prior to the Adoption Act 1881, adoption was practiced without recognition in common law (Else 1991). One kind of adoption that significantly influenced families in the country was the “closed stranger adoption” which was shrouded in secrecy and shame due to the socially constructed views at the time regarding out-ofwedlock pregnancy as a cause for family shame (Browning and Duncan 2005). In this kind of adoption, neither the adoptive family and the adoptee nor the birth family had access to or contact with each other. Due to these social perceptions, the state facilitated adoption through the Adoption Act 1955, which was based on closed stranger adoption whereby the adopted children were raised without knowing the identities of their birth parents (Browning and Duncan 2005: 157) and even with new names and birth certificates (Haenga-Collins 2011). The

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assumption was the adoptees would be placed in a wholesome environment and adapt as family members (Griffith 1997). Thus, the adopted child had “a complete break” from their heritage. In this regard, Haenga-Collins (2011) notes that a significant proportion of adoptees under the closed stranger adoption, who had Māori ancestry through at least one of their birth parents, lost access to their Māori heritage and culture when placed within Pākehā (New Zealand European) families. The Adoption Act 1955 was criticized for it disconnected Māori children from their whānau (family), hapū (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe) which was seen as a breach of the Treaty of Waitangi (West 2012: 2). Adoptees were not able to know any details about their birth families until the Adult Information Act 1985 was introduced whereby identifying information was allowed to be revealed to adopted people about their birth parents and vice versa (Browning and Duncan 2005). Another kind of adoption was traditionally practiced according to New Zealand Māori traditions, that is, traditional whāngai adoptions (HaengaCollins 2011). In contrast to closed stranger adoption, in whāngai adoptions children were raised in another family, but they “did not lose their culture, links with their birth families or their rights of succession” (Gillard-Glass and England 2002: 24). This traditional adoption is quite similar to the open adoption currently practiced in New Zealand, in which the adoptive family is committed to keeping the child’s heritage and culture. Intercountry adoption began in New Zealand in the 1990s, when orphaned Romanian children were brought into the country (Scherman and Harré 2008). Since then, intercountry adoption has received more interest. According to the Permanent Bureau (2019), the number of intercountry adopted children in New Zealand reached 228 adoptees in the last five years (2014–19). These adopted children came from the seven countries that New Zealand has adoption agreements with (Chile, China, Hong Kong, India, the Philippines, Lithuania and Thailand), through the Hague Convention (Ministry of Children 2019). The New Zealand legislation of intercountry adoption includes cultural considerations concerning the adoptive family’s commitment to the child’s heritage. This commitment applies to the child’s native language(s) and maintaining a connection to their native heritage (Ministry of Children 2019). As the family presented in this chapter adopted their child (Muromaha) in 2016, this family falls under this category of adoption whereby they are required to maintain current information on Muromaha’s heritage.

LANGUAGE PRACTICES AND IDENTITY Language practices play a crucial role in defining identity (Hatoss 2013; Kumar 2018; Revis 2015). Research has shown that identity construction is constituted discursively (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). Cummins (2000) argues that identity

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is enacted in interaction through “identity statements” which often include language attitudes and building connections with other speakers and group members. In the same vein, Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) argue that speakers enact identities through “acts of identity” rather than describing them, a point often repeated in the language maintenance and identity literature (e.g., Morales 2019). Furthermore, identity statements and acts reveal the speaker’s agency in “identity negotiation” through interaction (Albirini 2016; Eckert 2000; Rampton 1995). As explained in the findings section, discursive identity negotiation plays a major role in the current chapter.

METHODOLOGY The case study reported in this chapter formed part of a wider project conducted in New Zealand (2017–19) and aimed to investigate the language practices of a transnational adoptive family whose child was of Indian descent and attended a Hindi community language school (HS) at the time of the study. The participating family was an adoptive family comprised of two English speaking parents, Mark and Sara, who moved to New Zealand from Jersey some ten years ago and later adopted their daughter, Muromaha. Muromaha was an orphan originally from India, born and raised in an orphanage after the death of her birth parents. She came to New Zealand at the age of seven after she had been adopted seven months prior to data collection in 2017. Muromaha natively spoke Hindi and was learning English. Sara reported that they registered Muromaha in HS in addition to a New Zealand public school, in order to keep her connected with her heritage language and culture. This study drew upon several weeks of family-collected audio data of home interaction. Additionally, data from other complementary domains, such as the HS and post-recording feedback with the participants, were used to support the family-based discourse analysis and interpretation. Home data mostly took place at the dinner table (Fogle and King 2013; Kheirkhah and Cekaite 2015; Raspayeva 2018). In addition to mealtime, the family recorded their interactions during playtime, which provides a context of socialization among family members (Gordon 2009; Revis 2015). Data collection aimed at obtaining naturally occurring home interaction with the purpose of identifying the actual language practices rather than the reported ones. A total of five hours and fifty-one minutes of conversational interaction data were recorded for this family, using an Olympus Digital Voice Recorder. The data were transcribed (see Appendix for transcription conventions) and then imported to the qualitative data analysis software NVivo12 Plus for analysis. The recordings were then reviewed and coded in the relevant nodes (themes) which included meta-discourse of nationality, meta-discourse of culture, and meta-discourse of language, among others. Then, family language practices

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were described and analyzed using interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982; 2015) with the aim of investigating how Muromaha interacted with linguistic and national/cultural identities when socialized by her parents within different discourses of belonging. To ensure warrants for interactional data interpretations, post-recording feedback from the parents was elicited. The parents were consulted about some interpretations to strengthen the emic perspective and minimize our external assumptions.

META-DISCOURSE OF NATIONALITY Meta-discussions around Muromaha’s national identity signal that her Indian identity occupies a significant part of her parents’ discourse in the data. The home recordings show that Muromaha’s parents support her Indian identity and are highly committed to keeping her connected with her Indian heritage. The parents seem not only to acknowledge her Indian identity but also to view it as overtly recognized by others. They also connect Muromaha with her Indian roots whenever they feel it is possible, connecting her with India through Indian artefacts, music, food, and Hindi. The family is highly aware of Muromaha’s Indian identity since she is Indian-born and has recently come to New Zealand. In addition, meta-discussions can be seen as a site for deliberate identity negotiation where individuals (dis)align, accept or reject certain identities. While meta-discussions function in this way across the data, this constant positioning seems to be problematic for Muromaha due to its potential for othering. Positioning Leading to Othering Positioning draws on how individuals identify themselves and others discursively in conversational encounters (Davies and Harré 1990; Langenhove and Harré 1999). According to positioning theory, social actors use “language displays of oneself ” (Howie and Peters 1996: 53) to locate themselves and others in discursive activities, and these positionings reflect their ideologies and emotions among other embedded cultural meanings (Hatoss 2012: 50). Researchers (e.g., Martin-Beltrán 2010; Seals 2013; Umansky 2016) have examined the construction of participants’ linguistic identities when positioned by those who are viewed as linguistically more expert than the learners themselves. Though, the case seems to be different when the interactional partners have limited or no linguistic knowledge in the language of the young learner/speaker, as is the case in some adoptive families. In Muromaha’s case, there are instances where she is positioned specifically as a speaker of Hindi, such as when Muromaha’s mother Sara said, “Hindi is her first language.” Similarly, individuals may experience a kind of positioning, particularly “othering,” that influence their national, cultural, or ethnic identities

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construction. In this vein, in Hatoss’s (2012) study of Sudanese former refugees in Australia, she concludes that her participants are “othered” by the mainstream culture despite their disposition to integrate into Australian society, which in turn, as Udah (2018: 397) suggests, has the potential to lead to the community being unable to integrate. While these studies have looked at how minorities are positioned as others by the mainstream cultures, othering can be practiced within the family, even if unwittingly. Experiences like this appear to garner various reactions from family members as in the following example. Excerpt 3.1 comes from a discussion in which Muromaha (Muro in the excerpts) recounts what she has done at school. The family has a set daily practice of tell-about-the-day (Fogle and King 2013), which is part of their FLP since it is oriented toward practicing English, inter alia. When Muromaha tells them about hair clips that her friend Kessey has given her, the family engage in a discussion of Muromaha’s Indian identity. Excerpt 3.1. “Do you think she gave them to you because you’re Indian?” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Sara: Muro: Sara: Muro: Sara: Muro: Sara:

8 9

Muro: Sara:

why did Kessey give you um: the clips? I dunno + but she told me they’re from India so it’s from India, is it? Ha how beautiful + (  ) do you like them? hm [agreeing] do you think she gave them to you because you’re Indian? is that why she? I don’t know Em

In line 1, Sara encourages Muromaha to wonder why Kessey gave her the hair clips, a question that receives a vague answer with a hint that the clips are made in India (line 2). Seemingly, Sara has taken Muromaha’s response in line 2 as a potential reason for receiving the clips. It is noteworthy that across the data Muromaha gives “I dunno” (and its variants) as a response to many questions that her parents (especially Sara) ask in relation to her Indian identity, perhaps when she feels that her Indianness threatens her membership in the family. This interpretation was confirmed in the post-recording feedback with Sara. It would seem that Sara strategically uses the rhetorical question tag in line 3 and the expression of liking (line 5) to implicitly persuade Muromaha to align with what is being said in line 7. Sara allows room for considering Muromaha’s Indian identity as the reason for Kessey’s action by presenting the idea in the form of a yes/no question rather than a statement. Yet, Muromaha seems not to align herself with what Sara is saying. While the parents’ deliberate foregrounding of Muromaha’s Indian identity is ostensibly targeted at their commitment to locate Muromaha within her

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heritage, Muromaha seems to often have different interpretations. As illustrated in Excerpt 3.1, while Sara positions Muromaha as Indian and this positioning becomes the theme of the sequence of turns, we argue that Muromaha interprets Sara’s talk as “othering,” due to her lack of engagement with this discourse. Rejection of Positioning (Being Othered) When considering positioning, we need to recognize the influence of power relations between interlocutors. This means rejection, resistance, and negotiations are sometimes impossible or challenging (Blackledge and Pavlenko 2004). Hatoss (2012: 65) has suggested that positioning in contexts where acts of identity are performed in interethnic and high-risk settings (e.g., everyday life) yields different reactions to contexts where identity work is enacted on safe ground (e.g., sociolinguistic interviews). Like sociolinguistic interviews, the family domain is expected to be a safe context in which participants may perform unrestricted identity work. In their daily interactions, Muromaha’s family regularly have conversations around Muromaha’s Indian identity. These conversations create a sense of discomfort for Muromaha, and at times she refrains from contributing to the conversation. Excerpt 3.2 is an example. This excerpt is part of a conversation at the dinner table when Muromaha turns the CD player on, plays Indian music, and joins the family for dinner. The main topic of the excerpt is Muromaha’s choice of music. Excerpt 3.2. “why did you put this disc this CD on today?” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Sara: Muro: Sara: Mark: Muro: Sara: Muro: Mark: Sara: Muro: Sara: Muro:

[Indian music in the background] why did you put this disc this CD on today? I dunno the food is quite tasty it’snice I dunno why +I didn’t think I think you like it because it’s Indian music why do //you?\ /I think\\ you like it ++ you’ve got a nice choice hm! so what do you think Idunno + I think we should put it on because we haven’t listened to it for a long time no you like to listen to this sweetie + don’t you? Hmm

When Muromaha returns to her seat, Sara initiates the conversation by asking why Muromaha wants to play Indian music specifically (line 1). Sara seems to indirectly connect to Muromaha’s Indian identity by posing the question “Why did you put this disc—this CD on today?” rather than giving a direct statement.

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However, Muromaha responds negatively in lines 2 and 5 by saying “I dunno.” As mentioned above, “I dunno” is a regular response from Muromaha and seems to function as a way to avoid further questions (Baumgarten and House 2010) and to resist the parents’ request (Guardado 2013). In line 6, Sara becomes more explicit, giving her own evaluation (Baumgarten and House 2010) telling Muromaha that she thinks the reason for playing the music is that it is Indian music. In response to this statement, Muromaha’s question of why Sara has such an opinion (line 7) sounds to be another form of resistance to the continuation of positioning her as an “other.” Mark then contributes to the interaction seemingly with the intention of alleviating Sara’s insistence and the daughter’s resistance. He suggests that Muromaha likes the music and compliments her on her choice (line 8). However, Sara once again insists on knowing what Muromaha thinks by repeating the question in line 9. Again, Muromaha responds with “I dunno” (line 10) and elaborates that they have not listened to it for a long time (line 11). Sara responds to Muromaha’s idea with a direct rejection by using no at the start of line 12 as well as taking control of the conversation. The response “I dunno” constantly used by Muromaha is arguably functioning as a stance-taking sign that indexes avoidance (see also Baumgarten and House 2010) because Muromaha interprets herself as being “othered,” however unintentionally. The excerpt shows that despite the inequity in power relations between her and Sara, Muromaha shows resistance and reluctance toward the notion of overemphasizing her Indian identity in certain contexts (turns 2, 5, 7, 10). She is actively expressing her agentive role in language practices (Revis 2017a). In fact, Muromaha’s reluctance toward what she feels as “othering” was reported in the post-recording feedback with the family, and she has recently stopped going to the HS. The negotiation of Muromaha’s stance in relation to being positioned as Indian (and thus othered in her views) takes the forms of contestation and avoidance. Although the process of othering is often based on phenotypical characteristics such as color (Hatoss 2012; Udah 2018) and negative stereotypes (MacNaughton, Davis, and Smith 2009), Muromaha’s rejection of being positioned as Indian might derive from her understanding of the repeated attempts to connect her with her Indian heritage as an interruption to her engagement in the family norms. At other times, however, it was evident in the data that she does not resist or reject her Indian identity. The following section demonstrates how Muromaha shows agentive identity construction in relation to the communities she belongs to. Complex and Contradicting Membership The experiences that Muromaha has had in India and in New Zealand are expected to offer her a multiple sense of belonging. Being born and raised

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in India might have established her Indian identity. Similarly, her life in New Zealand where she lives with her adoptive parents and goes to school could be seen as a source for creating a common identity as a member of the family and an ingroup member in the home and school respectively. In Excerpt 3.3, the family engage in a conversation that shows Muromaha’s membership in her various and overlapping communities, that is, the family, Indian and school communities. In the excerpt, Muromaha recounts her school visit to Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand, to her parents. During the school visit to the museum, Muromaha painted a bridge using painting software. She is explaining to her parents how she painted the bridge in the excerpt below. Excerpt 3.3. “I was going to say India but that’s what she said” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Muro: Sara: Muro: Sara: Muro: Sara: Muro:

[…] then after it says put your name then next where are you from then after next um why do you like it did you put where you’re from? hm Wellington good yeah because that’s what Shishma said I was going to say India but that’s what she said because that’s where we the three live eh? Yeah

As shown in Excerpt 3.3, Sara explicitly displays her interest in knowing how Muromaha identified herself in response to the software questions (line 3). In line 4, Muromaha reports that she identifies herself as a Wellingtonian and then elaborates that she has done that because her friend said to (line 6). The question of where someone is from could mean “where do you live?” or “where are you (originally) from?,” and Muromaha shows her negotiation of this double meaning. Line 7 suggests that if Muromaha were not to “accommodate” (Giles 1973) to her peer, she would identify herself as an Indian. Muromaha highlights the influence of peers in her explanation, and although she identifies herself as an Indian using an “identity statement” (Cummins 2000), she shows solidarity with her peer, Shishma, by selecting the same answer as Shishma, which in turn serves as an act of asserting a common identity (Le Page and TabouretKeller 1985). Sara praises Muromaha’s response (line 5), which is presumably targeted at supporting Muromaha’s identity as a local (rather than migrant). She also supports Muromaha’s membership in the family by explaining that Wellington is “where we the three live” in line 8. In line 9, Muromaha agrees with Sara’s statement. This example clearly reflects Muromaha’s understanding of her complex membership in several communities (i.e., as a family member, Indian and Wellingtonian), but it also shows the developing identity that is emerging in Muromaha’s discourse.

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Overall, these examples show the dynamic and multiple nature of identity construction and negotiation (Darvin and Norton 2015; Hua 2017; SkutnabbKangas 2000) as being connected to an individual’s engagement with how they are positioned in relation to their belonging in their communities. Excerpt 3.3 suggests that Muromaha is aware of and acknowledges her Indian identity but also recognizes her “local” identity (i.e., as a Wellingtonian) with which she identifies alongside her friends at school. She also values her membership in the family. Returning to Excerpts 3.1 and 3.2, it seems that one of the contexts during which Muromaha disaligns with being positioned as an Indian is when she feels her Indian identity interpolates her status as a member of the family. Disaligning with being positioned in this way does not necessarily lead her to totally reject her Indian identity. Rather, her rejection is reflected in her avoidance of engaging with her parents in the interaction. When her status as a family member is not at stake, she discursively displays her Indian identity. The complex and sometimes contradicting membership in the different communities suggests that relevant identities are discursively available. The following section outlines the ways in which the family engages with the cultural values related to these identities.

META-DISCOURSE OF CULTURE Cultural signals, for example, attitudes, preferences, knowledge, behaviors, goods and credentials (Lamont and Lareau, 1988), and values are foregrounded in heritage language research (Ayeomoni 2011; Brown and Carpenter 2018; Dweik, Nofal, and Al-Obaidi 2019; Hua 2014; Revis 2015; Shameem 1995). Guardado (2008) notes that parents socialize their children into specific associated cultural values and practices. In their study of language practices within Spanish-speaking families in Britain, Tyrrell, Guijarro-Fuentes, and Blandon (2014) found that parents discuss language and cultural values with their children and reminisce about their own childhood cultural experiences. When it comes to adoptive families, research suggests that the adoptive parents’ efforts to the adoptee’s “culture keeping” mitigate some of the challenges of living in a multicultural family (Shin 2014; Volkman 2005). Furthermore, Jacobson (2008) argues that transracial adoptive parents are more active culture keepers than their monocultural adoptive counterparts (with more dance and language lessons, holidays and outside activities etc.) due to cultural differences. In addition to their commitment to keeping Muromaha’s heritage foregrounded, Muromaha’s parents seem to have a “here and now” orientation to her life in New Zealand. The recordings include examples of discussing cultural signals that are related to her life in the communities she belongs to in New Zealand. At one point, Muromaha comments that the first author’s

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name is a strange name. Sara explains the religious origin of the name and gives an example of other naming practices from the Catholic culture. On other occasions, the family engage in a discussion of their own travel experiences, dietary habits and making friends. Excerpt 3.4 exemplifies the discussion of socializing with other children at school. In the excerpt, Muromaha recounts her first day of the school year to her parents, pointing out that a new student has joined the class. By showing a desire to know how she engages with the newcomers at school, the family get into a discussion on the norms of socialization. Excerpt 3.4. “but this is a very good opportunity for you to show that you’re friendly and nice” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Sara: Sara: Muro: Sara: Muro: Sara: Muro: Sara: Muro: Sara:

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Muro: Sara: Muro: Sara:

Muro: Sara:

did you go and talk to her? [Muromaha remains silent] well she’s a new girl like you //were last term\ /but not now\\ no but that’s a good opportunity for you + yes? but she’s been here before + in this class because she probably she was here last time huh! but did the others recognize + did the others know her? probably + Torra and Emilia + probably they did well- because they were talking to her Yes it might be that Torra and Emilia asked because they were on their first day remember when Koko + when you first started + Koko was asked to be your little friend //and\ /but\\ because Kef [the school teacher] asked her if you remember […] you might find in the next few days that she doesn’t have anybody to chat to I’ll see tomorrow you’ll see tomorrow? but this is a very good opportunity for you to show that you’re friendly and nice and yeah? and that you’re willing to play I AM YES? THAT you are + YOU ARE?

The positioning appears to start when Sara interrupts Muromaha’s speech about the new child at school. Sara’s curiosity to know whether Muromaha has spoken to the newcomer is expressed by a question in line 1. Muromaha’s silence in line 2 suggests that she strategically uses silence to manage the conversation (Jaworski 1993) by refraining from answering the question as a way of rejecting

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it (Jaworski 1998). Sara models the shared practice in the school/community, drawing upon Muromaha’s experience as a former newcomer by reminding Muromaha that she was recently new to the school (line 3). While Sara wishes to connect Muromaha with features of the (New Zealand) identity within the school context, it seems that Muromaha reads Sara’s guidance as positioning her as an outsider (and thus as an “other”). Muromaha displays her status as an insider in the school community by interrupting Sara saying “but not now” in line 4. Once again, this suggests that Muromaha resists further interaction when her membership in the school community seems to be threatened. The interaction between Muromaha and Sara shows rejection of what the other is saying. This rejection is marked through the direct “no” (line 5) and the use of the conjunction “but” at the beginning of the turns (line 4, 6, 8, 13, 18) as well as Sara’s repetition of Muromaha’s words in the form of rhetorical questions (lines 17 and 21). In line 5, Sara directly rejects the way Muromaha perceives her words. She controls the conversation, shifting to highlighting the advantage of talking to the new child at school. Again, Muromaha resists the idea of having to talk to the new child by providing a justification for her viewpoint (line 6 and 7). In line 13, Sara once again refers to the previous year when Muromaha first joined the school and one of the classmates, Koko, talked to her. In so doing, Sara foregrounds socializing with new children as a norm and shared practice. The model used by Sara arguably suggests that she tries to foreground Muromaha’s membership in the school community and encourages her to expand her social network. It might also be a way of encouraging Muromaha, who seems to be viewed as less social than expected, to show friendliness with newcomers—a feature that is often reported as a marker of the New Zealand identity by researchers (e.g., Holmes, Marra, and Schnurr 2008; see also Wohlfart 2017). This also appears in other examples in the data where the mother modeled her ways of interacting with people and showing friendliness to encourage Muromaha to be like the people around her (e.g., the other kids at school and her mother). Sara explicitly explains the view of showing friendliness in lines 20 and 21. Nonetheless, Muromaha consistently demonstrates resistance to what is being said. In response to Sara’s argument, Muromaha stresses that she is friendly and nice by saying “I AM”in a high pitch, which leads Sara to reject Muromaha’s claim in the form of a rhetorical question in line 23. Excerpt 3.4 shows how Muromaha rejects what she seems to consider positioning as “other” in relation to her social behavior in the school community and negotiates this positioning. This rejection is targeted at what she sees as a threat to her membership in the school community. The interaction also highlights discursive “negative identity practices” (Bucholtz 1999) when Muromaha feels that she is being “othered.” That is, she rejects being positioned as Indian only when she feels that she is being seen as “different” from her surroundings (e.g., family, school). In the following section, we provide evidence to support this

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argument from the recordings where the family engage in linguistic metadiscussions regarding Hindi.

META-DISCOURSE OF LINGUISTIC IDENTITY Linguistic meta-discussions are salient in the home interaction data, with a focus on English and Hindi. The family appear to recognize Muromaha’s linguistic identity and engage in linguistic meta-discussions about Hindi. Excerpt 3.5 is an example. Muromaha and her father are playing a game in which one player asks a question they think that the other player cannot answer, and if the other player answers correctly they get one point; otherwise, they get a blank. This game is proposed by Mark and serves as a strategy to culture keeping. Additionally, this game empowers Muromaha by extending her role as the teacher of Hindi who teaches her father and can check his knowledge. In this excerpt, Muromaha uses her knowledge of Hindi to win the game, but the game turns into a discussion of pronunciation. Excerpt 3.5. “he says gagjer, it should be gaajaR” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Muro: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro:

14

Mark:

what colour did I ask you in Hindi before? Hmm but you learnt them gajerr [carrot-like orange] gaajerrrrr (laughter, repeating Mark’s pronunciation style] I am not sure how they say it + in Hind [laughs] they roll their r quite (backwards) gaajaR* + can you say it? Kaajar R + gaajaR Yeah he says gaajer + it should be gaajaR + they might understand the gaajer it might be enough to get it right but not + not perfect + not perfect Hindi *alveolar trill

As shown in Excerpt 3.5, Muromaha takes advantage of her knowledge in Hindi to spot the chance of asking a difficult question. She asks Mark to say the color he has learnt in Hindi (line 1). When he fails to remember it, she takes an epistemic stance by encouraging him to remember it because he has already learnt it (line 3). Mark seems to support the stance Muromaha takes by answering her question in line 4. The repetition of Mark’s pronunciation of the word along with laughter (lines 5 and 7) could arguably be interpreted as performing a Hindi speaker identity as well as highlighting Mark’s poor

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linguistic performance in Hindi. In turn, Mark’s discursive face-saving behavior (lines 6 and 8) suggests he not only mitigates his stance but also aligns himself with Muromaha’s Hindi speaker identity. In lines 9 and 11, Muromaha continues performing her linguistic identity as a legitimate Hindi speaker by providing corrective feedback (Tyrrell et al. 2014), modeling the correct pronunciation for Mark who positively responds to the modeling in lines 10 and 12. When Muromaha addresses Sara, evaluating Mark’s performance in Hindi, she extends this identity to comment on the proper pronunciation of the word and the possibility that Hindi speakers might understand the form he is producing (line 13). Muromaha takes this epistemic stance and displays her knowledge in Hindi to index her Hindispeaking identity, and thus indexes her Indian identity, as shown in the next excerpt. Another example is illustrated in Excerpt 3.6 when Muromaha and Mark continue playing the game they started in Excerpt 3.5. Excerpt 3.6. “Indian people are like me but other people are like daddy” 15 16 17. 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Muro: Mark: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro:

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32. 33. 34 35. 36 37. 38 39 40 41 42 43

Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro: Sara: Muro: Mark:

and windowin Hindi? aha! [surprised] window? em! in Hindi [clears his throat] I know you’re working well + oh! can I remember? then I am saying it right you won’t remember because we haven’t done Hindi for a long time and I forget when I do that + that will be normal Hindi then we don’t speak anything else Ok what’s the word for that in Hindi? How does it start? Khi ok + is it Ki-? I know you’re going to say Kirkirr no your’re going to say kerky Kirky that’s it no it’s wrong oh that’s wrong! khidhki: [window] kidki: no+ that’s Kidki: + khidhki: khidhki: khidki: no + it’s not + you’re like daddy Indian people are like me but other people are like daddy [cough] let’s ask my Indian friend at work + “my parents say the word for window and they- is that khidki:?”

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44 45 46 47 48 49

Muro: Mark: Muro: Mark: Muro:

47

//who’s that your friend at at-\ //he’s just a man at work\\ at work who is a- speaks Hindi uh! [surprised] don’t you think he’s got some children? oh yes + I can ask him my- and get my Hindi right he might he might not understand what’s Khidhki: + khidhki:

In Excerpt 3.6, Muromaha continues the epistemic stance she has taken earlier in the game (in Excerpt 3.5) by recognizing the reason why Mark has forgotten the Hindi word (line 22). Likewise, she seems to use this kind of stance to draw a separation line between her linguistic identity as a speaker of “normal Hindi” (line 24) who speaks like “Indian people” (line 41) and her parents who speak like “other people” (line 41). In doing so, Muromaha is using a “positive identity practice” (Bucholtz 1999) to claim an Indian identity as well as using a negative identity practice to distance her parents from herself in relation to a Hindi linguistic identity. Paradoxically, while she has previously rejected being positioned as “other,” she seems to position her parents linguistically as “other” in line 41. This is, perhaps, because she feels that language does not threaten their membership in the family. In fact, this finding parallels language maintenance and heritage language research findings where language (proficiency) is not necessarily equated with one’s identity or membership in a certain group (Canagarajah 2013; Dweik et al. 2019; Holmes, Roberts, Verivaki, and ‘Aipolo 1993; Ngaha 2005). Notably, the turns in lines 29 through 40 are replete with modeling and corrections of Mark’s pronunciation of the word “khidhki:.” This suggests the bidirectional positioning of both interlocutors. Muromaha positions herself as a Hindi speaker who is able and entitled to demonstrate expert linguistic knowledge (lines 29, 36, and 38), and she is being positioned the same way by Mark (lines 33 and 37) and Sara (line 39). In line 41, Muromaha foregrounds her Indian identity by commenting on shared linguistic knowledge (i.e., pronunciation) with Indian people by portraying language as an identity marker. This corresponds to the finding that minority language speakers use language to show in-group similarities with others (e.g., Spolsky 2012; Starks, Taumoefolau, Bell, and Davis 2005). Additionally, Mark aligns with Muromaha’s identity by referring to his Indian coworker, who is a potential expert in Hindi and can assess whether the parents’ pronunciation is acceptable (lines 42 and 43). Another possibility is that he is enlisting his Indian coworker’s help (see also Shin 2014). Despite that, Muromaha performs a strong act of identity by claiming exclusive ownership of the language in line 49 by questioning Mark’s coworker’s knowledge in Hindi. In doing so, Muromaha seems to push Mark’s coworker outside the conversation. She also seems to have a mindset that assumes that her Hindi

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is the standard variety. Interestingly, the Hindi language transcribers who listened to Muromaha report that her Hindi is quite “different” from what they normally use/hear, which suggests that she may in fact speak a regional dialect of Hindi, or at least have child competence only. It is evident that the parents position her as an expert in Hindi, which in turn underpins her Indian identity. This resonates with the finding that giving children the opportunity to be experts in the HL connects to their linguistic and ethnic identities (Desmond 2017; Kheirkhah and Cekaite 2015; Seals 2013). Regarding the corrective feedback that Muromaha engages in with her parents, Tyrrell et al. (2014) point out that this practice reverses the power roles in the family and gives the child the status of being expert, corrector, and teacher. While findings of previous research report that parents tend to avoid teaching their children the HL and English literacy skills simultaneously (e.g., Revis 2015), Muromaha’s parents attempt to teach her Hindi and English literacy skills at the same time. In addition to enrolling her in the HS, they try to make the home a Hindi space. This does not mean that they ignore the family language ecology (Fogle 2013); instead, they hire a Hindi private tutor and have established a practice whereby Muromaha says grace. It is quite habitual for Muromaha’s family to turn the recorder on at the table as they mostly socialize while having dinner. Having Muromaha say grace either in English or Hindi is a common practice before dinner. It is Muromaha who makes the language choice when saying grace. However, the recorded interaction in Excerpt 3.7 is a result of requesting her to say grace in Hindi while the private Hindi tutor, Ateesha, is present. Excerpt 3.7 was recorded during Ateesha’s first visit to the family for the purpose of introducing her to Muromaha in an informal way. Excerpt 3.7. Muromaha says grace 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Muro: Ateesha: Sara: Muro: Ateesha: Muro:

[saying grace in Hindi unclearly] what did she say? not sure not sure what was it? say it again emm ([grouching] I didn’t- I didn’t hear anything can you tell me again? ok+ hum sub chotte bachei hain [we are all little children] apko sir jukate hain, apne bojan diya [I am bowing because you are giving me food] aur sabhi kam swarpan karte hain, Amen! [and you fulfil all of my wishes, Amen!]

Notably, Muromaha sounds linguistically insecure when she says grace in line 1. Her voice is low, and her words are not fully articulated. Because of the

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lack of clarity of the words, Ateesha has difficulty figuring out what has been said. Therefore, she addresses Sara with the question in line 2 asking what Muromaha has said. In turn, Sara requests a repetition in line 4. The grouching sound in line 5, perhaps, voices Muromaha’s discontent because of the repetition itself, or because she felt that she is being judged on a linguistic basis. However, Ateesha seems to take the latter interpretation and responds to it in a facesaving way (line 6), asking for repetition again in line 7. In lines 9 through 11, Muromaha says the grace, produced as a rote learned phrase, perhaps learnt in the orphanage she was at in India (see Fogle 2013 for adoptees). In the postrecording feedback, the parents confirmed that Muromaha learnt to say this grace in the orphanage. Muromaha’s discomfort is notable, however, as this discussion again related to her rejecting being othered.

CONCLUSION This chapter presented the language practices of a New Zealand adoptive family. Drawing upon recordings of home interactional data, this chapter has aimed at exploring how the adopted child, Muromaha, negotiates her linguistic, national, and assumed cultural identities in complex and contradictory discourses of belonging. The data showed that Muromaha’s parents were highly committed to connecting Muromaha with her Indian identities, whether linguistic or otherwise. Yet, natural Hindi language use did not occur within the family, which is to be expected since the caregivers do not speak the language. Rather, Hindi language use was limited to the use of isolated lexical items, as noted in Excerpts 3.5 and 3.6, but also rehearsal of a religious formula (e.g., saying grace) as shown in Excerpt 3.7. These findings align with Kühl and Peterson’s (2018) who demonstrated that a limited collection of Danish lexical items remained with Danish community members in Utah. Notwithstanding, this limited use of Hindi potentially makes the home a Hindi-speaking space, which in turn fosters Muromaha’s sense of belonging to the family (Fogle 2013). The analysis also suggested that the parents used language practices as acts of identity (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). For example, the parents introduced aspects of Indian culture to keep Muromaha connected with her Indian cultural identity, which was mostly indexed via music and food in discourse (Friesen 2008; Shah 2013). Notably, the family’s use of meta-discourse to discuss with Muromaha aspects of her Indian heritage was targeted at foregrounding Muromaha’s linguistic, national, and cultural Indian identities. However, Muromaha tended to interact with these identities differently as she appeared to feel at times that her Indian identities would become problematic and contradict other socially constructed identities. Accordingly, while Muromaha

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accepted her linguistic identity as a Hindi speaker and built upon this to claim an “expert” Hindi linguistic identity (Leeman, Rabin, and Román–Mendoza 2011), she resisted, avoided, and rejected being positioned as Indian at times when she felt that her Indian national and cultural identities would interrupt her membership in other communities (e.g., the family and school). Overall, the findings show that the adoptive parents regularly intertextually draw upon meta-discourses of what it is to “be Indian” in an attempt to connect the adopted child with her heritage culture and identity. However, the child strategically resists and rejects her heritage identity when it contradicts other memberships, such those belonging to her New Zealand family and the dominant New Zealand school community.

APPENDIX Transcription Conventions (Following Holmes, Marra, and Vine 2011) Modified [laugh] + //here\ /here\\ () (word) !? WORD word

Paralinguistic and editorial information in square brackets; colon indicates start and finish Untimed pause of approximately one second Overlapping talk. Double slashes indicate beginning and end Untranscribable talk Transcriber’s best guess at an unclear utterance Regular punctuation Stressed word Hindi

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Haenga-Collins, M. (2011), “Belonging and Whakapapa: The Closed Stranger Adoption of Māori Children into Pākehā Families,” MA thesis, Massey University, Wellington. Hatoss, A. (2012), “Where Are You from? Identity Construction and Experiences of ‘Othering’ in the Narratives of Sudanese Refugee-Background Australians,” Discourse & Society, 23(1): 47–68. Hatoss, A. (2013), Displacement, Language Maintenance and Identity: Sudanese Refugees in Australia, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Holmes, J., Roberts, M., Verivaki, M., and ‘Aipolo, A. (1993), “Language Maintenance and Shift in Three New Zealand Speech Communities,” Applied Linguistics, 14(1): 1–24. Holmes, J., Marra, M., and Schnurr, S. (2008), “Impoliteness and Ethnicity: Māori and Pākehā Discourse in New Zealand Workplaces,” Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture, 4(2): 193–219. Howie, D., and Peters, M. (1996), “Positioning Theory: Vygotsky, Wittgenstein and Social Constructionist Psychology,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 26(1): 51–64. Hua, Z. (2014), Exploring Intercultural Communication: Language in Action, New York: Routledge. Hua, Z. (2017), “New Orientations to Identities in Mobility,” in The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language, ed. S. Canagarajah, 117–32, New York: Routledge. Jacobson, H. (2008), Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Jaworski, A. (1993), The Power of Silence: Social and Pragmatic Perspectives, Newbury Park: Sage. Jaworski, A. (1998), “Talk and Silence in the Interrogation,” Language and Literature: Journal of the Poetics and Linguistics Association, 7(2): 99–122. Kendrick, M., and Namazzi, E. (2017), “Family Language Practices as Emergent Policies in Child-Headed Households in Rural Uganda,” in Family Language Policies in a Multilingual World: Opportunities, Challenges, and Consequences, ed. J. Macalister and S. H. Mirvahedi, 56–73, New York: Routledge. Kheirkhah, M., and Cekaite, A. (2015), “Language Maintenance in a Multilingual Family: Informal Heritage Language Lessons in Parent–Child Interactions,” Multilingua, 34(3): 319–46. Kim, J. (2019), “The Role of Minority Language-Speaking Families, Community and the Majority Society in the Intergenerational Language Transmission of the Korean Language in New Zealand,” PhD thesis, University of Canterbury, Christchurch. King, K. (2016), “Language Policy, Multilingual Encounters, and Transnational Families,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 726–33. King, K., and Logan-Terry, A. (2008), “Additive Bilingualism through Family Language Policy: Ideologies, Strategies and Interactional Outcomes,” Calidoscópio, 6(1): 5–19. King, K., and Fogle, L. (2017), “Family Language Policy,” in Language Policy and Political Issues in Education, ed. T. McCarty and S. May, 3rd ed., 315–27, Cham: Springer International. King, K., and Lanza, E. (2017), “Ideology, Agency, and Imagination in Multilingual Families: An Introduction,” International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3): 717–23. Kühl, K., and Peterson, E. (2018), “The Remains of the Danes: The Final Stages of Language Shift in Sanpete County, Utah,” Journal of Language Contact, 11(2): 208–32. Kumar, D. Z. (2018), “Identity Changes in the Slovenian and Friulian Linguistic Communities in the Province of Udine, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy,” European Countryside, 10(1): 141–57.

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Scherman, R., and Harré, N. (2008), “The Ethnic Identification of Same-Race Children in Intercountry Adoption,” Adoption Quarterly, 11(1): 45–65. Seals, C. A. (2013), “Multilingual Identity Development and Negotiation amongst Heritage Language Learners: A Study of East European-American Schoolchildren in the United States,” PhD thesis, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Seals, C. A. (2017), “Dynamic Family Language Policy: Heritage Language Socialization and Strategic Accommodation in the Home,” in Family Language Policies in a Multilingual World: Opportunities, Challenges, and Consequences, ed. J. Macalister and S. H. Mirvahedi, 175–94, New York: Routledge. Shah, S. (2013), “Factors Affecting Proficiency among Gujarati Heritage Language Learners on Three Continents,” PhD thesis, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Shameem, N. (1995), “Hamai log ke boli: Language Shift in an Immigrant Community: The Wellington Indo-Fijians,” PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington. Shin, S. (2014), “Language Learning as Culture Keeping: Family Language Policies of Transnational Adoptive Parents,” International Multilingual Research Journal, 8(3): 189–207. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2000), Linguistic Genocide in Education or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights?, Mahwah: L. Erlbaum Associates. Smith-Christmas, C. (2017), “Family Language Policy: New Directions,” in Family Language Policies in a Multilingual World: Opportunities, Challenges, and Consequences, ed. J. Macalister and S. H. Mirvahedi, 13–29, New York: Routledge. Spolsky, B. (2012), “Family Language Policy—the Critical Domain,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 33(1): 3–11. Starks, D., Taumoefolau, M., Bell, A., and Davis, K. (2005), “Language as a Marker of Ethnic Identity in New Zealand’s Pasifika Communities,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. J. Cohen, K. T. McAlister, K. Rolstad, and J. MacSwan, 2189–96, Somerville: Cascadilla Press. Tyrrell, N., Guijarro-Fuentes, P., and Blandon, C. (2014), “Intergenerational Heritage Language Practices: A Case Study of Spanish-Speaking Families in Britain,” Applied Linguistics Review, 5(2): 307–28. Udah, H. (2018), “ ‘Not by Default Accepted’: The African Experience of Othering and Being Othered in Australia,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, 53(3): 384–400. Umansky, I. M. (2016), “To Be or Not to Be EL: An Examination of the Impact of Classifying Students as English Learners,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 38(4): 714–37. van Langenhove, L., and Harré, R. (1999), “Introducing Positioning Theory,” in Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action, ed. R. Harré, L. van Langenhove, and L. Berman, 15–31, Malden: Blackwell. Volkman, T. A. (2005), “Introduction: New Geographies of Kinship,” in Cultures of Transnational Adoption, ed. T. A. Volkman, 1–22, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. West, E. F. (2012), “Manu Is My Homegirl: Navigating the Ethnic Identity of the Māori Adoptee,” MA thesis, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland. Wohlfart, I. (2017), Intergenerational Consequences of Lifestyle Migration: German-Speaking Immigrants in New Zealand, Singapore: Springer.

CHAPTER FOUR

Making a Family: Language Ideologies and Practices in a Multilingual LGBTQ+ Family with Adopted Children KINGA KOZMINSKA AND ZHU HUA

INTRODUCTION Emerging from language policy (Spolsky 2004) and language socialization (Duranti et al. 2011) studies, family language policy (FLP) research has focused on the role of the family in language transmission: parental strategies in language contact situations (e.g., Lanza 1997) and impact of family type, situation, and context (Fogle and King 2013) on language maintenance and shift. After initial projects focusing predominantly on linguistic practices within Western middle-class two-parent bilingual families (e.g., De Houwer 1990; Lanza 1997), attention has been drawn to other, often socioeconomically and socioculturally marginalized types of families in order to better understand how families negotiate language maintenance goals. As a result, in addition to studies of transnational families, a few projects have been devoted to adoptive and single-parent families (e.g., Fogle 2013).

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The contemporary multiplicity of family definitions and configurations, however, has not yet been fully considered. Most of the projects examined FLP in relation to class and ethnicity, but linguistic performances can also be inflected by gender (e.g., Gal 1979) or sexuality (e.g., Podesva 2007). Importantly for FLP research, fairly recent developments in reproductive technologies and legal arrangements across the world, including Britain, have led to new groups being granted legal rights to constitute families and new forms of adoption becoming possible. Changes in political arrangements within the European space after the 2004 EU enlargement, digital communication technologies and affordable travel have also enabled new family practices. Below, we examine these new configurations and experiences of multilingualism by drawing on results from the ESRC-funded Family Language Policy project conducted in Britain in 2017–19. To inform our understanding of these practices and needs and challenges different multilingual families might face in everyday life, we focus on embodied communicative practices within one self-identified LGBTQ+ family with a history of transracial adoption and transnational migration from Poland to South East England. Following emerging research on fatherhood and masculinities in multilingual family research (e.g., Wright 2020; Doyle 2018), we seek to understand the family’s use of English resources in caregiver-child interactions, both in the immediate context of communicative and bonding needs and the wider context of complex language relations conditioned by political economic subordination and experiences of non-heteronormative masculinities in transnational space. Situating our study in relation to lack of research on multilingual LGBTQ+ families and avoiding exoticizing the studied family type, we show how a focus on issues of “power, struggle and conflict” (Canagarajah 2008) and enactment may foreground the wider need for developing more complex tools for analysis in FLP research. By drawing attention to the role of repertoires other than linguistic ones in “enabl[ing] and structur[ing] the process of becoming a competent communicator” (Duranti et al. 2011: 11), we propose to see a family as a multifaceted and dynamic sociopolitical unit that is interactionally accomplished by configurations of bodies, continuously assembled and coupled with objects, technology, and nature in the globalized world. We foreground the need for applying a multidimensional and multisensory approach to understanding FLP within LGBTQ+ transnational families that are simultaneously mobile, emplaced, and situated between different sociocultural norms and expectations regarding parenthood.

FAMILY, IDEOLOGY AND TRANSLANGUAGING PRACTICES In FLP research, the family is now less often defined as an autonomous, private unit. Neither parental strategies nor child agency are seen as operating in a

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vacuum. An emphasis is rather put on the family as “a site in which language ideologies are both formed and enacted through caregiver-child interactions” (Fogle 2008). Recent projects on transnational, displaced, and migrant multilingual families have also revealed the role of language ideologies in relation to sociopolitical, legal, historical, and economic forces. Language ideologies are “cultural system[s]‌of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (Irvine 1989: 255), which can be both “explicitly articulated or embodied in communicative practice” (Kroskrity 2004: 496). In multilingual immigrant families, they have been linked to particular linguistic markets (e.g., Curdt-Christiansen 2009), where combinations of educational background, immigration experiences, or language status were shown to influence language transmission. They are negotiated between necessity and opportunity, and in some cases, opportunities for learning particular languages might be limited within an ethnic community (Zhu Hua and Li Wei 2016). For example, Chinese complementary schools in the UK teach Mandarin and Cantonese but not Hakka or Hokkien, the two varieties which have significant numbers of speakers in the Chinese diaspora worldwide. Differing multilingual experiences were found even within the same families. Examination of Chinese families in Britain (Li Wei 1994; Zhu Hua 2008) shows that divergent values were ascribed to linguistic resources by different generations, pointing to language ideologies’ specific time-space configurations. Projects based on interview data in diaspora communities, for example, on Korean adoptee-returnees (Higgins and Stoker 2011), have also drawn attention to emerging non-static conceptualizations “of citizenship, ethnicity and linguistic identity.” Ideological struggles in transnational contexts may thus lead to linguistic practices that challenge market-oriented language ideologies. A need to make up for past inequalities together with lack of social acceptance, economic survival, and precarious legal status often contribute to new linguistic practices and language shift (Canagarajah 2008; Kulick 1997). Canagarajah (2008), for example, linked language maintenance practices of Tamil-speaking migrant families in the English-speaking world to macro-social institutions, power, and cultural hegemonies (Gal 1998). The migrants’ increased use of English resources was seen as a way to compensate for unequal past caste and religious relations. In line with global tendencies (e.g., Gal 1979), the role of gender in language shift was evident as young women who resisted gender inequality within Tamil-speaking community and families were observed to be leading the shift. Similarly, ideas about racial difference (Reyes and Lo 2008) often impact what and how linguistic resources are desired and used in transnational families (Fogle and King 2013; Shin 2014). Long-term ethnographic projects examining “complex situated relationships, symbols and orientations” (Duranti et al. 2011) in the family life illustrate that

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FLP could be linked to parental ideas about children and childhood. There is some evidence showing that FLP is shaped by what it means to be a good parent (King and Fogle 2006; Okita 2001), which itself is not a class-free practice (Johnston and Swanson 2003). Understandings of parenting at the intersections of class and race positions might also lead to different communication effects influenced through connections with technology, nature, use of objects, and other nonhuman entities. Crucially, FLP operates with an assumption of monolingual normativity, which impacts how families make daily decisions regarding language use, literacy, or speech and language therapy. In addition, multilingual families have to negotiate between the desire to raise their children multilingually and the need to develop emotional attachment (Fogle 2013). Such negotiation of linguistic practices within the family often has to do with parental understandings of affect and bonding (Fogle 2013), which reportedly lead to various practices: from bilingual mothers’ shift to the majority language for affective reasons (King and Logan-Terry 2008) through parents’ switch to less dominant codes due to accommodation (Kulick 1997) to parallel use of caregiver’s and child’s respective languages (Gafaranga 2010). Additionally, but equally importantly for this project, family practices are also “located within an assumption of heterosexuality” (Carlile and Paechter 2018), where particular expressions of femininity are perceived as qualities of personality (Giddens 1992) and where iconic status is assigned to the (birth) mother (Carlile and Paechter 2018). Historically, ideologies of motherhood and fatherhood were based on traditional and imagined gender roles in the family life (Butler 1990). Consequently, motherhood is usually associated with a particular femininized body as a bearer of children (Johnston and Swanson 2003), while fatherhood “as a more distant, less caring, but also more physically boisterous practice” (Carlile and Paechter 2018: 24). These ideas in turn have an impact on circulating assumptions about mothers’ and fathers’ relationship with schools and other institutions and engagement with family life. Heteronormative understandings of gender roles within the family are also often popularized in childcare manuals and assumed by institutions of the nation-state as national tax, legal, or medical systems are structured around the heteronormative family (Browne 2011). Non-heteronormative families can be variously situated in relation to such structures and hence might need to make conscious choices to parent differently from the assumed norms (Moore and Brainer 2013). Swarr and Nagar (2003) showed that in rural India, lesbian parents’ ideas about their offspring’s future financial independence led the mothers to stay away from conventional cultural practices such as arranged marriages for their daughters or adopting a son. Gay families have also often been observed to challenge conventional understandings of masculinity, parenthood, fathering roles and

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paternity (Carlisle and Paechter 2018). Research on parenting styles in such families, however, is fairly limited, with gay men in Western contexts being reported to parent similarly to heterosexual men (Bigner 1999) and co-parent in ways more often reported for women (Biblarz and Sarci 2010). Recent studies of LGBTQ+ families also stress the role of the state for family members’ life chances and of race and ethnicity for everyday life and possibilities of family formation (Moore and Brainer 2013). Most research on LGBTQ+ families has centered on upper-income white Western gay couples despite the fact that such couples are least likely to choose parenting (Rosenfeld 2010). Researchers’ sampling and data collection methods have shaped what we know about such families often ignoring families with working-class and racial minority background. It has been, thus, argued that intersectional studies of non-Western parenting, especially in migration contexts, can expose limits of existing research models (Moore and Brainer 2013) and help better understand parenting goals and practices as embedded within systems of inequality. This chapter departs from the “additive models of structural location” (Moore and Brainer 2013: 146) that, as seen in the literature review, sideline non-heteronormative and single-parent families in FLP research. We argue that instead of looking for “different practices” within LGBTQ+ families and treating them through the lens of additive structures (class + race + gender), the focus must be put on practice and enactment of making a family that unite all the family types. Such an approach has the capacity to shed light on the role of linguistic resources and workings of bodily affectivity foregrounding meaning-making processes and allowing for the expertise to emerge from participation. As language socialization within all families, heteronormative or non-heteronormative, is collaboratively (Goodwin 2006) and relationally accomplished, both parents and children play agentive roles in shaping FLP. The study of linguistic signs used within the family must hence acknowledge that the signs do not carry fixed meanings but are rather part of ever-changing complex social semiotic systems (Eckert 2012). Importantly, in all families, linguistic signs co-occur with other embodied phenomena that are “not simply a supplement to language but a basic element of communication” (Bucholtz and Hall 2016: 184), which also constitutes the meaning of a family and actively shapes embodied family knowledge. Therefore, agency within the family must be studied as “produced through a network of entities” (Bucholtz and Hall 2016)—human and nonhuman, corporeal, semiotic, and material, where touch, sensation, and intimate mixing (Blackman 2008) play an important role. This, as we show, is especially evident in the context of adoption. The translanguaging perspective, which recently developed in applied linguistics, aptly captures the role of clusters of signs rather than “bounded languages” in family making and consequently complexifies understanding of FLP. Drawing on

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two rather different but complementary fields of enquiry, bilingual education, and distributed cognition, this perspective foregrounds the fluid, dynamic, embodied, and culturally embedded nature of communicative practices (e.g., Li Wei 2018). Below, apart from examining how the parents explain their FLP, we focus on the ways in which their bodies attune to significances in their surroundings in interaction. By doing so, we demonstrate how the family members engage in complex social and affective embodied practices that make nonheteronormative transnational fatherhood and family. However, before focusing on the integrated and organic unfolding and weaving of the LGBTQ+ Polish-English-speaking family through available linguistic, semiotic, corporeal, and other material resources, we review the history of legal underpinnings of family-making in Britain.

ADOPTION: TRANSNATIONAL, TRANSRACIAL, NON-HETERONORMATIVE Adoptive families provide perhaps most visible examples of how parenthood, childhood, and legitimacy of families are constituted through embodied interactional moves in everyday life. In such families, the public most evidently intersects with the private, at the same time often questioning hegemonic ideas about belonging and family relations. Studies of adoptive families also point to the ways in which law, cultural change, and public policy are intimately intertwined in family interactions. “Adoptive talk” as used by Fogle (2008), therefore, provides a window to understand “the way we use language to communicate [as] a model for making sense of how we feel and of how we experience the world” (Costa et al. 2015: 5) “through increasingly complex conceptual representations” (de Zulueta 2006: 329). Apart from studies considering psychological, legal, or cultural identity issues, especially in the United States (Javier et al. 2007), research on adoptive family linguistic practices has only recently received increased attention (e.g., Fogle 2013; Shin 2013; Nofal and Seals, this volume). Most projects consider transnational adoptive families in Western contexts, which emerged largely due to international conflicts and economic global inequalities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Smith Rotabi 2013). Thanks to these projects, adoptive parents have been shown to often parent their offspring differently from biological parents (Fogle 2013). Most studies focusing on linguistic aspects were done in North American families where children had disparate linguistic resources from their parents. These studies often looked at older children who fall “at the intersection between monolingual and bilingual FLP” (Fogle 2013: 85). Fogle (2012), for example, examined how children (four to seventeen years old) in three adoptive families were socialized into

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their second languages in everyday practices. Culture keeping practices were widely reported (Jacobson 2008) and birth language maintenance was claimed to smooth adoptees’ transition to new contexts (Fogle 2012). Projects on adult adoptee-returnees further argued for the importance of knowledge of birth language for the adoptees’ development of a sense of belonging with their wider ethnic community (Higgins and Stoker 2011), while Shin (2013) posited that visible racial difference may require “engagement with birth language.” Crucially, in the context of adoptive talk, parental decisions to maintain children’s languages are made in the light of available language tuition, public discourse about adoption and experts’, therapists’, and teachers’ advice about children’s language development (Fogle 2013). In many adoptive families, the relationship between families’ senses of belonging and children’s language differs from other transnational and multilingual contexts. However, so far, most studies examined parents that had to make decisions whether they wanted to learn their children’s languages, while speaking their society’s dominant language. In this chapter, we focus on another type of transnational adoption: a family where children speak the dominant language, English, and parents’ birth language is a nondominant language, Polish. As the UK context differs from that of most existing studies of adoptive talk, we briefly discuss the historical context below. Although adoption has always existed in Britain, it was legalized only in 1926 (Keating 2017). Due to strict protection laws, initial records as to why parents decided to adopt or how children experienced adoption were limited. In the second half of the twentieth century, due to improved birth control and changing public attitudes, numbers of children for adoption decreased. Today, most children are adopted from “local authority care because their birth family situation placed them at risk; a few are adopted from overseas but the figures for this remain low” (Keating 2017). In 2019, there were 78,150 children looked after by local authorities through combination of adoption, foster care, and children’s homes1 (https://coram-i.org.uk/asglb/data). In 2011–12, 77 percent of adopted children were from care. Authorities do not track information about language profiles of such children (Costa et al. 2015). In Britain, most children in care are classified by Census-measures as White British—78 percent (Costa et al. 2015). However, historically, due to structural inequalities and other factors, Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME)2 children have been overrepresented proportionally since the 1950s, statistically least likely to be adopted and allegedly waiting the longest for placement,3 followed by children of mixed parentage (Barn and Kirton 2012). Significant numbers of adoptions are also made into white families. In Britain, transracial adoption became legal only in the 1960s. However, the UK continued with ethnic matching policies till 2014 when so-called color-blind adoption policies were introduced whereby race and ethnicity are not fully prioritized. Research

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has found that issues of race may become important “during late adolescence and adulthood” (Baden and Steward 2000). Since the introduction of Adoption and Children Act 2002, which came into force in 2005, it has also been legal for non-heteronormative families in Britain to adopt children. Overall, LGBTQ+ families remain in minority both worldwide and in Britain (Carlile and Paechter 2018). In 2019, same-sex families made 1.1 percent of all families, with same-sex cohabiting couples being most common followed by a growing number of same-sex married couples since the introduction of the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013 (Office for National Statistics 2019). Every year, the number of children adopted by LGBTQ+ families grows. It has been argued that LGBTQ+ families are well equipped with coping skills necessary for adoptive families and “the mindset to view adoptive families as ‘real’ families” (Boyer 2007), often leading to children becoming more tolerant of difference. However, worldwide, LGBTQ+ parents have been reported to encounter “considerable amount of social prejudice as they form families” (Crespi 2001). Additionally, as adoption family laws were created “with heterosexual families in mind” (Boyer 2007), adoption agencies do not always have policies for LGBTQ+ families, and there is a greater chance for adoption if a child is older, has special needs, or is from another country. Importantly, LGBTQ+ families often have to cope with social and legal vulnerability (Lynch and Murray 2000). As the parents in the studied family come from Poland, it is worth mentioning that despite an estimated population of two million (out of the total thirty-eight), the LGBTQ+ community in Poland has no legal protection. However, it is estimated that due to changes happening in the family life over the last few decades,4 approximately fifty thousand5 children are now living in families of choice, where parents are LGBTQ+. Traditionally, in the Polish romantic tradition, sexual minorities and feminists have been portrayed as competition (Janion 2004). Today, some projects report a “persistent move towards acceptance over the last 10 years,” but other studies argue “that acceptance has recently fallen.”6 Most recently, the LGBTQ+ community has been attacked by the current right-wing authorities and the Catholic Church, showing sharp divisions in Polish society, and in 2016, UN criticized Poland for lack of protection for LGBTQ+ citizens and decreasing initiatives in sex education. To our knowledge, neither in Britain nor in Poland, multilingual or “multicultural issues in LGBTQ family research” (Boyer 2007) have been investigated.

THE PRESENT STUDY The data come from the ESRC-funded Family Language Policy project, a multilevel investigation examining language ideologies and practices in multilingual transnational families with links to Poland, Somalia, and China,

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but living in Britain. The project investigated questions surrounding the role of mobility and sociocultural change for FLP across and within transnational communities including ethnographic fieldwork in ten families of different types from each community. At the family level, we recruited ten families with at least one person exhibiting knowledge of Polish. The recruitment was carried out in relation to official statistics for the Polish community in London and Britain in order to account for differences in density of local Polish population, class, family type, history of local ethnic relations, and type of neighborhood. To represent a wide range of family types, the LGBTQ+ family was recruited from our personal networks based in Poland with links to LGBTQ+ activist groups. All families were first contacted by phone. During the first visit, Kinga introduced the project, data collection methods, and secured ethical consent from all family members. The total number of hours recorded in the LGBTQ+ family was approximately 12 hours and 30 minutes. Fieldnotes were also made after any additional encounter. Most were recorded among family members, but some visits included others, for example, another Polish-speaking LGBTQ+ family with adopted children. Our overarching methodology is ethnography. As during any ethnographic process, we go “from reflectivity to reflexivity, that is from observation, description, introspection, to making connections between what has been observed in the present case and our knowledge of other cases” (Zhu Hua and Li Wei 2016: 657–8). This includes reflection on our own positioning as researchers who have worked with transnational multilingual speakers in Britain but, importantly, who are not members of the LGBTQ+ community nor were we raised by LGBTQ+ parents. We also have no direct experience of parenting in a transracial family. We are both cisgender women, with Zhu Hua also being a parent. Kinga, who conducted the ethnographic fieldwork, comes originally from Warsaw and has lived and worked in Brighton. Her networks include close friendships with Polish and international LGBTQ+ community members. Such a positioning stresses the reliance on the emergent themes and connections to observations in other families that we studied rather than researchers’ assumptions. Our data include field notes, audiovisual recordings of daily family interactions in and outside the home, extensive qualitative interview, photography, published TV and press materials about the family, and our own multimodal informal exchanges with the participants. The materials were analyzed in NVivo and Elan by means of discourse, multimodal, and Moment Analysis (Li Wei 2011). We first analyze the parental discourse on adoption, family life, and FLP. Later, our analysis focuses on linguistic and nonlinguistic aspects of interaction, including bodily movement, use of gestures, and objects examining “what prompted a specific action at a specific moment in time and the consequences of the action” (Zhu Hua and Li Wei 2016) for family life. We employ the Moment Analysis

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for the interactional data to understand the process of family making. Below, we discuss observed family language practices, history, and networks before presenting the interview and interactional data.

THE FAMILY Marek and Błażej are a gay couple in their forties, originally from large cities in Central and Central-Western Poland. They had met in Poland. Both moved to other urban areas in Western and Northern Poland before moving to Britain, where Marek7 had come during his studies. They both settled in Brighton in 2009. Research points to the possible importance of geographies of sexualities (Brown 2012): Brighton is often described as the UK’s LGBTQ+ city where the largest pride festival takes place every summer. Initially, only Marek knew English. Błażej spoke Polish and some Russian, but learnt English only after two years. The parents arrived after the 2004 EU enlargement, which allowed Polish citizens to legally settle and work in Britain. Today, they hold dual citizenship and are married. One has his own cleaning company, the other runs a hair studio. Both jobs involve contact with English. At the time of our research, they mainly communicated with each other in Polish. They were introduced to the idea of LGBTQ+ adoption through a Polishspeaking gay friend in Brighton. After Błażej improved his English skills by attending a course in a local language school voluntarily in order to ease the process of adoption, the couple successfully qualified for adoption and attended required training which was offered in English. The parents intended to adopt children of Polish descent and eventually were matched with two brothers, Jan and Benjamin, whose biological mother was originally from Poland and whose fathers were of African origin (limited data due to protection laws). The brothers joined the new family at ages 4.5 and 2.5, respectively. Based on the parents’ accounts, the contact with the biological mother ended early, with the older child being in care on and off from the age of one. The boys also had three other siblings born in Poland and Britain, and maintained occasional contact with two of them. At the time of the fieldwork, the boys were eleven and nine years old and have lived with the parents for six years. They predominantly use English to communicate with each other, their parents, and all other interlocutors. Literacy in Polish was not taught, but the brothers have communicative knowledge of Polish, with production limited to single word/phrase utterances. During the fieldwork, they usually did not initiate interactions in Polish, with Jan being least likely to do so. He only once spontaneously called the family dog in Polish. Both brothers were observed to respond to some Polish phrases and commands. The only Polish input the boys had was from their parents and, occasionally, TV. The parents mainly used Polish resources when speaking to Polish contacts. Based on the visual

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material we watched, when the boys attended a family wedding in Poland, they primarily communicated in English. The boys reportedly relied on some Polish expressions and occasionally nonverbal communication. The family also have relatives from Poland in Brighton with whom the boys speak English.

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE FAMILY, NONHETERONORMATIVE MASCULINITY AND ETHNICITY Below, we examine how the parents explained their FLP. The interview was situated at the end of the fieldwork. It was conducted in Polish, lasted 1 hour and 59 minutes and covered twenty-three questions that we had prepared for all families about family history, migration, language, social networks, ideas about parenting, or self-identification. The parents talked at length about the adoption process and situated their linguistic practices and language maintenance goals in relation to it. Similarly to previous studies, the adoptive status of the children was used by the parents to explain the role of trauma, potential abuse, and problematic history “to set the adopted child apart from other children with similar language learning experiences” (Fogle 2013: 90). First, the parents attributed their children’s preference to speak English to their experiences in care and limited contact with their biological mother. In Excerpt 4.1, Marek referred to the ethnic matching of the parents and children as Polish and the complexity of the relationship between language and their ethnic identification. Excerpt 4.1 Marek: tutaj w foster care oni wszyscy po angielsku mówią, to się tak ludziom wydaje, o Polacy, nie jeżeli dzieci się tutaj urodziły i zostały odebrane rodzicom, są przez jakiś czas w foster care, to raczej mówią w języku, który tutaj jest językiem urzędowym here in foster care they all speak English, some people think that oh they’re Polish, no, if children were born here and taken away from their parents, they spend some time in foster care, then they speak a language that is the official language here

In the quote, the father mixed the reality of the care system in Britain, where foster parents most often speak to children in English, with circulating discourses on ethnic identity which equate it with one language. Hence, he linked his children’s current limited performance in Polish to the reality of the foster care system which rarely provides opportunities for birth language maintenance. The parents also explained the children’s deficient early linguistic development in Polish in relation to experts’ advice, as they were explicitly instructed not to

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introduce the language immediately after meeting the children. Consequently, they claimed that they did not have any further explicit discussions of FLP between themselves but planned to gradually introduce Polish. In Excerpt 4.2, Błażej explains how as a result of the experts’ advice, they prioritized the children’s well-being and accommodated to their needs linguistically. Excerpt 4.2 Błażej: chodziło o to, żeby dzieciom nie wprowadzać za dużo zmian, bo nagle jak wyskoczę z językiem polskim, a dziecko nigdy nie miało kontaktu, to może być dodatkowy stres dla dziecka the idea was not to introduce too many changes because if I suddenly start speaking Polish and the child has never had any contact with it, it could be additional stress for them

The children were also reported not to self-identify as Polish and observed to occasionally instruct the parents to speak English during family interactions. During the interview and fieldwork, the parents repeatedly asserted that, at the beginning, Jan had a negative attitude to anything connected with Poland. Excerpt 4.3 comes from a longer passage in which Błażej listed Polish activities that Jan did not want to do himself8 after joining the family. Excerpt 4.3 Błażej: na początku odrzucał wszystko co polskie, czy to było jedzenie, czy mówienie po polsku, nie chciał mieć z Polską nic do czynienia, on jest Brytyjczykiem i koniec at the beginning he refused to do anything Polish, whether it was food, or speaking Polish, he didn’t want to have anything to do with Poland, he was British and that was it

The parents explained that in the initial stages of adoption, they prioritized nonlinguistic forms of communication such as gaze, corporeal cues, and proxemics as instructed by experts to establish rapport and build trust. While corporeal cues were extensively used in caregiver-child interactions, the experts’ advice was also incorporated into the design of the physical space, where cushions with family pictures from the foster-care period, material elements from shared travels, and photos were present. The family members also often documented and shared their activities through communication technologies. However, the parents did not stop speaking Polish to each other and intended for children to speak Polish in the future, with proficiency dependent on the children’s wishes. The parents did not actively plan to develop children’s literacy

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in Polish. Importantly, they did not express a wish to send the boys to a Polish Saturday School due to the fact that such schools and other Polish organizations are mocno wsiaknięte w tą Polskość “deeply rooted in this Polishness,” with which they did not entirely identify themselves (Excerpt 4.4). Excerpt 4.4 Błażej: ja się czuję Polakiem Marek: obywatelem świata Błażej: źle powiedziałem jestem obywatelem świata Błażej: I feel Polish Marek: a citizen of the world Błażej: I said it wrong I’m a citizen of the world

Excerpt 4.4 also points to the complexity of the men’s relationship with Polishness and their positioning as gay men. After Błażej’s initial selfidentification as Polish with some hesitation, both parents settled on defining themselves as citizens of the world. When describing their experiences of nonheteronormative masculinities in Poland, both acknowledged the presence of divisions within Polish society: compared with more open and tolerant urban areas, in recent years, rural areas in South-Eastern Poland reported hostility toward LGBTQ+ with an increased number of LGBTQ-free zones. The parents claimed that they did not encounter extreme reactions in the urban areas in which they had lived. Overall, they wished Poland well but had not felt accepted there, which they linked to lack of legal recognition and homophobic discourses circulating in parts of Polish society (Excerpt 4.5). Excerpt 4.5 Błażej: nie masz praw, musisz płacić podatki jak każdy obywatel w Polsce, ale nie masz praw, uważają cię za chorego psychicznie, bo jesteś gejem you don’t have any rights, you have to pay taxes like all other citizens in Poland, but you have no rights, they think you are mentally ill because you’re gay

Despite reporting occasional homophobia in Brighton, they enjoyed the legal protection of their family. They also argued that the Polish “mentality” did not allow them to imagine that as gay men, they could have a family and that their decision to have a family has important consequences for their positioning in the world and resulting practices. As the children have no Polish citizenship and as the Polish law does not recognize their family, they do not intend to move to Poland. They travel to Poland only occasionally to visit relatives and friends. Such rationale is presented in Excerpt 4.6.

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Excerpt 4.6 (6)

Marek: nie chcemy żyć jak obcy ludzie wobec siebie i udawać, że jesteśmy obcy, tak? […] w Polsce nagle stajemy się dla siebie obcymi osobami według polskiego prawa we don’t want to live like foreign people and pretend that we are foreign, right? […] in Poland we suddenly become foreign people to one another, according to the Polish law

When taking a negative stance toward “Polish mentality,” the fathers also listed physical attributes such as “being white, having blue eyes and blond hair” as being imagined to be defining features of Poles for some members of Polish society. Błażej also recalled a fierce attack on what he called his own more “Mediterranean” looks when growing up in Poland, which points to awareness of issues surrounding racial difference and dominant discourses on Polish ethnic identity. Strong racialization processes in Poland have been reported to have an impact on self-identification and experiences of Polishness of mixed-race children and individuals (Balogun 2020). Observations from our project also suggest that racial difference might be one of the factors impacting language choice. In contrast to reported lack of awareness of race-related issues among Western LGBTQ+ white parents (Hicks 2011), the family traveled to Africa and talked about race. The parents reported instances of racism in the children’s school and their own post-Brexit-vote experiences of discrimination, which led them to emphasize the importance of coping skills that they intended to pass on to their children through travel and other opportunities. Therefore, when asked about the children’s future (Excerpt 4.7), they listed happiness, respect, and openness and did not confine the children’s future to any particular geographical area, valuing multilingualism as a way to be open. Excerpt 4.7 Marek: żeby sobie jak najlepiej w życiu poradzili, przede wszystkim żeby byli zdrowi i szczęśliwi […] Błażej: poukładani psychicznie […] Marek: […] żeby się wzajemnie szanowali, fajnie będzie jak będą na jakiś stanowiskach, […] czy to będzie Hollywood Błażej: czy Bollywood Marek: to do well in life, most of all be healthy and happy[…] Błażej: mentally healthy[…] Marek: […]to respect one another it’ll be cool if they have some positions[…] […]whether it’ll be Hollywood Błażej: or Bollywood

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Finally, the parents also explained the presence of English in relation to the changing linguistic landscape of the Polish-speaking diaspora and Poland. Their networks were mixed, including both Polish-speaking and non-Polish-speaking contacts.

BONDING, BODILY AFFECTIVITY AND TRANSLANGUAGING We now redirect the focus to multimodal and moment analysis of everyday interactions to demonstrate that while the interview centered around “bounded languages” and suggested almost exclusive use of English in the family practices, in everyday interactions, Polish and English resources remained in constant relation to one another jointly building the family life in complex ways. Additionally, when caregivers and children interacted, they did not rely solely on linguistic resources: multilingual bodies were rather assembled by the coming together of various entities—human and nonhuman, semiotic, corporeal, and material—all of which participated in family making. The use of Polish resources was tightly linked to participation frameworks and functional demands. Apart from addressing each other in Polish during some multiparty conversations, the parents often addressed the children with Polish gender-neutral endearment terms such as misiu “little bear” or English names with Polish diminutive endings. They also used short Polish directives and expressions when addressing the brothers. The children did not respond in Polish, but often performed actions without translation to English. The everyday family interactions were situated and centered around particular practical activities, with each family member’s contribution being meaningful only in relation to the whole interactional event and family’s history of repeated actions, narratives, and habitual body routines (Wetherell 2012). We now examine one event from our fieldwork in order to highlight the processes through which events shape FLP and vice versa and how especially in the context of adoption, linguistic cues are employed through embodied participation and cannot be fully understood on their own. During one field visit, the family took a walk in a local valley (Excerpt 4.8). The transcript focuses on the moment when the family were walking down the slope with the family dog. Benjamin’s sudden fearful refusal to walk prompts a series of actions in which the family engage in the situated reorganization of multimodal, multisensory, and multilingual resources including bodily movement, touch, and speech. The importance of the corporeal cues and their role in shaping family relations comes to the fore when Marek begins his intervention with the iconic gesture of extended arms after noticing that Benjamin is not moving.

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Excerpt 4.8 ((Marek, Błażej, Jan, Benjamin and Kinga are walking down the slope in a local valley; Marek and Błażej have just talked about the dog in Polish)) 1. Jan: it’s not so bad \/no:w ((looks back towards Benjamin, holding his hand on Marek’s arm)) 2. Marek: ((looking at the dog addresses Błażej)) no to się nie rozpędza tylko [sobie so it’s not going fast but 3. Jan: [I just4. Marek:           \człapie               is lumbering 5. Jan: I just have to learn not to look \back 6. Błazej: ((looking at the dog)) człap człap\człap ((turns his head back towards Benjamin))                      lumber, lumber, lumber 7. chodź \B((name))lulku ((turns his head in the direction of walking, walks after the dog)) \chodź come Benjamin       come 8. Marek: ((drops Jan’s arm, turns his whole body towards Benjamin, stops, faces Benjamin, extends his arms)) /pysio ((waiting with open arms)) endearment term 9. Jan: this is FINE [\now 10. Marek:              [pi pi pi pi pi pi pi \pi((begins drawing his arms together)) beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep 11. Benjamin: ((stops moving entirely)) 12. Marek: ((stops, his arms stop moving)) 13. Błazej: \look everyone is watching \you even doggie is watching \you whatcha gonna \do 14. Benjamin: ((starts walking, puts the bottom of his hoodie onto his head, wind blows)) 15. Marek: ((resumes the movement of arms)) 16. Benjamin: ((stops again)) 17. Marek: the faster you go the warmer it \is (.) go \faster ((opens his arm again)) 18. if you go slow it’s \cold ((Jan puts his hand on Marek’s arm)) go /faster 19. Jan: ((laughter)) \whatever ((walks towards Benjamin, his hands in his pockets)) 20. Benjamin: ((turns back to everybody)) 21. Jan: ((inaudible due to wind)) I’ll just- ((walks down towards Marek, turns his body back to Benjamin, leans on Marek and walks away towards Błażej)) 22. Benjamin: ((turns his head up, takes the hoodie out of his head)) 23. Marek: ((extends his arms fully)) one more\chance 24. Benjamin: ((points his hand upwards)) \GOATS ((pointing the finger, smiles at Marek, starts running towards Marek, Benjamin and Marek embrace each other for 3sec, turn towards the path and start

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Benjamin: Marek:

27. 28. 29.

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walking with Marek’s hand on Benjamin’s back; following short exchange about the clouds between the brothers and Marek in English is omitted)) ((whispers)) °cuddle \cuddle° no chodź cuddlisiu ((leans down towards Benjamin and hugs him)) come on my cuddl-VOC ((starts straightening his body)) cuddly, cuddly ((straightens his body fully)) ((looks around, moves his head)) °cuddle° ((hugs Benjamin and kisses his head))

Jan walks between the fathers holding his hand on Marek’s arm. The fathers have a short exchange about the dog that Błażej is walking on a lead. They produce a sequence of turns in Polish, both looking ahead. Between the fathers’ turns, Jan asserts in English that walking down the slope is not so bad now, as he was afraid of it from the beginning of the walk. At the same time, he briefly looks back toward Benjamin. While the fathers discuss the dog’s walking pattern in Polish, Jan inserts his next turn in English, asserting that he cannot look back, again signaling fear. Meanwhile, Benjamin stays approximately 10 m behind others. In line 7, responding to Marek’s assertion about the dog in Polish, while imitating the sounds of the dogs’ feet in Polish, Błażej turns his back toward Benjamin and produces a Polish directive chodź “come.” He completes his turn by means of prosody and embodiment and pronounces Benjamin’s name in a diminutive form with a Polish vocative case ending, showing an affective stance toward Benjamin’s sudden lack of movement. Simultaneously, Błażej turns his head in the direction of walking uttering one more Polish directive chodź, “come.” Subsequently, Marek drops Jan’s hand, which is still on his arm, turns toward Benjamin, stops and produces an iconic gesture: extends his arms sideways and addresses Benjamin with a Polish endearment term pysio (see Figure 4.1). He establishes eye contact with Benjamin and shows that he is paying attention to the child’s problem. While Marek waits for Benjamin, Jan produces his next English turn asserting that walking down is fine now, signaling safety to his brother. In line 10, Marek produces a series of onomatopoeic syllables used to signal attention in Polish and begins to slowly draw his arms together. As Benjamin hears and sees it, he stops moving. In response, Marek’s arms stop moving as well. As a result, Błażej also turns his body toward Benjamin and addresses him in English confirming that everybody is watching him, including the dog. Benjamin puts the back of his hoodie on his head and starts walking toward Marek who is standing with extended arms, without uttering a word. The wind blows strongly and Marek starts drawing his arms again. As Benjamin

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FIGURE 4.1:  Marek with open arms facing Benjamin; Jan waiting on the lefthand side

sees it, he stops moving again. Marek encourages Benjamin to walk toward him in English not to be cold (line 17). As the interaction unfolds, Jan unsuccessfully intervenes, which results in Benjamin turning his body back toward everybody. Afterwards, as Benjamin begins to turn his body back with the head directed up toward the top of the slope, the father extends his arms again and utters in English one more chance. Benjamin extends his hand upwards, raises his voice for the English GOATS as he looks at the clouds, smiles, and starts running toward Marek (see Figure 4.2). Benjamin and Marek embrace each other for three seconds, then turn their bodies in the direction of walking and start moving with Marek holding on Benjamin’s arm. After a short exchange about the clouds in English, while walking in Marek’s embrace, Benjamin whispers an English directive cuddle. Marek leans toward Benjamin, produces a Polish particle no, followed by a Polish directive chodź and English stem cuddl- combined with a Polish diminutive ending in a vocative case and a series of English cuddly, cuddly. After the hug, Benjamin looks around and repeats cuddle. Again, Marek and Benjamin interact nonvocally (hugging, kissing) and the walk continues without further tension and fear (see Figure 4.3). As the interaction unfolded, the multilingual bodies (dis)aligned from one another through active work of multiple parties to the interaction in ways related to the requirements of the activity. Through appropriate facing formations (Kendon 1990), structures of control organizing family life (Goodwin 2006), and unfolding of utterance sequences, the family members

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FIGURE 4.2:  Marek and Benjamin hugging

FIGURE 4.3:  Marek, Benjamin, and Jan walking down the hill; Marek and Benjamin embracing each other as they walk

attuned to others and displayed affective stances. Motivated by participation frameworks and function, Polish and English resources wove the activity in dynamic and fluid ways in the context of available resources and past relational histories. Crucially, the family not only built the event through speech but also relied heavily on the role of gesture, gaze, touch, bodily configurations, and objects. The attunement of and intimacy among masculine bodies was also

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infused with sociocultural and personal history where the importance of gaze, touch, and intimate mixing had been emphasized through expert advice and parental goals to create a welcoming and safe space in the adopted family. The translanguaging perspective helps to demonstrate that the linguistic activity is intrinsically multimodal with embodied participation actively shaping the act of speaking and family life, which in the case of adoption has short-term and long-term important consequences for building relations. The translanguaging practices also enable new forms of transnational fatherhood to emerge and weave the transnational LGBTQ+ family in dynamic ways, challenging the cause-effect-oriented research paradigms that operate within simple binaries, where bounded languages are either added or lost.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter links the FLP to legal and sociocultural changes in family definitions and arrangements and child adoption in transnational space and examines how a multilingual LGBTQ+ family with adopted children bonds and communicates. It provides an account of complexities and contradictions of the FLP. First, our interview data shows a clear FLP. The dominance of English in caregiver-child interactions was attributed to multiple factors: experts’ advice, the perceived need to create “safe and welcoming space” for adopted children, complex ethnic identification and non-heteronormative masculinities, the lack of legal protection in the country of origin, and cosmopolitan values associated with English and multilingualism. Our moment analysis, however, demonstrates that the use of English and Polish resources in everyday life is far more complex, fluid, and simultaneously present actively contributing to the emergence of a “site of creativity and power” (hooks 1990: 154) where interactions are always multisensory and multimodal in addition to being multilingual. More precisely, it is through the translanguaging practices that the family achieves bonding. Showing the relational co-occurrence of communicative resources, we hope to highlight the importance of looking at FLP as an outcome of affects between the interacting elements and shifting the analytical focus from distinct codes to processes in which individuals engage to create, deploy, and interpret signs for communication. The tension between articulated ideologies and practices and the contradictions between the desired language choice and everyday practices call for a nuanced analysis and understanding. Breaking with the taboo relationship between the gay father and a son that has incited fear in Western tradition for far too long, the study argues that the focus on enactment and practice also enables a closer examination of the ways in which non-heteronormative masculine bodies and families achieve intimacy and bonding through embodied sociolinguistic practices, and

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emerging vulnerabilities and tenderness allow to model new ways to be a father in transnational space. The focus on family as a moving and changing political unit that is collectively accomplished by various types of bodily connections open to be affected and affect other aspects of the physical space, objects, and so on also allows us to better link language practices to the constantly changing “recruitment, assemblage and entanglement of huge social, cultural and material infrastructures” (Haraway 2004). These changes in family definitions and arrangements also point to the embedding of emerging meanings of linguistic choices and language maintenance goals in relation to history of power relations between and within communities in transnational space, as well as politics of adoption, gender, and sexuality.

APPENDIX 1: AN INVENTORY OF TRANSCRIPT SYMBOLS; BASED ON JEFFERSON (2004), ATKINS HERITAGE (1986), GUMPERZ AND BERENZ (1993), TRANSLATION IN ITALICS Symbol

Meaning

____ \ / \/ = (.) [ I ((comment)) :

Nuclear accent Fall Rise Fall-Rise No break/gap Brief pause Truncated phrase Overlap onset Overlap end Transcriber’s comments Lengthening of the sound before the colon (the more colons, the longer the lengthening) Loud sounds relative to the surrounding talk Softer relative to the surrounding talk

WORD °word°

NOTES 1 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/850306/Children_looked_after_in_England_2019_Text.pdf. 2 The term BAME does not include Polish and other non-white ethnicities in the UK. No data for the Census category “Other white” can be found. 3 This remains under researched and conflicting results that have been reported with Kirton arguing that children from some “ethnic groups least likely to be adopted

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spent the shortest average time in care.” https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/thecharacteristic-that-dare-not-speak-its-name-removing-the-ethnicity-clause-in-thechildren-and-families-act-2014/. 4 https://www.kph.org.pl/publikacje/raport2010_teczowe_rodziny.pdf. 5 http://rodzinyzwyboru.pl/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Raport_Rodziny-z-wyboruw-Polsce.-Życie-rodzinne-osób-nieheteroseksualnych.pdf. 6 https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/gender-ideology-and-the-crisis-of-care-in-pol and/?fbclid=IwAR07QpywzFstSwNq0ux5weKsM9GtJNrmBrycX72oEaDDDbhZ8 5WYIbfLnKk. 7 All names are pseudonyms. Marek and Błażej—parents, Jan—older child, Benjamin— younger child. 8 Polish was present in the early family life as the parents communicated in Polish between themselves.

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Costa, B., Dioum, M., and Yorath, S. (2015), “My Languages Matter: The Multilingual Outlook for Children in Care—a White Paper.” Crespi, L. (2001), “And Baby Makes Three: A Dynamic Look at Development and Conflict in Lesbian Families,” Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy, 4(3– 4): 7–29. Curdt-Christiansen, X. (2009), “Visible and Invisible Language Planning: Ideological Factors in the Family Language Policy of Chinese Immigrant Families in Quebec,” Language Policy, 8(4): 351–75. De Houwer, A. (1990), The Acquisition of Two Languages: A Case Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Zulueta, F. (2006), From Pain to Violence, London: Whurt. Doyle, C. (2018), “ ‘She’s the Big Dog Who Knows’—Power and the Father’s Role in Minority Language Transmission in Four Transnational Families in Tallinn,” Philologia Estonica Tallinnensis 3. Duranti, A., Ochs, E., and Schieffelin, B. (2011), The Handbook of Language Socialization, Wiley, accessed online. Eckert, P. (2012), “Three Waves of Cariation Study: The Emergence of Meaning in the Study of Sociolinguistic Variation,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 87–100. Fogle, L. (2008), “Home-School Connections for International Adoptees: Repetition in Parent-Child Interactions,” in Child’s Play? Second Language Acquisition and the Younger Learner, ed. J. Philp, R. Oliver, and A. Mackey, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fogle, L. (2012), Second Language Socialization and Learner Agency: Adoptive Family Talk, Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Fogle, L. (2013), “Parental Ethnotheories and Family Language Policy in Transnational Adoptive Families,” Language Policy, 12(1): 83–102. Fogle, L., and King, K. (2013), “Child Agency and Language Policy in Transnational Families,” Issues in Applied Linguistics, 19: 1–25. Gal, S. (1979), Language Shift: Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria, New York: Academic Press. Gal, S. (1998), “Multiplicity and Contestation among Linguistic Ideologies,” in Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, ed. K. Woolard and B. Schieffelin, 317–31, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gafaranga, J. (2010), “Medium Request: Talking Language Shift into Being,” Language in Society, 39(2): 241–70. Giddens, A. (1992), The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goodwin, M. (2006), “Participation, Affect and Trajectory in Family Directive/Response Sequences.” Available online: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/goodwin/ Goodwin_Participation_Affect_Trajectory.pdf. Haraway, D. (2004), The Haraway Reader, New York: Routledge. Hicks, S. (2011), Lesbian, Gay and Queer Parenting: Families, Intimacies, Genealogies, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Higgins, C., and Stoker, K. (2011), “Language Learning as a Site for Belonging: A Narrative Analysis of Korean Adoptee-Returnees,” International Journal of Bilingual Education & Bilingualism, 14(4): 399–412. hooks, b. (1990), Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Abingdon, UK: Routledge [e-book]. Irvine, J. (1989), “When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy,” American Ethnologist, 16: 248–67.

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Jacobson, H. (2008), Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Janion, M. (2004), “Po_zegnanie z Polskaz. Jeszcze Polska Nie Umarła …,” Krytyka Polityczna 6: 140–51. Javier, R., Baden, A., Biafora, F., and Camacho-Gingerich, A. (2007), Handbook of Adoption: Implications for Researchers, Practitioners and Families, SAGE, accessed online. Johnston, D., and Swanson, D. (2003), “Invisible Mothers: A Content Analysis of Motherhood Ideologies and Myths in Magazines,” Sex Roles, 49(1/2): 21–33. Keating, J. (2017), “History of Adoption and Fostering in the United Kingdom,” www. oxfordbibliographies.com. Kendon, A. (1990), “Spatial Organization in Social Encounters: The F-formation System,” in Conducting Interaction: Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters, ed. A. Kendon, 209–38, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, K., and Fogle, L. (2006), “Bilingual Parenting as Good Parenting: Parents’ Perspectives on Family Language Policy for Additive Bilingualism,” International Journal of Bilingual Education & Bilingualism, 9(6): 695–712. King, K. A., and Logan-Terry, A. (2008), “Additive Bilingualism through Family Language Policy: Ideologies, Strategies and Interactional Outcomes,” Calidoscópio, 6(1): 5–19. Kroskrity, P. (2004), “Language Ideologies,” in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ed. A. Duranti, 496–517, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Kulick, D. (1997) Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lanza, E. ([1997] 2004), Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Li, Wei. (1994), Three Generations, Two Languages, One Family: Language Choice and Language Shift in a Chinese Community in Britain, Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Li, Wei. (2011), “Moment Analysis and Translanguaging Space: Discursive Construction of Identities by Multilingual Chinese Youth in Britain,” Journal of pragmatics, 43: 1222–35. Li, Wei. (2018), “Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language,” Applied Linguistics, 39: 9–30. Lynch, J. M., and Murray, K. (2000), “For the Love of the Children: The Coming Out Process for Lesbian and Gay Parents and Stepparents,” Journal of Homosexuality, 39(1): 1–24. Moore, M. R., and Brainer, A. (2013), “Race and Ethnicity in the Lives of Sexual Minority Parents and Their Children,” in LGBT-Parent Families, ed. A. Goldberg and K. Allen, 133–48, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Office for National Statistics (2019), “Sexual Orientation, UK: 2019,” https://www. ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/sexuality/bulletins/ sexualidentityuk/2019. Accessed August 2021. Okita, T. (2001), Invisible Work: Bilingualism, Language Choice and Childrearing in Intermarried Families, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Podesva, R. (2007), “Phonation Type as a Stylistic Variable: The Use of Falsetto in Constructing a Persona,” Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(4): 478–504. Reyes, A., and Lo, A. (2008), Beyond Yellow English: The Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Rosenfeld, M. (2010), “Nontraditional Families and Childhood Progress through School,” Demography, 47: 755–75. Shin, S. (2014), “Language Learning as Culture Keeping: Family Language Policies of Transnational Adoptive Parents,” International Multilingual Research Journal, 8(3): 189–207. Shin, S. J. (2013), “Transforming Culture and Identity: Transnational Adoptive Families and Heritage Language Learning,” Language, Culture and Curriculum, 26(2): 161–78. Smith Rotabi, K. (2013), “Adoption: Intercountry,” Encyclopedia of Social Work, Washington, DC: National Association of Social Workers Press and Oxford University Press (online resource). Spolsky, B. (2004), Language Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swarr, A., and Nagar, R. (2003), “Dismantling Assumptions: Interrogating ‘Lesbian’ Struggles for Identity and Survival in India and South Africa,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29: 491–516. Wetherell, M. (2012), Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, London: SAGE. Wright, L. (2020), Critical Perspectives on Language and Kinship in Multilingual Families, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Zhu, Hua (2008), “Duelling Languages, Duelling Values: Codeswitching in Bilingual Intergenerational Conflict Talk in Diasporic Families,” Journal of Pragmatics, 40: 1799–816. Zhu, Hua, and Li, Wei (2016), “Transnational Experience, Aspiration and Family Language Policy,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37: 655–66.

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CHAPTER FIVE

“When Kirogi Speaks Two Languages Perfectly”: Language Policies and Practices in a Korean Diasporic Family HAKYOON LEE

INTRODUCTION Globalization has long been associated with increased mobility among families throughout the world. Traditionally, people’s international mobility has been fueled by the search for better economic opportunities. Migrant experiences differ greatly depending on the length of stay and types of families. Besides historical migration that sought work or asylum, migrating for education has significantly increased worldwide for over the past half century (Cho 2004; Lee 2010). However, despite this increased variation, a majority of the studies examine relatively typical types of migrants who migrate permanently from one nation to another. This shows that there is a need to explore various types of immigrant populations and their divergent linguistic practices. This study explores the Korean kirogi family. Meaning wild goose in English, the term “kirogi” is derived from the seasonal travel patterns of Korean families

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TABLE 5.1  Characteristics of Kirogi Family

Goals of migration Family members abroad Future plan

Kirogi family

Iminja

Education One parent + child(ren)

Labor (work) All family members

Either going back to Korea

Single destination of family settlement

or settle down in the host country

(permanent migration)

separated for much of the year (Ly 2005). Wild geese must travel great distances during seasonal migrations in order to support their families. A kirogi family is thus defined as a split-household and transnational family in which one parent, almost always the mother, and the children move to an English-speaking country for the children’s education, leaving the father to stay behind in Korea. Kirogi as a temporary family is distinctive from permanent immigrants (iminja) in three different ways: (1) the goal of the migration (Lee and Koo 2006), (2) family members abroad, and (3) future plans (Kim and Kwak 2019). Although both groups leave their home country to migrate to another, kirogi families live in two different nations for most, if not all, of the year for several years, depending upon their goals (Chang and Lee 2017). I refer to a kirogi family in this study as a transnational family. With the evolving views on globalization and migration, diverse types of relocated people have different degrees of transnational ties, and it is arguably difficult to understand them with the traditional sense of migration from one country to the another. As a “multi-sited family” (Vidal 2015: 187), kirogi families have a tighter connection with other family members in Korea and often anchor their orientation there due to the frequent visits and greater probability of returning to Korea in the future. Education migration does not necessarily indicate a one-directional flow of people, and it does not involve a single destination. Families whose members live separately across borders are by no means new, but in the case of kirogi families, they choose to live transnationally for the goal of their children’s education (Kim and Kwak 2019).

KIROGI FAMILIES AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION The kirogi family arrangement first started as a response to the challenges of rapid globalization, which became a driving force of migration for educational opportunities for the Korean parents (Lee and Koo 2006). Based on the importance of English as the global hegemonic language, Korea’s economic success and democratization, and the rapid development of transportation and communication technology, migrating for education has been significantly increasing globally over

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a half century (Cho 2004; Finch and Kim 2012; Lee 2010). Temporary visits or short-term stays in countries where the dominant language is English have been considered as a transnational strategy which helps people to learn English successfully (Song 2012). Korean parents seek better educational opportunities for their children because of their dissatisfaction with the Korean educational system, which is often described as highly competitive and test-centered. In Korean society where families are highly valued, kirogi families have received a great deal of attention, however FLP research is still largely absent. Generally, previous academic studies have highlighted either positive or negative impacts of this family arrangement and focus on the changes of the maternal roles and family relations. Due to the high value placed on family in Korea, kirogi families often face a certain social stigma. Even abroad, more traditional Korean immigrants often espouse a negative view of the kirogi families. Kang (2009) investigated the increased responsibilities, burden, and stress that kirogi mothers experienced when they managed their children’s education and household tasks without their husbands. By contrast, kirogi mothers appreciate the greater freedom, independence, and opportunities to develop personal interests, in addition to the fewer relational conflicts with their in-laws (Choi 2006). These periods of family separation have also been used as an opportunity to develop independence and an identity that integrates some Western influences within their Korean identity (Jeong, You, and Kwon 2014; Lee 2010). Since its beginnings in the mid-1990s, kirogi has drawn much scholarly attention within migration studies. While no longer a novel form of a transnational family, kirogi families are found in various societies, and their language use at home continues to warrant exploration. Despite the body of research on kirogi families across different academic disciplines, the findings of the majority of the studies focus on the outcomes of this family arrangement and its social effects. Few studies have focused on language use among kirogi family members and what factors impact their FLP and language practices at home. Thus, in this study, I will examine how FLP is constructed in the family’s everyday interaction and how social factors and language ideologies impact the formation of FLP in kirogi families. In the following section, I will explicate how this study is situated in the existing FLP literature and what specific explorations in the previous studies are relevant to the current study.

LITERATURE REVIEW I delve into the significance of examining language ideologies, particularly, the parents’ experiences of language learning and use, to better understand a kirogi family’s unique but complex educational arrangement. Short-term stayers who will return to home countries require a fairly strategic FLP while confronting language ideology. The three extents of FLP, which are family language practices,

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language management, and family language ideologies (Spolsky 2004), will be discussed in the following section. Family Language Policy and Interaction This study is situated in the burgeoning field of FLP that emphasizes FLP as emerging in the interactions among family members (Fogle and King 2013; Mensel 2018). The focus is on each kirogi family’s ways of justifying their FLP and implementation in the interaction. Curdt-Christiansen (2013) pointed out that there were few studies looking at FLP through parent/child interactions in everyday life, such as parents’ language inputs and children’s responses to parents’ language choices. Schwartz (2010) also emphasized the importance of investigating parents’ decisions about languages that they use in their interactions with their children. Even though parents value home culture and language, that does not mean that parents are motivated to promote the use of home language to their children (Curdt-Christiansen 2016). This suggests that giving attention to actual language practices among family members is fundamental. Despite looking at a new speaker context and multiple language uses among family members, Smith-Christmas’s (2018) study influenced my investigation, particularly that this longitudinal study shows how FLP was negotiated among family members (grandmother, a caregiver, and two grandchildren) over time. The grandmother tried to create an interactional space where Gaelic, the home language, was frequently introduced to the granddaughter without any pressure to learn the grandmother’s language. While maintaining a fun child-centered interaction, the grandmother strategically taught her granddaughter Gaelic by praising and repeating her granddaughter’s language expressions. While earlier studies focused on the parents’ role to socialize their children at home, the reverse roles are also important, as the children have more accessibility to certain linguistic resources outside of home (school, friends’ group, activities, etc.) than their parents do. There has been a perspective that home language use is based on family members’ mutual influences instead of top-down socialization process (Luykx 2003), and this viewpoint emphasizes the role of children in the interaction of bilingual and multilingual families. For example, Tuominen (1999) claimed that school-aged children in multilingual families often made decisions regarding language use at home, affecting the parents’ language policies. In addition, Fogle and King (2013) analyzed different transnational families’ FLP in diverse contexts and emphasized the children’s role in constructing and implementing FLP. In their study, they examine the children’s metalinguistic comments, use of resistance strategies, parental responses to children’s growing language proficiency, and enactment of larger discourses of race and language in diverse transnational families. The children

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also elicit, negotiate, and resist parents’ language choices (Lanza, 2004) which influences the construction of FLP. By analyzing family interactions, it becomes possible to observe the ways of implementing FLP at home and its outcomes, which leads to changes of language policy. Likewise, closely looking at parent and children’s interactions in the frame of FLP enables me to explore kirogi family members’ meaning-making process, language choices, and learning strategies in a private but contested site, home. To grasp the holistic understanding about FLP among kirogi families, I closely observed the daily interactions among kirogi family members and analyzed how FLP was enacted and negotiated. Both mother and children are emergent bilinguals in a sense, but the imbalance of accessibility to the linguistic and cultural resources situated them in different positions in the family. Family Language Policy and Language Ideologies Language ideologies are defined as “any sets of beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (Silverstein 1979: 193). Beliefs and values from various social contexts including families, schools, institutions, media, and so on impact the individual speakers’ attitudes toward language learning and use. Language ideologies, therefore, are context-bounded and interwoven with the speakers’ sociocultural experiences (Kroskrity 2004). In this study, the construct of language ideologies is adopted to understand kirogi families’ attitudes and beliefs about bilingualism and how these ideologies and their transnational experiences are related to the construction of FLP. Understanding FLP requires knowledge not only about private domains but also about conflicts and negotiations occurring due to sociopolitical influences within the family (Curdt-Christiansen 2013). A family may be viewed as “porous, open to influences and interests from other broader social forces and institutions” (Canagarajah 2008: 171). Previous FLP studies have proved that parental ideologies and beliefs informed the parents’ strategies and ways of constructing FLP, which eventually impacted the children’s linguistic outcomes (De Houwer 1999; King and Fogle 2006; 2013). FLP studies primarily discuss bilingual and multilingual families in which the parents promote two or more languages to the children (De Houwer 2009; Lanza 2004), or instead choose to maintain a heritage language. In this process, the parents’ immigrant experiences (Curdt-Christiansen 2009; Wei 1994) and public discourses (Okita 2002) play an important role in bringing the consequential impacts to the construction of FLP. In this sense, the kirogi family’s decision to move to an English-speaking country and the choice to place the family in English-dominant contexts is grounded on the social value of English in South Korea. These ideas about English suggest that language

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ability is imperative to success in life, and kirogi families choose to designate time and resources to a life abroad. I anchored my ideas more clearly by adopting Douglas Fir Group’s (2016) framework as a way of thinking through the location of ideologies and family language practices. The Douglas Fir Group (2016) proposed the model, the multifaceted nature of language learning and teaching, which captures the complexity of three distinguished but interrelated levels of L2 learning: micro, meso, and macro levels. In this model, recurring contexts of language use contribute to the development of multilingual repertoires, and this interaction is situated in and shaped by a “meso level” which is a particular social context such as family, school, or workplace. The communities in the meso level are impacted by pervasive social conditions, “which affect the possibility and nature of persons creating social identities in terms of investment, agency, and power” (p. 24). In addition, larger societal ideologies on language learning and use form and are formed by these communities. The most significant point is that all three levels are dependent and exist only through constant interactions. Likewise, the family members’ interaction happens within a family as a community, particularly in the case of the kirogi family arrangement, which is also impacted by larger discourses around English education or education in general in Korea. This study explores the cases of four different Korean kirogi families in order to examine the ideological ground as well as the families’ experiences related to language learning, which impacts how different households make various educational decisions in language learning and use. As such, home becomes a site where “language ideologies are both formed and enacted through caregiver-child interactions” (King, Fogle, and Logan-Terry 2008: 913). Among multicultural and multilingual families who try to maintain and follow heritage languages and cultures different from the mainstream society, home becomes an even more critical domain in which parents, children, and other family members become key participants influencing language choices and beliefs (Spolsky 2012).

THIS STUDY Data Collection This study is part of a larger research project that investigates various types of Korean transnational families in the United States, and their language learning and use at home. This study focuses on four Korean kirogi families who are short-term stayers and plan to return to Korea after their designated time in the United States. The aims of this study are twofold. First, this study will explore the language ideologies and social discourses of bilingualism interwoven with the kirogis’ educational and linguistic choices, and how these shape the family

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members’ language use at home. Second, it also examines how the “one family and two countries” arrangement is mediated through FLP. I employed purposive sampling techniques to recruit participants among Korean immigrants with children in the United States. The families have a commonality in that the mother of the family brought the children to the United States while the father lives in Korea. The category of kirogi was also introduced and shared during the interviews (e.g., the participants referred to themselves as kirogi, or they quoted other people categorizing them as kirogi). They all planned to move to the United States for several years before they actually came, and they needed time to consider the ideal region to live in the United States, their children’s ages and the school systems, and the mother’s educational institution if they planned to attend a school. The primary sources of data in this study are semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observation, and recordings of family interaction. Participants’ background questionnaires and language use profiles were also collected. The methods used for collecting audio recorded data consisted of the participants’ recording their language practices at home (without the researcher as in Lanza 2004; Mensel 2018) as well as semi-structured individual interviews. In late November of 2017 to late December of 2019, I conducted several separate interviews with each primary caregiver, who is the mother in all cases. The first interview focused on informing the mothers about the study and collecting background information from them. The interviews were conducted in Korean based on the participants’ preference, and all the interviews were audio recorded and transcribed for data analysis. After the first interview, the participants were asked to record their family language interaction during dinnertime, playtime, or any primary family time when the family members engage in conversation or do literary work. This context even includes family interaction through phones or video chat (e.g., the children talking with their father in Korea via FaceTime). Naturally occurring interactional data in both English and Korean was recorded, and a good deal of mixture between these two languages was also observed. Finally, an average of fourteen audio recordings per family were collected from the four participating families. The total duration of the audio recordings of interactions per family was about 5 hours and 40 minutes (about 3 hours and 20 minutes for all interviews and 2 hours and 20 minutes of interaction). After transcribing and initial coding of all the recorded data, the additional interviews were conducted for follow-up questions related to the audio recordings. Participants Four Korean families are self-categorized kirogi families: the mother and children came to the United States for educational purposes and the father lives in Korea

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TABLE 5.2  Demographic Information of Participants Mother’s Age Number of name children and their ages

Occupation Husband’s Visa status Years in in Korea occupation and job in the the United United States States

Jay

Office worker

50

Jaesuk

43

Heesu

43

Eunjung 45

1 (son, 10)

2 (daughter, 10; Teacher son, 8) 2 (sons, 10) Researcher

4 (daughters, 10, Teacher 15, 16; son, 3)

Office worker

Lawyer Public officer Public officer

US citizen (works at a community organization) F1 (graduate student) J1 (visiting researcher) F1 (graduate student)

1.5 years

2 years 1.5 years

3 years

to financially support the family. I was able access the research participants through Korean church meetings in addition to recruiting the participants by word of mouth in a local community. At the time of data collection, each family was in different stages of living abroad. The participating mothers and their children came to live in the United States either for a designated time or sometimes an undecided time. Table 5.2 presents the demographic information of the participants. Unlike the other kirogi mothers, Jay has various experiences living abroad because of her father’s job. She grew up in Hong Kong, Korea, and the UK and went to international schools. She also went to college in the United States, and after graduating college, she came back to Korea to work at a global company. Such experiences made it relatively easy to decide to come back to the United States with her ten-year-old son. Currently, she has a part-time job at a nonprofit organization. Her husband is an executive director in a global company in Korea, and he visits his family about three times per year whenever his work schedule allows it. Jaesuk came to the United States in 2017 with her two children. Currently, she is a graduate student. She has two goals as a kirogi: first, to pursue her graduate studies and second, to offer new educational experiences to her children. This decision was made with the condition that she would bring her two children to the United States. As she was close to finishing her degree, she decided to stay longer in the United States with her children. When Heesu, a researcher in a Korean research organization, came to the United States, it was her first time living and working abroad. She decided to come to the United States when she applied and was accepted to her current

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position. However, she also explained that the move was planned for a long time for her children’s English education. Her children are twin brothers who are ten years old. Heesu’s husband is a public officer who visits his family twice a year during the children’s summer and winter break. Due to the mandatory return after the two years of residency training, Heesu’s family has to be back in Korea. Eunjung was a social studies teacher in Korea. She first came to the United States with her family because her husband was a resident employee in 2017 to 2018. After the father went back to Korea, the family decided to remain in the United States because of their education. Eunjung wanted to go to graduate school, and the children wanted to go to school in the United States, too. She started her graduate study in the United States, which helped her maintain her student visa, and her student visa helped the children attain their dependent visas as well to attend a public school. Though the participants do not know each other, these four families came to the United States at a similar time, and currently live in the same US city. I shared some similar life experiences with the participants in that they are Korean immigrants living in the United States with children, and some previous experiences including raising a child and attending a graduate school. We have an equivalent knowledge of Korean and American culture and the educational systems. My positioning enables the participants to communicate confidently (Adler and Adler 1987; Kanuha 2000), and the shared understanding allows both the participating mothers and I to have a more in-depth understanding of the cultural ideologies related to language education and the challenges the immigrant family faces in managing bilingual environment at home. Data Analysis Data analysis followed the comparative processing of qualitative research (Merriam and Tisdell 2016). Once data were collected and transcribed, the data were coded to highlight meaningful family language interaction and salient narrative segments that show the families’ ideas on language education. Next, I conceptualized the preliminary data regarding family’s ideas about learning language and culture, bilingualism, and language practice at home. Based on the salient themes, the codes were created and finalized to maintain the consistency of nodes. I conducted a content analysis of the collected data by focusing on the participants’ experiences as kirogi and their linguistics practices. In addition to interview data, the mother and children’s interactions were analyzed, and particular attention went to the linguistic and cultural resources the family members brought into their interactions. I focus on the participants’ moments of life experiences, either described in narratives or interactions, and the ways the mothers construct the notion of bilingualism, their shifted roles

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and challenges, and the absence of a paternal role in language education. More specifically, in the following section, I present the findings of my analysis by focusing on the following questions: (1) Who influences the FLP in the kirogi families, and how does this happen in the family interaction?; (2) How does the mother’s role as the only physically present parent shape the FLP?; and (3) How does the family’s transnational location mediate the construction of FLP?

FINDINGS Language Ideologies and Kirogi Families The Korean families plan and invest in an opportunity to situate the family in a bilingual environment. Although all four families in this study came to the United States for English education, at the same time, all of them emphasize both English and Korean to be a “true” or “perfect” bilingual. The discussion may depart from the understanding that placing a family in the transnational context is Korean parents’ planned strategy and desire for the children’s bilingual education. The meaning of bilingual is different from one family to the other since it is closely related to a family’s flexibility and different future orientation. Hua and Wei (2016) found that bilingualism and multilingualism have different meanings to different generations or different family members. The participants of this study also do not confine the meaning of bilingual or bilingualism within the linguistic capacity, but it is thoroughly connected to the parents’ experiences, flexibilities, adaptability, and future orientation. Similarly, Heesu also explained her ideas about bilingualism when she talked about the reason why she became a kirogi. Her answer is closely connected to her experience as a language learner. Excerpt 5.1. “It is about confidence” Being bilingual is, um, rather than studying a language but it is about having experience and confidence. So, you experienced it and then you won’t be afraid. Honestly, we get scared if we’ve never done an international conference. I got scared at the first international conference but when you actually do it, it’s not a big deal (Heesu, 2018). In Korea, Heesu worked at a Korean research institution, and her international or intercultural experiences at work have shaped her view of bilingualism. To her, being bilingual means trying out and having an experience of using English. This “unlike me” excerpt above shows the desire to raise their children as bilingual, at the same time revealing that the mothers’ desire to become kirogi was to compensate for what they were unable to achieve in their lives as less competent English speakers.

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Unlike the cases introduced above, Jay’s idea of bilingualism was based on her experience of the benefits of being bilingual. She acknowledges that her parents’ emphasis on learning and maintaining Korean made her competent in both languages. By reflecting on past experiences as a bilingual, she reveals the ways she raises her son as a bilingual. Excerpt 5.2. “My parents did a good job” We got tormented if we skipped the Saturday Korean school. They never gave us allowance if we did not speak Korean at home. But my mom and dad couldn’t tolerate Koreans who couldn’t speak Korean. When I got into my job in Korea, I was hired because of my English, not my Korean. I got made fun of a lot, but I also got many praises. I thought how it cannot get better than this. I could continue to develop there, honestly, I got a lot of good feedbacks, but it was compliment to my parent’s compliment. ‘Wow, your parents did a good job’ (Jay, 2019). Her positive experiences of being bilingual made her use Korean with her son at home just as her parents did for her and her siblings. As seen in Excerpt 5.2, the positive evaluation of her Korean from her colleagues made her valuable as a bilingual. Though she feels more comfortable using English, she tries to use English minimally with the purpose of maintaining her son’s Korean. Except in the cases when she helps her son’s homework or tries to be stricter to him, she interacts with her son mostly in Korean. Jay’s interview also presents the value of English in the Korean market since she was able to get her first job in Korea due to her English proficiency. This example shows how the two languages were viewed in the society: English has institutional and economic value while Korean has cultural value. Though these two participants have different backgrounds, both of them present how the language ideologies in Korea that value English influenced their decision to become kirogis. In general, being kirogi is a way of promoting bilingualism in the family. The mothers consider bilingualism as a source of pride and improvement of future perspectives. However, raising children bilingually does not only mean acquisition of linguistic knowledge. Rather it also means becoming well-rounded and improving the family’s well-being. My research demonstrates that the way the mothers construct the notion of bilingualism is closely related to their language experiences. It serves as a tool to complement what they have not been able to achieve as language learners. This provides a strong driving force for the kirogi family arrangement. In addition, the kirogi families’ flexibility regarding their future orientation contributes to constructing meaning of bilingualism for the mothers. In the following section, I will more closely examine the kirogi mothers’ or children’s roles in the family and the challenges that they face in managing FLP.

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Children Take Charge of FLP All of the participants struggled at varying degrees with their roles as caregivers and as less competent language learners while being kirogis abroad. Further, kirogi mothers face new challenges, including making educational decisions by themselves, coping with difficulties related to acculturation, and parenting within a new school system (Kim, Agic, and McKenzie 2014). At the same time, they feel a great deal of responsibility to educate their children successfully. De Houwer (1999) discusses in her study the “impact beliefs” in which parents see themselves more or less capable of and responsible for raising bilingual children. Likewise, the kirogi mothers’ responsibility and capability are shared in the interviews for this study, as the mothers tried to maximize both Korean and English inputs for their children. However, depending on the mother’s linguistic and cultural expertise, each mother has different roles and faces different challenges. In particular, the mothers’ competency in English, living abroad experiences, and intercultural knowledge are the main deciding factors for family members’ roles at home. Furthermore, as the child’s English proficiency improves over time, the relationship between the mother and her children also changes. In Jaesuk’s case, she is clearly aware of her role at home and the scope where she can help the children’s linguistic development. Excerpt 5.3. “I can help them with Korean” If I can do something between those two, I think that I can teach Korean. I think the best thing I can do for them is to expose them to the language with effort. Originally, for one and a half year using English was prohibited at home. I told them not to speak in English and when they come home, they talk in Korean. But I couldn’t stop them. So one day I just gave up. If their father was here I might have been easier to control them. Since we divide the work (Jaesuk, 2019). Instead of using English at home, Jaesuk maximizes the use of Korean at home for the purpose of maintaining the children’s Korean. At first, English was prohibited, but as time went by, and as the children became more exposed to English at school, it turned out to be impossible to manage. Moreover, maintaining a home language is considered a collaborative task in which both parents participate, and in Excerpt 5.3, she expresses the lack of these resources. In Heesu’s case, she and the twin boys learn English together in the home as she helps them with homework and vocabulary by using technology and playing language games. Excerpt 5.4. “You sound like my classmate” Because they still know that I am better at English grammar and vocabulary, they want me to read a book and ask about a word. But sometimes they say, my

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accent is similar to the kid in their class who just came from China and can’t speak English very well (Heesu, 2018). Heesu mentioned that she can explain the English grammar and vocabulary when reading a book or doing homework for the boys, and the boys often ask English questions to her. However, as seen in Excerpt 5.4, the boys criticize Heesu’s accent when reading a book. At the interview she told me that she was extremely mad when she heard that criticism from her twin boys that she told them she would not read books for them again. Though she continuously helped the children’s grammar and vocabulary, after this incident, I observed more occasions that Heesu double checked her spelling and pronunciation with an application or Google Home to attempt to provide more accurate inputs to the children. Fogle and King (2013) argue that bilingual families in transnational contexts have uneven access to linguistic resources, and the children’s language competence development and increased metalinguistic knowledge impacts FLP. This example shows how children play a critical role in modifying and negotiating FLP, and the kirogi mother flexibly finds a way to improve her English, which becomes the accurate linguistic inputs to her children. The boys’ negative comments may work as “initiated resistance” (Fogle and King 2013: 9) to the family language policy, which is using English dominantly for the literacy work at home and their mother’s leading position. Eunjung has relatively older children compared to other kirogi families in this study, and her teenage daughters helped Eunjung’s English for her graduate schoolwork. Though the mother wants to use English at home to allow her daughters to more freely communicate among themselves, they tried not to because of their mother who is not fully competent. Excerpt 5.5. “They speak perfect English unlike me” I: Do you often use Korean at home? E: Yes, I tell them I want to do it in English, but the kids say no since I can’t speak English. They speak English sometimes but when I’m there they change to speak Korean. Honestly it lowers my self-esteem. The parent should be able to lead the kids in a foreign country and care for them but rather I ask the kids and depend on them. My oldest daughter is almost my writing center. To speak English as your own language it opens doors and opportunities to do things. I think it’s a freedom for the kids. Knowing both the language and culture is the ‘perfect’ English. They can live different life than mine, yes unlike me (Eunjung, 2019). Eunjung was a middle school teacher before she came to the United States, and she never lived in a foreign county. She depends on her daughters’ help with English, which led her to emphasize the importance of being bilingual. The

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disadvantageous experiences that the mothers went through because of their incompetency in English while living in a foreign country worked as deciding factors in their construction of the meaning of bilingualism. Eunjung wanted her family members to use English at home, which might be helpful to improve her English, but her plan was rejected by her children. To Eunjung, being a bilingual means life opportunities and freedom which she might not have had as a monolingual, but her desire was not realized because her children were in charge of FLP in this family and kept refusing to use English with their mother. In the case of Jay, her experiences living abroad and her fluent English qualify her as a linguistic knowledge provider or expert to her son. Excerpt 5.6 demonstrates her son’s dependence on her, including asking for help in English. Excerpt 5.6. “My son thinks I am a superwoman!” I’ve taken the role as a father and all the responsibilities that the father used to have in Korea, and my son knows it very well. It may sound funny, but I and my son didn’t have a close relationship when we were in Korea. ((laughter)) However, as the father is not here with us, my son started asking me for any help whenever he needs his father. It’s hard to explain but, when we were in Korea, his father was able to help him with all his problems or needs like a superman, and now he expects me to do likewise (Jay, 2019). As Excerpt 5.6 shows, Jay’s son depends on her and asks many questions about language and culture. Jay took the role of providing the information to him to support his adjustment to the new school and the new linguistic environment. The emergence of this mother-son interaction in this new context increases their family bond. Unlike Jaesuk, Heesu, and Eunjung, who either provided Korean help to the children or learned English with the children, Jay offered both English and Korean assistance to her son despite the fact that her son required nearly constant help with English. The findings in this section reveal that the mothers’ level of English proficiency is a crucial factor in determining their role in the family, though all of the mothers try to maximize resources for the benefit of their children’s education. The mother’s proficiency means the accessibility to English resources or communities, thus, plays a key role for the construction of the FLP. More importantly, the children who have developed greater English proficiency are in charge of FLP in the kirogi families. The uneven encounters of language learning and the power differential between the mothers and children are the crucial factors to construct FLP. Multisited Transnational Families and Mediation through FLP The physical absence of a father figure in the household impacts the families’ language practices at home. This might be the most salient feature of the kirogi

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family, which make it distinctive from other transnational families. In all the cases, though the father lives abroad, he tries to be connected to the family through frequent video calls, chats, and text messages. This makes the father feel less excluded from the family, a common difficulty among kirogi families. Several studies emphasize the importance of advances in technology, which made it easier and more affordable to the kirogi families to maintain feelings of family cohesion despite their physical distance. Finch and Kim (2012), for example, investigated the use of technology for kirogi family’s cohesion. They argue kirogi families take advantage of the latest technology to maintain communication among dispersed family members. In their interview studies, Jeong, You, and Kwon (2014) also maintain that participants made an effort to maintain family cohesion with frequent communication using technology and sporadic reunions. All kirogi families in this study use different venues including Skype, FaceTime, and KakaoTalk (Korean text, voice, and video chatting application) to frequently connect to the father in Korea. Excerpt 5.7 is one of the examples of father-child remote interaction through a video call in Korean. English translation is provided below. Excerpt 5.7. “Call me at 9 pm tomorrow” F: 내일 할 일 다 해놓고, 아빠한테 전화를 해. You call me first at 9 pm tomorrow when you’re finished with all your work. J: 응. Okay. F: 알았어? 약속한거야, 내일! Okay? You promised, don’t forget to call me tomorrow! J: 응. Okay. F: 그리고 내일 알림장 보여주고, 1주일, 월,화,수 3일동안 쓴 알림장 내일 보여주고, 그 다음에 내일 와서 해야될 것들 하고, 그 다음에 아빠랑 통화해. Also, show me your agenda for this week during the call. Let’s talk after you finish your things to do. J: 응. Okay. F: 알았어. 아빠 이제 일하러 가야 되니까 끊어. Alright, now I have to go back to work. I’ll talk to you later. (Jaesuk’s family: father and son conversation via video call) In Excerpt 5.7, the father checks the children’s homework and musical instrument practices at home. Since the child missed a piano practice, the father asked the child to make a promise to practice harder and call him back the next day to report. Excerpt 5.7 shows that the father is closely involved in the children’s education. Jaesuk reported in the interview that she and the children

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wish to maintain an emotional connection to their dad by making sure he is not excluded from the family. This interaction exemplifies a commonly found interaction between the children and the father. Interestingly, though there was not an explicitly decided FLP in terms of language use, the father also serves a role in maintaining the children’s Korean (Jeong, You, and Kwon 2014). Jaesuk in particular emphasizes the father’s role in language maintenance because of her limited access to the Korean community in the United States, which might provide linguistic and cultural resources to the family. I have observed that the son always tries to answer his dad in Korean, whereas he mainly uses English when he talks with his mother. More importantly, the father fulfills his parenting role by keeping track of his children’s homework, extracurricular obligations, and holding them accountable. For example, the father called to check whether the children completed the assigned piano practice daily and often asked them to play over the phone. Jaesuk told me that this is her husband’s way of alleviating the burden of taking care of children’s education abroad. Similarly, in other families, the fathers tried to get involved in children’s education despite the distance. The fathers often asked questions regarding English, such as “How much English did you improved?” and “Do you know how to say some words in English?” These continuous efforts prevent conversation breakdowns and awkward moments when the whole family meets, according to Jay and Jaesuk. All of the participants in this study explain that the large Korean community was the most crucial factor in their choice of city, second to whether they already have settled family members in the US city. However, it seems challenging to the kirogi mothers to access the already established Korean community because of the Korean immigrants’ negative images of kirogi families and the absence of a father in the household. Previous studies demonstrate that kirogi families faced psychological distress due to this negative perception (Kim and Yang 2012). To answer my interview question, “How would it be different if your husband was with you and the children in the US?” Jaesuk answered as follows: Excerpt 5.8. “They stare at us pathetically” If my husband were here, it became less difficult. Like for instance, it’s hard for me to fit in at the church. Because all the churches are family units. Thus, it’s kind of iffy. I can’t belong anywhere. I cannot belong to graduate student group without kids. I’m just an old lady, an old lady who brought her kids. And we’re not a whole family figure, right? I felt that immigrants here have very negative feeling towards kirogi’s mom. They think we want to use something in the US and just get out. They also think that we use the taxes they pay and take advantage of that. So honestly, first, they look at us with the eye of surveillance and secondly, stare at us pathetically. I’ll never be an insider in that church. But the families with husbands gets treated differently. This also takes

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the opportunity of mingling with Koreans and using Korean and doing Korean stuffs with other Koreans (Jaesuk, 2019). This interview presents Jaesuk’s difficulties to belong to the Korean community because of the other Korean immigrants’ prejudice. As discussed earlier in this study, people in the Korean immigrant community may treat kirogi as a temporary, short-term immigrants differently from the immigrants (iminja) who settled in the United States, which is why Jaesuk may feel alienated. The limited access to the Korean community also means the closure of getting information from Koreans in the local community, which includes inquiries from finding a good private tutor for the children to finding a good neighborhood. This isolation also limits the opportunities for using Korean, and as a result, the children from kirogi families have their mother as the only Korean interactor at home. The mothers’ concern about this limitation of Korean language use seems somewhat solved by frequent interaction with the father in Korea. Same examples were found in Jay’s family too. Excerpt 5.9. “He will grow up as a bilingual” When my husband comes, we use Korean more often. Because of modern technology they do FaceTime every morning and night. At least at that time there won’t be no scolding, their relationship will recover, and I think it would get better. That’s why when I do face time so that they would talk about every little detail, hoping it would get better. Also, the language, ah, that’s also another way of using the language. I don’t know if this is being too arrogant, growing up as bilingual now won’t be a big problem (Jay, 2019). Excerpt 5.9 clearly shows Jay’s belief that her son’s frequent interaction with his father is crucial for maintaining Korean and becoming a bilingual. Interaction with the father in Korea has not only the emotional function of connecting with each other and sharing daily life, but it also offers a chance to reinforce Korean language and culture. Furthermore, the father’s absence in Jay’s family is related to her selection of English when she has to be more assertive and stricter to her son. In the interview, Jay shared her concern of a missing father figure in daily life, which might have a negative impact on raising a boy. She uses English as a tool to replace her husband’s role in the family. Excerpt 5.10. “I am doing a bad cop by speaking English” My son is more responsive to male authority, but he starts to look down on his father because he thinks his English is getting better. My husband always told me he felt like a stranger and was worried he keeps getting excluded and losing authority over my son. So, I told my husband once that we need to have a bad cop and a good cop. I think I only use English when I scold him because I want to be stricter and have to take a new role of bad cop ((laughter)) (Jay, 2019).

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As a way of exerting more authority, as well as filling the missing gap caused by the father’s absence, she intentionally uses more English to discipline the son. English is chosen by Jay as the language of discipline, and the switch from Korean to English refers to her shifted role as a strict disciplinarian who replaces the father’s job. In another interview, she told me that she thinks she was not that strict before and moving to the United States gave her new pressure to educate her son well as a primary caregiver. The son thinks his English is getting better than his father’s and the changing proficiency changes the positions among the family members. Overall, the absence of a father in the house influences the family members’ language use. Each family maximizes their linguistic and cultural resources and utilizes advanced technologies to create home as a bilingual environment where they rehearse, negotiate, and reinforce their two languages. The nonexistence of a father in the house shapes the language uses and strategies, and it makes the kirogi mothers vigorously replace the father’s linguistic and cultural roles.

DISCUSSION This study endeavors to understand the kirogi families’ language policy, practice, and interaction to see how this family arrangement shapes the kirogi families’ daily language use. The specific conditions include the absence of the father, limited access to the Korean communities, and the mothers’ varying levels of English proficiency, which play a key role in daily language practices. Each family’s divergent resources, contexts, and experiences create dynamics. The parents struggled between the children’s successful English acquisition and loss of Korean. Even when the parents were happy with their children’s growing confidence in English, they were concerned with their children’s Korean language skills to successfully readapt back to the home country. In her ethnographic case study of Korean study abroad families and their language socialization, Song (2012) examines how the mothers’ future plans to return to Korea impact their home language practices. For example, persuading the child to use Korean at home rather than English was observed in the one of the participating families. This is also realized as the dynamic nature of family interaction in the current study. Within the limited time of living abroad, the families strategically plan, police, and practice languages at home and maximize the available resources around them. This presents the nature of transnational families and the characteristics of their FLP. In this well-planned family arrangement, mothers, as single physically present caregivers, take the consequential role of making educational decisions for the family. It is common among the participating mothers: the mothers’ language proficiency serves as a key factor to decide the role in the family and the nature of the interaction with her children. If the mother is (self-defined) bilingual as

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in Jay’s case, the child depends on the mother’s English proficiency and uses his mother as a resource provider. On the other hand, if the mother’s English proficiency is not fluent enough, the mother’s role is limited to enforcing the children’s Korean maintenance or learning English alongside the children with the support of technology. In this study, as the children’s English proficiency developed, the nature of using home language became more complex. With the exception of Jay’s family, as the children’s English proficiency progressed, resulting in uneven proficiencies among family members, children can pull the strings in shaping FLP. In addition, the use of technology serves an important role to reinforce a bilingual environment at home by inviting the kirogi father who is remotely in Korea but still provides Korean input to the children. This shows that using technology is not only maintaining the family relations but also has a more practical function: helping to develop the children’s linguistic and cultural awareness and a new global stance and managing children’s education in general. Ideologies of bi/multilingualism and its benefits play an important role in strategically constructing family language policy. In this process, mothers are the main spring of the transnational family arrangement. The findings also show linkages between transnational life experiences, language ideologies, and language practices, which allude to the shifts of the family members’ roles as well as negotiation of a linguistic reality.

CONCLUSION Being kirogi is an educational choice that necessitates different linguistic and cultural environments for the family members. Being kirogi is also considered practicable and desirable as middle-class Korean families pursue success through education in the global arena (Lee and Koo 2006). This is a practice for the family to effectively utilize family resources to enhance their desire for more mobility. By examining the dynamic nature of FLP, this study advances our understanding of language use and learning within kirogi families. This study has demonstrated the importance of closely analyzing family interactions at home to better capture the individuals’ language use, learning, and challenges as the diversity of individual linguistic and cultural background has dramatically increased in the United States. The immigrants came to the United States with varying and pressing needs related to living abroad. The implication of this study is that we need more tangible institutional and community support for individuals and families. More research on varied types of transnational families, such as kirogi, needs to be conducted to better understand families’ investment, aspiration, and challenges in language learning and use at home in the era of multilingualism.

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In that sense, this study paves the way for a range of FLP studies in the future to investigate more diverse types of Korean transnational families in different stages of migration and with different immigrant histories and social backgrounds, which embrace pre- and post-sojourn experiences.

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Kim, G., and Yang, S. (2012), “Separation Experiences of Wild Geese Families from a Social Exchange Perspective,” Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association, 50(2): 11–23. Kim, H., and Kwak, M. (2019), Outward and Upward Mobilities: International Students in Canada, Their Families, and Structuring Institutions, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kim, J., Agic, B., and McKenzie, K. (2014), “The Mental Health of Korean Transnational Mothers: A Scoping Review,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 60(8): 783–94. King, K., and Fogle, L. (2006), “Bilingual Parenting as Good Parenting: Parents’ Perspectives on Family Language Policy for Additive Bilingualism,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(6): 695–712. King, K., and Fogle, L. (2013), “Family Language Policy and Bilingual Parenting,” Language Teaching, 46(2): 172–94, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444812000493. King, K., Fogle, L., and Logan-Terry, A. (2008), “Family Language Policy,” Language & Linguistics Compass, 2(5): 907–22. Kroskrity, P. (2004), “Language Ideologies,” in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ed. A. Duranti, 496–517, Oxford: Blackwell. Lanza, E. (2004), Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, H. (2010), “ ‘I Am a Kirogi Mother’: Education Exodus and Life Transformation among Korean Transnational Women,” Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 9(4): 250–64. Lee, Y., and Koo, H. (2006), “ ‘Wild Geese Fathers’ and a Globalised Family Strategy for Education in Korea,” International Development Planning Review, 28: 533–53. Luykx, A. (2003), “Weaving Languages Together: Family Language Policy and Gender Socialization in Bilingual Aymara Households,” in Language Socialization in Bilingual and Multilingual Societies, ed. R. Bayley and S. Schecter, 25–43, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ly, P. (2005), “A Wrenching Choice,” Washington Post. Available at: http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59355-2005Jan8.html?noredirect=on (accessed on September 1, 2020). Mensel, L. (2018), “‘Quiere Koffie?’ The Multilingual Familylect of Transcultural Families,” International Journal of Multilingualism, 15(3): 233–48. Merriam, S., and Tisdell, E. (2016), Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation, 4th ed., San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Okita, T. (2002), Invisible Work: Bilingualism, Language Choice and Childrearing in Intermarried Families, Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Schwartz, M. (2010), “Family Language Policy: Core Issues of an Emerging Field,” Applied Linguistics Review, 19(6): 171–91. Silverstein, M. (1979), “Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology,” in The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, ed. P. R. Cyne, 193–247, Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Smith-Christmas, C. (2018), “‘One Cas, Two Cas’: Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Family Language Policy,” Multilingua, 37(2): 131–52. Song, J. (2012), “The Struggle Over Class, Identity, and Language: A Case Study of South Korean Transnational Families,” Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16(2): 201–17, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00525.x. Spolsky, B. (2004), Language Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Spolsky, B. (2012), “Family Language Policy—the Critical Domain,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 33(1): 3–11. Tuominen, A. (1999), “Who Decides the Home Language? A Look at Multilingual Families,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 140: 59–76. Vidal, M. (2015), “Talking with Abuelo: Performing Authenticity in a Multicultural, Multisited family,” Mutilingua, 34(2): 187–210. Wei, L. (1994), Three Generations Two Languages One Family: Language Choice and Language Shift in a Chinese Community in Britain, Philadelphia, PA: Multilingual Matters.

CHAPTER SIX

The Formation of ‘Ohana in Hawaiian Language Revitalization CHRISTINA HIGGINS

INTRODUCTION Research on Family Language Policy (FLP) has long investigated language use with attention to the relationships among parents, children, siblings, and grandparents, often focusing on families who live together, under the same roof (e.g., Curdt-Christiansen 2009; King et al. 2008; Macalister and Mirvahedi 2016; Schwartz and Verschik 2013). In this scholarship, the concept of “family” is conventionally associated with nuclear, biologically related families first and foremost, and the object of inquiry is normally whether and to what degree the transmission of heritage languages in second and third generation families is successful from parents to children, with some attention to the role of grandparents as a catalyst for language maintenance (Fishman 1991). Meanwhile, the societal changes of the past century have led to new formations of the family, as mobility, transnationalism, relocation, and separation have produced new roles and relationships. As Beck-Gernsheim (1998) explains, in preindustrial times, families were bound together by mutual dependence due to the common goal of maintaining their livelihoods. Since the early 1900s, however, the growth of the welfare state offered individual members of the family an opportunity to be less dependent on this mutual dependence, for changes in

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the labor market and the development of social security provided opportunities to be less constrained by family obligations. Moreover, changes in gender roles in postindustrial societies have led to relationships built on individualization, rather than mutual dependence. While preindustrial roles stemmed from shared experiences, ethnolinguistic identities, and cultural values, postindustrial family roles have arguably become “post-familial,” whereby family relations are more elective in nature. This means that people are freer to choose whether or not to have spouses and children, whether to stay together or divorce/separate, and whether and to what degree to maintain ties with their blood relations. While preindustrial conceptualizations of kinship are still influential, postindustrial families are increasingly reflective of these changes. All of these changes are part of the process of detraditionalization (Heelas et al. 1996), whereby individuals’ increasing reflexivity leads them to forge their identities without reference to the traditional reference points of ethnicity, homeland, family, traditional gender roles, and religion. In this view, traditional societies “determined identity by birth and hence provided few if any occasions for the questions of ‘who am I?’ to arise” (Bauman 2004: 49). While criticisms of this dichotomy have been noted (e.g., Adams 2007), new formations of family are apparent in many strands of postindustrial societies in contemporary forms of elective and circumstantial single parenting, LGBTQ parenting, caretaking that utilizes friend networks, and more (see introduction). In the Global North especially, the dominance of neoliberal value systems reinforce detraditionalization, as families prioritize children’s success in education and actively cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset among their children in order to plan for competing in a global marketplace. Neoliberal dispositions impact how families operate on a daily basis, as focusing on success results in a strongly child-centered lifestyle, significant investments of time and financial resources in extracurricular activities, and more autonomy and democracy in parent– child relationships (Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik 2015). These changes mean that the younger members of such families spend less time with grandparents and extended family, which means that they have less opportunity to be exposed to the languages of the family network. In Hawai‘i, detraditionalization is particularly complex for families who are engaged in the process of Hawaiian language transmission and maintenance. In alignment with typical detraditionalized families, they experience more egalitarian gender roles, and some also spend less time with grandparents and extended family due to their work, though it is not uncommon to maintain strong ties with nuclear and extended family due to financial burdens which require multigenerational living. Still, for families who are actively revitalizing Hawaiian at home, their values are anchored in tradition rather than modernity. They are revitalizing Hawaiian as an act of cultural reclamation of the past, and as a way to honor ancestors and knowledge systems that were formed

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with relatively minor contact with outsiders (Kanaʻiaupuni and Malone 2006; McCarty and Lee 2014). A small number of families share these traditions across generations, despite the many challenges of doing so (e.g., NobregaOliveira 2019). However, as this chapter illustrates, this revitalization happens more often in detraditionalized ways, as it is uncommon for entire family units to engage in these activities together, as they once did, due to changing ways of life (Handy and Pukui 1972; McGregor 2007). In today’s Hawai‘i, these practices, and often, the commitment to revitalizing the Hawaiian language, can be better understood as the basis for forming communities and for forming new familial relationships. In this chapter, I consider how three families relate their Hawaiian language commitments to ʻohana, a Hawaiian term that translates to “family,” but which is used in a broader and more inclusive sense historically (Handy and Pukui 1972; Kanuha 2005). Drawing on interviews with three mothers of young children, I explore how they see the relationship between ‘ohana and Hawaiian. The interview data reveal how the concept refers not only to blood relations, or kin, but to close connections between people who are not biologically related, yet who share a worldview that prioritizes Hawaiian knowledge, culture, and language in daily life. ‘OHANA Historically, the Native Hawaiian concept of the self is grounded in social relationships and mutual benefit associations in relation to the land (Handy and Pukui 1972). In the islands, the concept of ʻohana, or family, has always been more inclusive and expansive than many conventional understandings of this term for kinship, as ʻohana refers to blood-related kin but also to the connections between people who are not biologically related, including hanai (fostered) relatives, who are brought into the ʻohana in both official and informal ways. The word itself derives from the word ʻoha, which refers to the kalo (taro) plant’s new corms, or young offshoots, thereby indicating a botanomorphic origin. Historically, through hoʻokama (adoption), both children and adults could be brought into families, and a change in residence was not always a part of this practice (Handy and Pukui 1972: 71). In this system, ʻohana were those who were closely tied to the extended family and who provided support, or they could also be those whom the ʻohana supported emotionally, physically, and/or financially. Despite devastating changes to the Hawaiian people due to colonization, decimation from foreign diseases, and pressures to assimilate as a part of Americanization, the importance of social relationships, mutual dependence, and mutual respect associated with traditional understandings of ʻohana are still visible in today’s Hawaiʻi. For example, it is common for younger people

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to refer to the next generation as “aunty” and “uncle” even if they are not related (Cupchoy 2015) and for children to call their neighborhood friends “calabash cousins.” Elders are revered for their knowledge, particularly in Hawaiian communities (e.g., McGregor 2007; Vaughan 2018). In recent decades, the term ʻohana itself has been used in more public ways as a name for people who have a shared social purpose, such as the Protect Kaho‘olawe ʻOhana (PKO), who formed in the 1970s in response to the use of the island of Kahoʻolawe for bombing practice by the US military. PKO’s lawsuits were ultimately successful in returning the land to the people of Hawai‘i in the form of a natural reserve, to be used only for Hawaiian cultural, spiritual, and subsistence purposes. In addition, in the practice of hula, groups who form hālau, or hula schools, often refer to one another as members of the same hula ‘ohana and to one another as hula sisters and brothers (Witt 2016). The term has also been used as a synonym for conventional understandings of the nuclear “family” in Hawaiʻi, but this chapter explores how the historical uses of this term that invoke Hawaiian cultural norms operate in the three families, as explained by the three mothers. ‘ŌLELO

HAWAI‘I: THE HAWAIIAN LANGUAGE

‘Ōlelo Hawaiʻi, or the Hawaiian language, has been undergoing revitalization since the 1970s as a result of political and cultural struggles by families and educators. Hawaiian declined sharply in the second half of the nineteenth century, when foreign diseases took their toll on Native Hawaiians. Hawaiian speakers were further marginalized after a group of American businessmen used military force to overthrow the Hawaiian monarch in 1893 and later declared the islands to be a Republic of Hawaiʻi. Laws were passed to make English the sole official language of schooling, and when Hawaiʻi was illegally annexed as a Territory of the United States, many Hawaiian speakers were under strong pressure to assimilate to American language and culture (Reinecke 1969; Wilson and Kamanā 2000). A Hawaiian Renaissance emerged in the 1970s that led to reclamation of Hawaiian cultural practices previously suppressed by missionaries and the US government, including ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, hula, voyaging, song, and Hawaiian medicine. Hawaiian became an official language of the state in 1978, and in 1983, the first ‘Aha Pūnana Leo (language nest) immersion preschool was established on Kaua‘i (Kawai‘ae‘a, Housman, and Alencastre 2007). In 1986, parents led the efforts to rescind the 1896 law banning Hawaiian in schools, and the following year, public Hawaiian immersion programs were established. There are now more than twenty immersion programs operating as standalone and within-school programs, including those at public charter schools. While some parents of children enrolled in immersion programs are not fluent

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speakers (Yamauchi, Lau-Smith, and Luning 2008), the number of parents who do speak Hawaiian has visibly grown in recent years since immersion graduates and those who learned Hawaiian in higher education in the 1990s have now become parents (Schultz 2014). Most speakers of Hawaiian today arguably qualify as new speakers, or individuals who did not have significant exposure to the language in the home, but who learned it in the classroom, most often as adults (O’Rourke et al. 2015). While this term is not widely used in an emic fashion among speakers of Hawaiian, most speakers of Hawaiian are indeed second language learners who acquired the language as adults. New speakers are known to speak “University Hawaiian,” a way of speaking that carries somewhat negative associations with inauthenticity, as it stands in contradistinction with the Hawaiian that is spoken by mānaleo, the remaining elders who learned the language naturally through their family members.

PARTICIPANTS The chapter draws from interviews with three mothers of young children who are committed to using Hawaiian in the home and beyond. To invite participants, I drew on my personal network of friends and colleagues who speak Hawaiian and who are raising children with a commitment to both ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi and Hawaiian cultural practices. All of the mothers have multiple ethnicities in their ancestries, and two of the mothers do not have any Hawaiian ancestry. Each interview lasted approximately two hours, though I also draw on my knowledge of the women’s family lives from our larger shared experiences to contextualize the data. Next, I introduce each of the participants with a brief biographical sketch at the time of the interview. Maria is in her mid thirties and is the mother of an eight-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl. She was born and raised in Honolulu, on the island of Oʻahu. She is of Mexican and Chinese ethnicity, and the maternal side of her family resides on Oʻahu while her father’s family is on the west coast of the United States and has roots in Mexico. Maria grew up speaking English and Pidgin (Hawaiʻi Creole) at home and learned Spanish, Italian, and Arabic in secondary and tertiary education. She learned to speak Portuguese fluently when living in Brazil, where she met her Brazilian husband, and she still often speaks Portuguese with him at home. Maria chose to enroll her son in a Hawaiian immersion school when he entered kindergarten, and she plans to enroll her daughter there as well. Maria has never studied Hawaiian formally, but she has been exposed to Hawaiian language and culture through years of practicing hula and through regular but limited exposure to the language in primary and secondary education. She describes herself as a natural language learner, and she reports being able to communicate in Hawaiian. She recently produced a

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Hawaiian-English bilingual play for children, and she has taught theater lessons in Hawaiian at her son’s Hawaiian immersion school. Alejandra is in her mid-thirties and is the mother of a three-year-old boy, an eighteen-month-old girl, and a newborn baby boy. She was born and raised in Kailua, on the island of Oʻahu. She is of Mexican heritage on her father’s side and Okinawan descent on her mother’s side. Alejandra’s family moved to the west coast when she was in middle school because of her father’s job. Upon graduation from high school, she moved back to Oʻahu and lived with her grandparents, who mostly speak Pidgin. She learned Spanish in secondary school and began learning Hawaiian in college. She earned a master’s in Hawaiian and taught at an immersion school for a number of years before working as a Hawaiian language instructor. Her husband is of Hawaiian and Filipino ancestry. His family moved from the west coast of the United States to Maui when he was in elementary school, and upon relocating, they enrolled him in a Hawaiian immersion school. Her husband works for a nonprofit that takes a Hawaiian approach to communitybased land management. Alejandra notes that even though her husband is able to speak Hawaiian, he often prefers to speak English to their children, and she identifies herself as the main source of Hawaiian language in the home. Leialoha is in her late twenties and is the mother of a four-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy. She was born and raised in Keaukaha, on the island of Hawaiʻi. She grew up in a Hawaiian village that was established on land reclaimed by a group of Hawaiian activists. The village is self-governed and sits on land that is run by the Department of Hawaiian Homelands. Leialoha grew up with a number of other families on this land who strived to live the principles of Aloha ʻĀina (literally, “love for the land”) and Mālama i ka ʻĀina (“care for the land”), phrases that emerged at the time of the Hawaiian Renaissance that point to Hawaiian cultural values and particularly, Native Hawaiians’ deeply reciprocal relationship with the natural environment. The village embraces Hawaiian knowledge systems for self-governance and mutual interdependence. In terms of language, Leialoha and her five siblings grew up with Hawaiian, Pidgin, and English in the home context. She attended Hawaiian immersion schools until high school. She distinguishes her own Hawaiian, learned at home and in school, from University Hawaiian, which she finds quite distinct. On her father’s side, she is of Hawaiian and Chinese descent. Her mother is white and grew up in the continental United States. After moving to Hawaiʻi, Leialoha’s mother taught herself Hawaiian and became a Hawaiian language teacher at a nearby immersion school. Her father grew up with exposure to Hawaiian from his grandparents and his community, but he speaks Pidgin and English as well. Leialoha describes how she speaks to her children as a “fluid mix” of Hawaiian, Pidgin, and English. Her partner has Hawaiian ancestry as well but did not grow up with the language but uses phrases and Hawaiian vocabulary regularly. At the time of the interview, Leialoha was in graduate school on Oʻahu where

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she lived with her partner and son. Her daughter was living with Leialoha’s parents, where she was enrolled in a Hawaiian immersion preschool.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS The three interviews analyzed in this chapter are part of a larger study on family language histories in Hawaiʻi (see Higgins 2019). Interviews were conducted in English, though Pidgin and Hawaiian were also used, particularly by the interviewees. Each interview began with the participant’s language history with a focus on home life, schooling, and social networks. During the interviews, I worked with the participants to sketch their linguistic family trees while I made notes about the linguistic repertoires used by each family member. Along the way, I asked questions about what domains family members used their languages in, who they spoke to and in which languages, and why particular languages were or were not transmitted along generations. The purpose of the questions was to obtain family language histories while eliciting stories and accounts that would shed light on language maintenance and language shift in families. For participants who were maintaining Hawaiian in their families, I chose to ask specific questions about ʻohana and the relationship between Hawaiian familial ties and Hawaiian language practices. I analyze the interviews by examining how the three mothers engage in positioning within narratives (Bamberg 1997; De Fina 2013) to better understand what ‘ohana signifies with regard to their dedication to revitalizing the Hawaiian language. As the three mothers describe the practices that allow them to engage in Hawaiian language revitalization at home, they position themselves and others as characters with particular values and goals (Level 1 positioning). In telling me about their experiences, they also continuously position themselves interactionally with me as their audience (Level 2 positioning). Though I do not focus on this aspect of the data in depth, my role as a researcher who researches and advocates for multilingualism in Hawaiʻi, and as a beginning-level Hawaiian language learner, certainly shaped the interview trajectories. Finally, as the mothers discursively constructed themselves and their storied worlds with reference to larger societal and historical Discourses, they positioned their personal experience with reference to larger and more enduring social histories and cultural struggles (Level 3 positioning). As De Fina (2013: 43) explains, Level 3 positioning recognizes “the relative freedom of positioning that individuals have in interaction and the appreciation of processes of ‘enregisterment’ (Agha, 2005) of identities that happen at a macro social level in that capital D discourses and ideologies often imply also the reification of social roles and identities.” Through examining what the women told me about their language and culture practices with their families (Level 1), my goal is to better understand how their practices relate to master narratives

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and counter-narratives about the Hawaiian language. By establishing patterns across the three interviews, we can begin to describe the nature of familial schemas that are linked to Hawaiian and how these representations may be operating on a wider scale to help perpetuate the language.

FINDINGS The findings are organized by Level 3 Discourses that relate to ʻohana and Hawaiian language practices. Transcripts are presented following conventions in De Fina (2013), and all names are pseudonyms. Brief sections of the interviews have been omitted due to space, as indicated by elipses in square brackets ([…]). In presenting the findings, I identify the Level 3 Discourse that emerged from the interviews and then examine how each mother uses Level 1 positioning to place herself and her family with reference to that Discourse. The first Discourse examines how the women discussed their kuleana (reciprocal responsibility) to Hawaiian values, language, and people, which in turn heavily shaped their understanding of ʻohana. The second Discourse explores how the mothers related their kuleana to land through aloha ʻāina (a caring reciprocal relationship to the land), which is a central concept in Hawaiian cosomology and cultural practices (Handy and Pukui 1972; McGregor 2007). Again, through their relationships with the ʻāina, the women form ʻohana based on shared visions and shared practices with other like-minded people. ʻOhana as Shared Kuleana (reciprocal responsibility) Across the three interviews, the mothers identified their ʻohana as referring to their blood relations but often also to connections with people who shared a worldview that placed Hawaiian values centrally and did not necessarily involve biological relations. In Excerpt 6.1, Alejandra described her ʻohana as her community, which is made up of her and her husband’s coworkers and friends who are involved in Hawaiian-culture based work and pasttimes. In her depiction, the shared activities come first, and Hawaiian language frequently comes with the activities. Even though Alejandra does not have Hawaiian ancestry herself, her (lack of) biological ties to Hawaiian ancestors is not a necessary part of her explanation. Instead, she emphasizes the shared practices and community that she and her husband are a part of. Excerpt 6.1 1 2 3

A:

To me, I see that word as like your community of people that you’re always with and around. So that means my co-workers, that’s our ʻohana, [my husband]’s friends, those are the people

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that we value and spend our time with. If we spend our time with anybody outside of our blood, it’s going to be those people. And a good amount of them can ‘ōlelo (speak Hawaiian).

Later in the interview, Alejandra told a story about how some friends identified her and her family as people who they liked to spend time with because of their shared values. In telling the story, she foregrounds the sense of community that they are building together with reference to bloodlines, but the point of her story is to show how heritage in itself is not equivalent to being ʻohana or living with Hawaiian values. In Excerpt 6.2, Alejandra explains how some friends expressed enthusiasm for spending time with her family because of their commitment to Hawaiian values (lines 4–6). This depiction of ʻohana contrasts with another Discourse of family that is based on bloodlines, which she rejects as relevant (line 11). She also expressed appreciation for how her family’s dedication to Hawaiian practices would benefit her son, who would in turn view his parents’ community as his aunties and uncles (line 8) as well and would feel comfortable speaking Hawaiian in that context. Excerpt 6.2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

A: We just talked about this with [my husband]’s friends. […] he was like you know, how he was saying (it was) good to hang out with us, you know like cause he hadn’t brought his keiki (‘children’) around too many people. And he said “Because we know you, we know your ʻohana and we know how you guys raise-without saying all these things, I think that’s what he meant. […] because you know where you come from, you know who those families are and what they’re instilling. […] That is why it made me feel better about kind of pulling in the reins about how many different people we’re hanging out with. Or who [my son] knows to be his aunties and uncles because I want to be able to say everybody that we are around is lāhui (Hawaiian nation). So, it’s important that he feel comfortable and feel comfortable speaking Hawaiian and feel comfortable doing all these things that he’s doing. Yeah, I think that that’s what it means to me. I don’t see it as a blood thing.

Very similarly, in Excerpt 6.3 Maria explains her conceptualization of ʻohana as people who she chooses to share her circle with. Like Alejandra, she references the lāhui, a term that refers to the Hawaiian people as a Hawaiian nation that is striving to regain sovereignty (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua 2011). She describes the lāhui as an entity that she affiliates with in terms of values and who she feels a responsibility toward.

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Excerpt 6.3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

C:

M:

And I wonder if your experience with, with who you identify as your ʻohana, is at all shaped by Hawaiian language, Hawaiian perspectives, Hawaiian ʻike (knowledge), um, as you’re embracing Hawaiian language more and more. I try, like in terms of who I want to relate with, um, the people I want to choose to be in my circle- to, to be in our ʻohana, to be a part of our ʻohana is- it’s based on like the people who (1.0) want to move forward in a similar way. Um, yeah, it could, be like a shared worldview, a shared practice, um, a shared kuleana (ʻreciprocal responsibility’) to like, towards the lāhui (Hawaiian nation). […] When I talked about with another family from Mālamalama [my son’s immersion school] about going back to school, you know? And it’s like, well, what, like, what about this place? Like Mālamalama families, what about this school with a lot of families, you know, and with the coronavirus, like, going back to school is if really scary because like the future of the lāhui is at stake. Like, these are the people. This is the future of the Hawaiian people. And for some reason there is an outbreak in this school or within this community, it could be very detrimental. So, I think we have to - I mean, we have to even think about the school and everybody.

In Excerpt 6.3, Maria describes her ʻohana as people she chooses and uses the language of “a shared practice” and a “shared kuleana” (lines 7–8), both of which point to Hawaiian-based viewpoints that underscore mutual interdependence and reciprocity in social relationships. She refers to the lāhui to explain how a shared stance toward bettering the future of the Hawaiian nation and efforts to establish soverignty for the Hawaiian people is what defines her ʻohana. She identifies the lāhui as at risk because of Covid-19, which heightens her responsiblity to the families who attend her son’s Hawaiian immersion school to stay safe. Maria’s reference to the lāhui prompted me to ask her to elaborate, as lāhui is generally associated with people of Native Hawaiian ancestry, rather than people like Maria who are culturally affiliated with Hawaiian values but who do not have Hawaiian ancestry. She described her family as “ʻohana lāhui” (line 21), a term she coined on the spot to express an accomplice role in supporting the development of the Hawaiian nation. Excerpt 6.4 21 22 23 24 25

C: M:

Do you see it as ʻohana or lāhui? I’m wondering how you see yourself with regard to lāhui. I think I, maybe not, because we’re not Hawaiian, like considering ourselves part of the lāhui, it’s not necessarily- but I think we’re like, ʻohana lāhui, right?

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C: M:

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What is that? (laughter) I don’t know something I’m just coming up with, right? (laughter) Like, like accomplices, right. People who are, who want to be a part of, who- who are upholding it?

In discussing the composition of ʻohana and its relationship with lāhui, Leialoha remarked on the importance of Hawaiian as a guide for living with Hawaiian values. For her, lāhui was equivalent to ʻohana and was the cultural organizing principle in the village she grew up in, among other families who she both was and was not related to by blood. In Excerpt 6.5, Leialoha explains how Hawaiian language functions to establish a Hawaiian nation within the occupation of the United States. Excerpt 6.5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

C:

L:

How do you see Hawaiian as part of the lāhui (Hawaiian nation) (…) and does, for you, does lāhui have anything to do with ʻohana, or is it totally different? No, they’re very much connected. And the language in the lāhui is basically setting us back to that framework. We are not Hawaiian people who live- I mean, we should not see ourselves as Hawaiian people that live under an American occupation. And how are we combining the two? We come from a very specific tradition and we are trying to implement that tradition back into our leadership and back into how we are governing this place, this weird nation within nation situation that we live in, that we’re over here trying to have our our nation. And we’re stuck under this occupation and the part of language in the lāhui, is, the language teaches us about what it really means to be Hawaiian.

As we continued talking, Leialoha described the features of the ʻohana that she grew up with in the Hawaiian village, referring to Hawaiian relational roles kaikuaʻana (“older sibling of the same sex”) and kaikaina (“younger sibling of the same sex”) relationships. While these terms can refer to the responsibilities, rights, and obligations among siblings or cousins, their meaning extends beyond familial relationships in Hawaiian knowledge systems (Handy and Pukui 1972). Lipe (2014) extends these genealogical relationships to knowledge and experience. She explains, “When I am a college advisor, I am the kaikuaʻana to my students because of my knowledge, experience, and resources in terms of the university setting. However, in that very same relationship I can be the kaikaina in certain respects if my student is older than me in age” (p. 13). In Excerpt 6.6, Leialoha’s description of her home village refers to these relationships that establish a social system built on responsibility

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and respect, and which form her own ʻohana, which is not entirely comprised of blood relations. Excerpt 6.6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

So ʻohana is a very, um, interesting word for me. And I started learning how I grew up. I started realizing how I grew up in a ʻohana and some people grew up in a family when me and my boyfriend were dating because in our family, and like I said, we grew up in [the village] and [it] has a ʻohana structure, […] So, they have a ʻohana and that’s the president, the vice president. They create the rules, they manage the rules. And the community members are looked at as like the kaikaina (younger siblings), and the association is looked at as the kaikuaʻana (older sibling) and it’s the kaikaina’s responsibility to keep up with the rules and keep the place good. And it’s the kaikuaʻana’s responsibility to check up on everybody and enforce the rules and make sure everybody’s following the same rules.

L:

Leilaloha then compared these indigenous Discourses of responsibility in her home ʻohana to the idea of “family” in a contrastive way. Her experiences with her boyfriend’s family revealed this difference to her, as she explained that even though his family is Hawaiian, their values are not Hawaiian. In Excerpt 6.7, Leialoha compares her experiences growing up with an ʻohana built on the idea of the lāhui with other families who she described as “colonized Hawaiians,” drawing attention to superficial nods to Hawaiian cultural identity. In line 4, she criticizes the prioritization of a capitalist worldview over Aloha ‘Āina perspectives. In line 5, she narrates an occasion where her boyfriend’s relative questioned the value of hula, and she voices him as valuing US football, but not hula, as a good reason to take time off of work. Through Level 1 positioning, Leialoha ventriloquates the voice of the relative in reported speech in Pidgininfluenced English (lines 8–9) and responds in her own quoted speech (line 9) to position him as a colonized Hawaiian. Excerpt 6.7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

L:

Um, you go to your grandma’s house where you eat Hawaiian food. You put a sticker or two on your truck that says that you’re proud to be Hawaiian. You wear a lot of clothes that say that you’re proud to be Hawaiian, but Hawaiian culture and language will never come above things like making money and sports. […] Or like in a situation I had somebody, um, one of my boyfriend’s cousins and he was upset with his coworker cause his coworker left to watch the daughter’s hula performance. And he and I got, he and I were really close. So, we got into a lot of arguments like this and he was like, “Hula, brah, I understand if your nephew have one football game.” “Brah, what are you gonna miss for hula?” I’m like “brah, don’t call yourself a Hawaiian.”

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ʻOhana as Aloha ‘Āina (Reciprocal Caring for the Land) Hawaiian knowledge systems are centered around ʻāina (land) and the importance of adopting a reciprocally beneficial relationship with the land (Kana‘iaupuni and Malone 2006; McGregor 2007). Simply put, when people care for the land, the land cares for them in return. For Leialoha, this was the central to the homestead that she grew up on, which relied heavily on knowing how to cultivate the land to grow food and fish and collect limu (seaweed) from the ocean. For the other two women, however, these practices became more prominent in their adulthood, when they were committing to Hawaiian language and culture. Maria made sense of my questions about ʻohana by contemplating the etymlogy of the word in relation to its relationship with kalo (taro), the traditional staple of the Hawaiian people that is also seen as the ancestor who gave birth to the first Hawaiian. The word ʻohana is made up of the morpheme ʻoha (to sprout) and the substantive suffix na, together which means “that which feeds” (Handy and Pukui 1972). As Maria notes in Excerpt 6.8, the buds or offshoots of the kalo plant, which is the traditional staple of the Hawaiian people, does not require pollination to create more kalo. She describes herself as “part of a system” (line 3) that leads to growth, drawing on this Hawaiian cultural metaphor. In noting that the offspring are possible without two makua (parent) producing the new plants (line 6), she presents a cosmology of kinship relationships that is strongly rooted in a nourishing alliance with Hawaiian culture, language, and people. Excerpt 6.8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

M:

What’s the, what are all of the, you know, the roots of that word? If we had to break it down. But I know that with ʻohana, that ʻoha, the shoots that you have this connection and- Like you are part of a system in ways, and it’s not just, I mean, in some ways it can be this like placing of things and pushing, put them together. But it can also be this like, but it’s also the growth out right? Like that kind of, the shoots coming from the makua (parent). And that, being how an ʻohana forms. But if you had to think about it in this way, like because the huli (top of the taro plant) can be like the makua plant, like the, the kalo don’t have to mate. Like they don’t have to pollinate in order to create, to have off- like to have these, these offspring. It’s just something I’m thinking about right now. [...] So, it kind of changes the way that, like what an ʻohana can, what it can be, what it is.

Maria explained that she felt connected to others in relation to her ʻāina practices, and in Excerpt 6.9, she described attending a board and stone class with a friend and another family. The class teaches how to hand-carve a board and make a stone pounder to produce poi, an important Hawaiian dish made

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from the kalo root that is baked and then pounded to a paste. In lines 3–4, she describes this experience as creating a bond of strengthening themselves together. Since her husband is often working, Maria noted that she usually does these activities with her two children and with friends. In line 7, she moves from Level 1 narration to Level 2 positioning to take up an evaluative footing on her experience, noting that it is in fact difficult to think of her husband as part of her ʻohana since he is not able to take part in these ʻāina-based experiences. Excerpt 6.9 1 M: And so I did that with, a single friend by herself and then with a family, you. 2 know. And it was like this, this felt like a really important thing to do together 3 that would all now be grounded in this idea of making our own food and trying 4 to strengthen ourselves. I mean, for me, it was just me and my kids, you know, 5 we just, the three of us did it together. And maybe it’s because the three 6 of us have so many experiences by ourself that sometimes it’s like- to call us the 7 four ʻohana, like sometimes feels a little bit weird. Right? Because there are so 8 many things that [my husband] misses out on because he works so much.

ʻĀina practices were also central in Alejandra’s commitments to Hawaiian. An earlier trip to Kahoʻolawe, an island that has been reclaimed by Hawaiians after decades of being used by the US military, was an important experience in her dedication to Hawaiian language and culture. Kahoʻolawe has been a site of struggle for Hawaiians and a symbol of the power of the lāhui. It is now under the stewardship of the PKO, which organizes cultural practices on the island. In Excerpt 6.10a, Alejandra talks about how her experience there was part of a chain of events that connected her to Hawaiian culture, land, and language. She describes her experience as a life-changing experience that connected her to Hawaiian culture and language. Excerpt 6.10a 1 A: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I went to Kahoʻolawe and then my mind was blown for so many reasons. It’s like- you’re just away from everything, you have so much clarity out there. Seeing the culture in a place like untouched and that was the world. This is all Hawaiian culture right now, that was something I had never experienced before. But like the people I met were all like somehow in Hawaiian education or in ʻāina stuff. And it was really cool because through that, I started doing another trip to Kauaʻi where we would hike into the valley and do an awa ceremony, and the man that I went with I ended up becoming best friends with his daughter, and the people on Kahoʻolawe always have connections through Hawaiian language.

Alejandra explained that she viewed her journey to Kahoʻolawe as formative in not only Hawaiian language and culture, but eventually in her relationship

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with her husband. While her first visit to Kahoʻolawe took place as part of her Hawaiian language learning journey, her connection with people there resurfaced through her husband later. Excerpt 6.10b 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

A:

And now it’s cool because one of the ladies or a few of the ladies I met on Kahoʻolawe- this was like from 10 years ago, are now working with [my husband]. So [my husband] does ʻāina (land) stuff right. We all met on summer solstice for a work meeting that [he] had. And we hadn’t seen each other for that long, and the last time was Kahoʻolawe. So I was thinking that this was a full circle moment for me that validated that or just told me that I’m on the right path and I’m doing the right work because that all led to so many years later my connection is now with my ʻohana. Now, [my husband] and I as an ʻohana like we just connected our worlds. We’re both doing our own thing, not actually related. I mean it is related but I am in the humanities and [he] is in the sciences, and now it’s like our worlds and our careers are like this. I was like, “Whoa, I get it.”

In Excerpt 6.10b, Alejandra explains how she deepened her relationship with the land in order to expand her Hawaiian language practice. Even though she and her husband are in different fields, ‘āina provided connection for them and common ground. She describes her experiences with the land as a “full circle moment” (line 15). Later, she uses inner speech (line 21) to express a profound epistemic stance toward the role of the land and her relationship with it, as it connects her professional identity as a Hawaiian language teacher and the work that her husband does in community-based planning in two intersecting forms of ʻohana.

DISCUSSION: KULEANA AND ʻĀINA AS KEY TO ʻOHANA For the two women who started learning Hawaiian in adulthood, Maria and Alejandra, kuleana and aloha ʻāina were principles that they adopted which shaped their social networks deeply. While they both expressed having close relationships with (some) of their family members, they also formed deep connections and commitments to people who they identified as their ʻohana who were not biologically related. As non-Hawaiians who embrace Hawaiian values and ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi in their daily lives, they positioned themselves as committed practitioners of Hawaiian culture. Maria identified herself with some mitigation as part of the “ohana lāhui,” rather than as part of the lāhui (Hawaiian nation) in her interview. Alejandra identified more centrally as a member of the lāhui due to her commitment to cultural practices, values,

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language, and relationships with others who lived in a similar way. For Leialoha, who grew up in a community that was designed with kuleana and ʻāina at the heart of all activities, a strong sense of ʻohana was expressed among members of this community who shared a vision about how to live among each other and in connection to the land. For her, there is no difference between the lāhui and ʻohana, since a commitment to the Hawaiian nation and its sovereignty calls for people to adopt Hawaiian values and practices in everyday life. In explaining their conceptualizations of ʻohana, the women all positioned themselves amidst the Discourses of “family” and “ʻohana,” often reserving the term “family” for those who did not embrace the Hawaiian cultural perspectives, even if they were biologically related. When Leialoha said, “I grew up in a ʻohana and some people grew up in a family” (Excerpt 6.6) she articulated an epistemic division that highlights the very different practices involved in belonging to an ʻohana in Hawaiʻi and the Discourses that frame family and ʻohana differently. Similarly, in other parts of her interview, Maria referred to her maternal side of the family as ʻohana, due to their closeness and shared values that included reciprocal caring and nurturing for one another, but to her father’s side as “family,” as she had a much more distant relationship with them. While ʻohana is a term that is often used in a more common manner to refer to one’s nuclear family in Hawaiʻi, the interview data here suggests that among people who are committed to sustaining resilient Hawaiian cultural practices, the relations and practices among members of a ʻohana are quite distinct from the relations and practices among members of many families in Hawaiʻi and beyond. In terms of FLP, the interviews reveal how ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi is embedded in ʻohana practices, rather than necessarily a byproduct or a precursor of them. While current FLP studies typically note the importance of adult family members’ language ideologies in shaping language practices and language learning outcomes, this study demonstrates how the language learning practices themselves extend the conceptualization of “family” in alignment with other post-familial families who have affiliative ties through their activities (BeckGernsheim 1998). With Hawaiian, however, these post-familial ties are commitments to tradition, rather than neoliberal innovation, as the practices of cultivating kalo, restoring fish ponds, practicing hula, and speaking Hawaiian are all investments in the knowledge and culture of past generations of Hawaiians. In the case of Leialoha, we see that language, culture, and ʻohana are interconnected and, in many ways, indistinguishable. For Alejandra, language and cultural practices emerged together and helped form ʻohana, which in turn reinforced the links between the Hawaiian language and ʻāina-based activities for her husband and children as well as like-minded people in her life. Finally, for Maria, Hawaiian language is at a comparatively early stage of development

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for her children and for herself, but she remains committed to cultural and ʻāina-based practices while she is developing her ability to communicate. While kuleana and aloha ʻāina may be showing signs of enregisterment in the accounts shared here for social roles and identities tied to ʻohana, in the future, it will be helpful to extend this research to other families who have placed their children in Hawaiian immersion schools or who learned Hawaiian as adults to better understand whether and to what degree these Discourses shape their lives. While these are basic concepts in most Hawaiian language classrooms, they are not the only Discourses about language that people are subjected to in the State of Hawaiʻi, where challenges such as a high cost of living, homelessness, and overtourism put pressures on people to embrace more capitalist Discourses about the value of language learning in today’s world. Though Hawaiian has not yet been tied to the idea of the “entrepreneurial child” and the neoliberal project of global competitiveness, language learning always intersects with other ideological regimes. How families cope with these competing Discourses will be important to investigate.

REFERENCES Adams, M. (2007), Self and Social Change, London: Sage. Agha, A. (2005), “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1): 38–59. Bamberg, M. G. (1997), “Positioning between Structure and Performance,” Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4): 335–42. Bauman, Z. (2004), Identity, Cambridge: Polity. Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1998), “On the Way to a Post-familial Family: From a Community of Need to Elective Affinities,” Theory, Culture & Society, 15(3–4): 53–70. Cupchoy, L. (2015),” Reimagining Paradise: Public Culture and the Los Angeles Hawaiian Community, 1950s–Present,” unpublished dissertation, University of California, Irvine. Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2009), “Invisible and Visible Language Planning: Ideological Factors in the Family Language Policy of Chinese Immigrant Families in Quebec,” Language Policy, 8(4): 351–75. De Fina, A. (2013), “Positioning Level 3: Connecting Local Identity Displays to Macro Social Processes,” Narrative Inquiry, 23(1): 40–61. Fishman, J. A. (1991), Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, N. (2011), “Kuleana lāhui: Collective Responsibility for Hawaiian Nationhood in Activists’ Praxis,” Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, 5: 130–63. Handy, E. S. Craighill, and Pukui, M. K. (1972), Polynesian Family System in Ka-‘u, Hawaiʻi, Rutland: Tuttle. Heelas, P., Lash, S., and Morris, P. (eds.) (1996), Detraditionalization, Oxford: Blackwell. Higgins, C. (2019), “The Dynamics of Hawaiian Speakerhood in the Family,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 255: 45–72.

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King, K. A., Fogle, L., and Logan-Terry, A. (2008), “Family Language Policy,” Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(5): 907–22. Lipe, K. (2014), “Aloha as Fearlessness: Lessons from the Mo‘olelo of Eight Native Hawaiian Female Educational Leaders on Transforming the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa into a Hawaiian Place of Learning,” unpublished dissertation, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Kana‘iaupuni, S. M., and Malone, N. (2006), “This Land is My Land: The Role of Place in Native Hawaiian Identity,” Hulili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian WellBeing, 3: 281–307. Kawaiʻaeʻa, K. K., Housman, A. K., and Alencastre, M. (2007), “Pu’a i ka’Olelo, Ola ka’Ohana: Three Generations of Hawaiian Language Revitalization,” Hulili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being, 4(1): 183–237. Kanuha, Valli K. (2005), “Na ‘Ohana: Native Hawaiian Families,” Ethnicity and Family Therapy, 64–74. Macalister, J., and Mirvahedi, S. H. (eds.) (2016), Family Language Policies in a Multilingual World: Opportunities, Challenges, and Consequences, London: Taylor & Francis. McCarty, T., and Lee, T. (2014), “Critical Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy and Indigenous Education Sovereignty,” Harvard Educational Review, 84(1): 101–24. McGregor, D. (2007), Na kuaʻaina: Living Hawaiian Culture, Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Nobrega-Olivera, M. (2019), “Pū‘olo pa‘akai: A Bundle of Salt from Pūʻolo, Hanapēpē, Kauaʻi,” in Detours, ed. H. Aikau and V. Gonzalez, 220–9, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ochs, E., and Kremer-Sadlik, T. (2015), “How Postindustrial Families Talk,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 44: 87–103. O’Rourke, B., and Ramallo, F. (2015), “Neofalantes as an Active Minority: Understanding Language Practices and Motivations for Change amongst New Speakers of Galician,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 231: 147–65. Reinecke, John E. (1969), Language and Dialect in Hawaiʻi: A Sociolinguistic History to 1935, Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Schwartz, M., and Verschik, A. (eds.) (2013), Successful Family Language Policy: Parents, Children and Educators in Interaction, New York: Springer Science & Business Media. Schultz, P. L. K. (2014), “Kuleana ʻOhana Kaiapuni: A Story of Agency and Hawaiian Immersion Families,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Vaughan, M. B. (2018), Kaiāulu: Gathering Tides, Eugene: Oregon State University Press. Wilson, W. H., and Kamana, K. (2000), “ ‘Mai loko mai o ka ‘i’ini: Proceeding from a Dream”: The Aha Punana Leo Connection in Hawaiian Language Revitalization,” in The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice, ed. L. Hinton and K. Hale, 147–76, Leiden: Brill. Witt, V. L. (2016), “Aloha in the Desert: Ideologies of Ka ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi a Mēheuheu,” unpublished master’s thesis, University of New Mexico. Yamauchi, L., Lau-Smith, J., and Luning, R. J. I. (2008), “Family Involvement in a Hawaiian Language Immersion Program,” School Community Journal, 18: 39–60.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

This Is the Normal for Us: Managing the Mobile, Multilingual, Digital Family ÅSA PALVIAINEN

INTRODUCTION It is about five o’clock in the afternoon and four-year-old Mira came home from her Finnish kindergarten an hour ago.1 She is sitting at the kitchen table having a snack while her mother, Kati, is cooking (see Figure 7.1). Mira is watching cartoons in Finnish on an iPad directly in front of her. Next to that iPad is another one, on which Mira’s Dutch father, Nick, is online on FaceTime. He is at his place of work in Switzerland and is doing some paperwork. Every now and then he initiates a conversation with his daughter, asking her what she has done and how her day went at kindergarten. This conversation is a mixture of English and Dutch. Mira is not especially interested in chatting with him—preferring to watch the cartoons—but she occasionally responds with some words in English and asks her mother in Finnish to translate something. FaceTime is still connected when Mira and Kati sit down to eat dinner. After half an hour or so of this connected presence (Licoppe 2004), Kati and Nick exchange some phrases in English about Mira’s upcoming activities. Kati then switches off the video link.

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FIGURE 7.1:  Mira at the kitchen table watching cartoons on one iPad and connected with her father on another (screenshot from a video recording). The photo is printed with the permission of Mira’s parents.

The situation just described illustrates the daily FaceTime routine that Mira and Kati had with Nick. The video-calling practice was of potential significance for Mira’s multilingual development and identity in that she got to regularly communicate and interact multimodally with her Dutch- and English-speaking father, who lives elsewhere. The way they use digital tools and multilingual resources to keep in contact with each other over time and space is not unusual in contemporary families. Nor is the dispersed family configuration they represent, in which important family members live in different households, or even in different countries. Despite these facts, digital families like Mira’s are rarely studied within the field of family language policy (FLP). Indeed, empirical research that connects digitally mediated family language practices with early bilingual development, heritage language transmission, and family language management is surprisingly rare (Lanza and Lexander 2019; Palviainen and Kędra 2020). I had the opportunity to follow Mira, Kati, and Nick and how they were “doing family” (Morgan 1996) for a period of six months in 2017–18. This ethnographic case study is situated in the growing sociolinguistic interest in understanding how “hypermobility and transnational migration shape, influence, and in many instances, define family life” and in the roles that multilingual practices and communication technologies play in these processes (King and Lanza 2019: 718). Taking Mira’s family configuration as the point of departure, I focus particularly on the management aspects of doing the digital multilingual family. Here, I refer to Kati and Nick’s deliberate involvement and

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investment in their family, as well as their more tacit effort to do what they believe is best for their daughter (cf. Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018). The active aspects of this co-parenting arrangement were articulated in an interview with Kati: in response to my observation that she “[does] a lot of logistics, planning and arrangements to keep this whole thing going,” she replied, “Yeah, but we’ve never had it any different. This is the normal for us.” The study was conducted within a nexus analytical framework (Scollon and Scollon 2004) and aimed to explicate the ways in which the practices of this family configuration were shaped by the historical bodies (the lived experience of the participants), the interaction order (the social arrangements among them), and the discourses in place (the conceptual and material context) (Hult 2015; Scollon and Scollon 2004). The analysis of ethnographic data—collected in the context of the FaceTime call routine and in close collaboration with the participants—focuses on the ways in which the three participants managed the three languages in these video calls. I begin by describing the data collection procedures before moving on to discuss the family construct as a function of the mobile-digital age. I also present the previous research on video-calling as both mediated presence and “social work” (Ames et al. 2010). This is followed by a detailed analysis of the multilingual mediated language practices in this family constellation.

COPRODUCED DATA COLLECTION I first came into contact with Kati after I posted a call for research participants in a Facebook group for “Foreigners in city X.” The criteria for participation were being part of a translocal family constellation (members not living in the same household) with at least one child, in which two or more languages and communication technologies (e.g., Skype, WhatsApp, Snapchat) were in daily/ weekly use. Although, as a researcher, I was interested in examining digitally mediated practices in multilingual families, I was not completely aware of what the focus of analysis would be at the start of the project. According to the principles of mediated discourse analysis, the complexity of the analysis must be preserved without presupposing which actions and discourses are relevant (Scollon and Scollon 2004). Consequently, the data collection procedures did not follow a preestablished protocol but were, instead, explored and developed along the way. The research process was an act of “coproduction” (Boivin and Cohenmiller 2018) between me, as the ethnographer, and the research participants and eventually involved not only Kati but also Mira (daughter) and Nick (Mira’s father). The project followed the three steps of nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004). Firstly, in engaging in the nexus of practice, the crucial social

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FIGURE 7.2:  The three data collection cycles in fall 2017 to winter 2018.

actions and actors are recognized and identified. Secondly, in navigating it, the discourses, objects, places, and concepts that circulate through it are mapped. Thirdly, in changing it, the links and connections within the social action are opened up and made visible. The overall ethnographic process therefore consisted of identifying the crucial actions (the multilingual and video-calling practices), understanding their employment, and, ultimately, contextualizing and expanding the theoretical understanding of the phenomena. This process can, however, also be deconstructed into several distinct phases or cycles, each of which builds on history and anticipates the future (Scollon and Scollon 2004). Accordingly, this ethnographic project consisted of three consecutive cycles of collecting and navigating the data (see Figure 7.2). In the first cycle, I met Kati for an initial interview, in which I asked her to talk about herself and her family and their media and language practices. Kati had primary custody of Mira after she and Nick had divorced earlier that year. Kati and Mira lived in Finland, whereas Nick lived in Switzerland. For Mira’s sake, they tried to meet as often as possible and spend quality time together, either by Nick traveling to Finland or by Kati taking Mira to Nick in Switzerland or the Netherlands. Kati saw Mira and Nick’s daily FaceTime contact and Nick’s involvement in his daughter’s everyday life as essential to their emotional bonding. During the interview, the FaceTime calls emerged as a core activity in the management of the digital multilingual family life and as a nexus of practice that required navigation.

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After Kati agreed to continue participating in the research, I asked her how she would like to proceed with the data collection. The suggestion to combine screenshots of the FaceTime calls with contextual diary notes was actually hers. She also asked Nick to give his consent. After one month of data collection, Kati and I met again and discussed the data she had collected. In this videorecorded interview, we discussed language practices, the spatial arrangements of the technological devices, and the effort and organizational aspects—the “social work”—connected with the video calls (Ames et al. 2010). At this point, Kati informed me that Nick would soon be coming to Finland to spend time with Mira. Consequently, the second cycle began with an audio recorded face-to-face interview with Nick, using a question protocol similar to that used with Kati. This interview complemented the picture gained in the first, in that it provided the father’s perspective on the family matters related to the video calls. As the data collection had thus far relied on the parents’ accounts of the activities, both Nick and Kati encouraged me to directly observe a FaceTime call at Kati and Mira’s home, which I subsequently did once Nick had returned to Switzerland. This is when I met Mira for the first time. I observed a FaceTime call between Mira and Nick, taking field notes throughout. Immediately after the video call, Kati and I sat down to talk about her experience of the FaceTime call I had just observed. I emailed a similar set of questions to Nick the next day. The home visit was truly rewarding for me as a researcher and I gained a lot of insight from it. Nevertheless, I was aware that my presence may have had an impact on the authenticity of the situation. Consequently, I suggested that Kati should video record some FaceTime calls when I was not present and I left a small sturdy video camera with Kati and Mira for this purpose. The third data collection cycle thus included participant-produced video recordings of the home setting (cf. Figure 7.1). When Kati pointed out to me the difficulties of producing these, for example, with Mira having asked why she had to be filmed, I suggested that Mira might like to take charge of the camera and recording the calls herself. This spontaneous suggestion turned out to be unexpectedly successful, as Mira enjoyed being empowered as a filmmaker (Boivin and Cohenmiller 2018). As a result, I got the privilege of watching a FaceTime call between Mira and Nick from Mira’s visual perspective. This was eye-opening for me as an ethnographer and reminded me of the importance of including children as active research subjects. The third data collection cycle concluded with an interview with Kati on the topic of the video-recorded data. Throughout the six-month data collection period, I also had occasional email correspondence with both Kati and Nick and they sent me photos and screenshots with comments on the situations they depicted (see Palviainen (2020a) for an analysis of some of these photos).

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THE FAMILY CONSTRUCT IN THE MOBILE-DIGITAL AGE Research on how families connect over long distances with the help of information and communication technology (ICT) has long been pursued within migration studies, with particular focus on adult family members (typically mothers) compelled to move abroad to earn a living and on their caring for children and/or ageing parents left behind in the home country (e.g., Baldassar, Baldock, and Wilding 2007; Madianou and Miller 2012). These family constellations have often been in the forefront of ICT use (Cuban 2014). However, today’s career paths and labor markets, which both allow for and, sometimes, demand international mobility, along with higher education and a neoliberal economy, have also paved the way for middle-class families to choose a hypermobile lifestyle (Baldassar 2016; Gonçalves 2019). Indeed, as Nick stated, when talking about managing traveling arrangements with Kati and Mira, “[our situation] is not so much a money constraint problem that maybe other people would have, but rather a time constraint problem because we are busy people.” Kati and Nick’s way of “doing parenting” and managing family life was a natural continuation of the hypermobile way of living that was already familiar to them both. They first met abroad in 2009, before moving around to study or work in different countries in Europe, visiting each other whenever possible. They wrote emails and used Skype between seeing each other in person. They eventually got married, Nick got a new job in Switzerland, and, as Mira was about to be born, Kati decided to settle in her home country, Finland. When I got to know them, Kati and Nick had known each other for eight years. By then, their relationship had followed the trajectory of a long-distance romance, marriage, having a child, divorce, and now long-distance co-parenting. During these eight years, they had only spent a total of approximately seven months living together. As such, they represent a relational configuration that has taken on different forms over time and has been shaped by geographical distance, mobility, and the use of ICT (Elliott and Urry 2010). A “transnational family” can be defined as a family (nuclear or extended, or involving other significant kinships) that has living arrangements spread over two or more countries, has an active desire to maintain family relations, and experiences important interconnectivity across and beyond national borders (Hirsch and Lee 2018: 884; Zhu Hua and Li Wei 2016). As Kati and Mira spent most of their time in Finland, and Nick—of Dutch origin—resided in Switzerland, they qualified as transnational. However, in “doing” the mediated digital family, the geographical locations and national borders probably played a subordinated role for Mira: from her perspective, the actual location of her parents, as opposed to their virtual presence, appeared to be of little or no

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relevance (Gonçalves 2019: 480). She was either unaware or unconcerned. In the transconnective space (King-O’Riain 2015) constructed through the FaceTime calls, the emotional connection with Nick, the language varieties Mira and he used together, and the interpersonal routines they engaged in were likely to be more important to their bonding than their respective physical location. For a mobile-digital family, the home becomes a relational concept rather than being connected to a fixed physical or geographical place (Marchetti-Mercer 2017). While it is the members of a family who shape the practices of technology, the technology itself also contributes to shaping the family. Baldassar (2016) studied a middle-class family dispersed over different countries in two continents and explored the ways in which the family created virtual forms of copresence (mediated by voice calls, text messages, emails, and video calls). These practices not only broadened the family network but also served to bring people closer together. Clayton et al. (2018) focused on families with members whose work took them away from home for short or extended periods and found that they made use of ICT in order to recreate a sense of home while away. Gonçalves (2019: 480), who described herself as a “part-time and commuter mom,” mentions digital technology as one enabling means (with constraints) of keeping in regular contact with her five-year-old daughter. Kati and Nick had divorced and had never permanently lived in the same household. In this sense, their (hypermobile and translocal) family arrangements did not mirror those of an otherwise nuclear family, in which one or more parent commutes for employment reasons (cf. Clayton et al. 2018; Gonçalves 2019). Instead, Mira was the center of their hypermobile family constellation, and in Nick and Kati’s co-parenting ambitions for her, the daily video-calling practices served as the glue (Baldassar, 2016). In taking Mira as the anchoring point, they formed a “digital family” (Taipale 2019: 14): a geographically distributed family consisting of related individuals living in one or more households and who utilize ICT and social media applications to stay connected through daily communication practices, maintaining a sense of unity despite a lack of regular in-person encounters.

VIDEO-CALLING AS MEDIATED PRESENCE AND WORK The expansion and enhancement of ICT have contributed to a new social environment of ubiquitous connectivity, with the proliferation of these environments also challenging the premise that strong relationships require face-to-face interactions (Baldassar 2016). In fact, video calls make mediated face-to-face contact possible and are fundamentally just another mode of normal interaction (Harper, Watson, and Licoppe 2017). Video-calling applications, such as Skype and FaceTime, allow for instantaneous and multimodal communication, and they provide powerful

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means for members in dispersed families to keep in touch with each other. In reviewing research on family video-calling as a phenomenon, three major interwoven themes emerge. Firstly, video-calling activity is commonly viewed as creating a connected or mediated presence among the participants, that is, a sense or illusion of “being there (together)” (Villi and Stocchetti 2011: 105). Related concepts include, for example, ordinary or virtual copresence (Cuban 2014; Nedelcu and Wyss 2016), “always on” webcam presence (Madianou and Miller 2012: 121), and shared living (Greenberg and Neustaedter 2013). The literature shows that video-calling is often used as mediated presence in family contexts in the form of lengthy, sometimes daylong, calls that take place while the participants engage in everyday activities (Greenberg and Neustaedter 2013; Madianou and Miller 2012; Nedelcu and Wyss 2016). Secondly, video calls are seen as part of a routine that is interwoven into the rhythms of family life (Harper, Watson, and Licoppe 2017; Nedelcu and Wyss 2016; Parreñas 2014; Share, Williams, and Kerrins 2018). Video calls typically involve geographically disparate family members in the everyday activities of family life and the recreation of everyday rituals (Clayton et al. 2018; Taipale 2019). Thirdly, many studies on familial video calls focus on the emotional and intimacy aspects of “doing family” across time and space. King-O’Riain (2014) uses the term emotional streaming for transnational extended families who keep Skype turned on for long periods to reduce the sense of distance. The emotional side of caring for loved ones, such as children or ageing parents, is well-documented (e.g., Cuban 2017; Madianou and Miller 2012; Parreñas 2014). The same is, to some extent, true of the role of shared living in longdistance romantic relationships (Greenberg and Neustaedter 2013). The instantaneous, multimodal format of video calls is intimate, conducive to a phatic mode of communication, in which the relations between people are of prime importance, and the transmission of explicit and meaningful information is subordinated (Greenberg and Neustaedter 2013; Madianou and Miller 2012; Villi and Stocchetti 2011). The daily video calls between Mira and her father were both routine and ritualized. In my interviews with Kati and with Nick, they provided detailed and consistent descriptions of the ways in which the routine was usually performed, including the time of day, call length, procedures, locations, the tools and artifacts involved, spatial configurations, the participant roles, and the range and type of activities and interactions engaged in (the practices have been analyzed in greater detail in Palviainen (2020a; 2020b)). For example, Mira could follow her father cooking and eating, and they could have a conversation while she was in the bath. They could also be quiet together through a mediated presence, as illustrated by the example at the beginning of this chapter (King-O’Riain 2014; Share, Williams, and Kerrins 2018). The emotional bonding between Mira and

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her father was regarded as essential and natural, and Kati made conscious efforts to facilitate it: “It’s important that they have a relationship. Of course Nick wants to see her every day. It’s hard for him to be at a distance, so I do everything to facilitate this.” Nick’s active involvement in his daughter’s life stands in contrast with, for example, Parreñas’s (2014) findings regarding Filipino migrant fathers who did not regularly communicate with their children. Video calls as a means of maintaining family relationships across distance also pose challenges and require work. Share, Williams, and Kerrins (2018) studied Polish families residing in Ireland who kept Skype contact with grandparents and other family members in Poland. Along with the gains in “doing family” through such mediated means, many families also found it hard work: videocalling required a significant performance element and the cooperation of all participants in order to create meaningful communication. Ames et al. (2010) examined the technology use of twenty-two families in the United States with remote family members. Of these families, seven used video chats (Skype or iChat). In their study, the responsibility for managing the video chats lay primarily with the parents, while the grandparents at the other end mainly enjoyed the benefits (see also King-O’Riain 2014). Ames et al. singled out four types of “social work” connected with the video chat activity: coordination (e.g., assembling the family), presentation (e.g., ensuring faces can be seen), behavioral (e.g., ensuring small children sit still), and scaffolding work (e.g., engaging children in talk). Examples of these types of work were pointed out by both Kati and Nick during the interviews.

DIGITAL FAMILY LANGUAGE PRACTICES Despite an extensive body of research on the ways in which transnational families make use of ICT to maintain connections (cf. above), the role of languages and linguistic practices in these processes has been somewhat neglected. In primarily focusing on the emotional aspects of Skype calls in transnational families, King-O’Riain (2014) provides some examples of mothers managing these calls because they see it as important to maintaining the linguistic and cultural connections between their children and grandparents living abroad. In summarizing the literature on digitally mediated family language practices, Lanza and Lexander (2019) identify three major areas of research: the possible effects of digital interaction on identity and heritage language use and language choice in transcultural families; the choice of medium implying a choice of spoken or written modality in these families; and digital practices as promoting children’s informal language learning. They do, however, conclude that research in these areas is still scarce and that more is required. To comply with the mediated reality of contemporary multilingual families, I have suggested elsewhere (Palviainen 2020c) that the classic definitions of FLP

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(e.g., Curdt-Christiansen 2009; King, Fogle, and Logan-Terry 2008; King and Lanza 2019) should be expanded to include digital practices. Consequently, FLP is to be understood as explicit and overt as well as implicit and covert planning among members in a family network regarding their language use and digital literacy practices. Kati and Nick had different L1s—Finnish and Dutch—and their joint language had always been English. They had also made efforts to learn each other’s L1. It was not until Mira was born, however, that the language question became something to consider further, that is, what roles the three languages (Finnish, Dutch, and English) would play in Mira’s life. I will now focus the analysis of the ways in which these languages were managed and used by the participants in this particular digital-family network. In nexus analysis terms, the focus, here, is the playing out of the languages as part of the interaction order (the norms of interaction, role expectations, language varieties and the modalities employed, and Mira, Nick, and Kati’s respective orientation to them). Moreover, the discourses in place, such as those associated with use of devices and the physical layout of the space, as well as any personal beliefs and interpretations at play, must also be included in the analysis in order to fully understand the nexus of practice.

LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT IN THE MEDIATED PRESENCE Kati described Mira as trilingual, with Finnish being her strongest language and English her second strongest; her Dutch skills were described as weaker (see also Palviainen 2020b). In my first interview with Nick, he reported that, although he and Mira used some Dutch, they mainly used English together (Excerpt 7.1). Excerpt 7.1. Transcript from initial interview with Nick Me Nick Me Nick

So how would you describe your own use of languages with her? Messy ((laughs)). Like I said, I try to go for Dutch, but if she speaks to me in English- I do so much of my life in English that I just automatically switch into it. It’s very hard to stop that. Yeah. Mira understands quite a lot [of Dutch], more then she lets on I think, but she doesn’t like to speak it very much so- That’s actually interesting because Mira is quite lazy about her languages it seems. If there is somebody who can translate for her, she would get somebody to translate. But if I leave her with my mother whose English is good but not as fluent as mine, whose Finnish is completely non-existent she will switch [into Dutch]. Well, I’ve noticed that when we’re out walking she really tries to talk to me in Dutch but she’s struggling to find the words.

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So there are moments when she’s actually trying to speak Dutch? Yeah, but that’s quite recent actually. It didn’t use to happen often so much but she tries harder now, which I find very encouraging.

In this excerpt, Nick explicitly says that he wanted to use Dutch with Mira but also that he gave in easily because she tended to stick to English. He described Mira as being resistant to speaking Dutch (although she understood quite a lot) and as taking the easy way out whenever possible. When the context demanded it, however, such as when spending time with her Dutch-speaking grandmother, this “laziness” was replaced by an active effort to speak Dutch. Nick thus described his daughter in terms of agency: while she avoided using Dutch and asked others to translate for her, she was also “really trying” (and “struggling”) with her Dutch and even “trying harder” than before to speak it. I visited Mira and Kati after my interview with Nick. They lived in an apartment with two rooms and a kitchen. The kitchen and living room were adjacent to each other, creating quite a large open space, which included kitchen furniture, a table with chairs, a couch, and an armchair. An iPad was used for the FaceTime calls with Nick. As the device was portable, it was carried around as necessary, depending on the activities engaged in. During my visit, Mira received a FaceTime call from Nick while she sat on the couch (Excerpt 7.2). Excerpt 7.2. Field notes from home visit (observing FaceTime call) Nick starts to talk to Mira (iPad resting against the back of the couch, Mira lies on her stomach with head up, face towards screen). Nick greets her in English, with some words in Dutch. Mira tells Nick in English that I (the visitor) am sitting “over there” (at the kitchen table) and mum is “over there” (in the kitchen, cooking). She says something to her mother (in Finnish) across the room, wanting her to translate to dad into English. Nick tries to engage Mira in conversation and asks in English: “How was your day?” When Mira wants to relate what happened in kindergarten, she runs to the kitchen to get help from mum: äiti! (mummy!). She tells her mother in Finnish what she wants to tell her dad and then Kati translates and explains to Nick, in English. Mira is very engaged and lively, runs around, in and between the living room and kitchen, speaks a lot in Finnish, which her mother translates into English for Nick. Mira sits on the couch close to the screen and has a clear face-to-face connection with Nick. Mira talks in an English-Finnish mix. She says in Finnish what she ate at kindergarten: mustamakkara ja salaatti, Nick picks up on this and makes a guess in English: “Oh! Some salad!”. As I am not a Dutch speaker, I may have missed some exchanges in Dutch, but, according to my observations, the digitally mediated communication between Nick and Mira was mainly carried out in English and interspersed with quite a

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lot of Finnish from Mira. When Mira ran into a problem in communicating her message she called for Kati’s attention, whereupon Kati translated what Mira wanted to say from Finnish into English. At the end of Excerpt 7.2, we also find evidence of Nick’s active efforts to interpret what Mira said in Finnish. Whereas he failed to grasp the meaning of the word mustamakkara (black sausage), he did pick up on salaatti (salad), as the words are similar in Finnish and English. In the situation described in Excerpt 7.3, the multimodal affordances associated with the video recording and the portability of the device became evident, as they enabled interactive and physical play in the connected space. Excerpt 7.3. Field notes from home visit (observing FaceTime call) Mira is lying on floor on her stomach, the iPad is leaning against the wall. Dad starts to make funny faces and Mira responds with her own. Laughing. “Wait a minute!” Mira says in English, running away to another room to get a blanket. Mira comes back, crawls on floor covered with the blanket, making sounds like a “bad creature.” Mother assists in the game, takes the iPad, following Mira’s movements so that Nick and Mira are face to face. Mira is “hunting” daddy and he is whole-heartedly playing along with verbal expressions of pretend fright. The playful hunting game required collaborative accomplishment by all three participants. Kati also needed to stop what she was doing in the kitchen, take the iPad, and carry it around. Kati was doing presentation work (Ames et al. 2010) in that she had to ensure Mira stayed in frame (because of the limited range of the built-in camera). The visual constraint was evident in the situation described in Excerpt 7.4, when Mira held the tablet herself and unintentionally swung it away so that her father could hear but not see her anymore. Excerpt 7.4. Field notes from home visit (observing FaceTime call) Mira is lying on her back on the kitchen floor. Kati stands beside her with a spatula in her hand. It is a triadic conversation involving funny tongue-twisters in Finnish, Dutch, and English. Mira holds the iPad in her hands, occasionally twisting it around and upside down, whereupon eye contact is lost. After the observation, I asked Kati whether she thought the call had been typical. She said that although Mira had been a little bit more engaged than usual due to my presence, it was otherwise typical. She then pointed out three typical characteristics of the daily call routine: “One, I’m there to facilitate communication and translating; two, I’m doing housework at the same time; three, I’m carrying around the iPad.” The following day, I contacted Nick by email, and he confirmed that the activity had been fairly normal. I asked him about the situations described in Excerpts 7.3 and 7.4 and whether he was affected by the technical (audiovisual) constraints of the device. It turned out that his lived experience (preknowledge

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of the physical surroundings and of Mira herself) helped him to understand what was going on (Excerpt 7.5). Excerpt 7.5. Email exchange between Nick and I the day after the home visit Nick: I can reasonably follow what is going on somewhat if they are out of vision, because I know the apartment and I know what Mira tends to do. There are also audio clues that carry even when sight doesn’t work. The carry-andfollow is quite common, though sometimes the shaking makes me nauseous. Losing the view on a face does reduce communication for I don’t speak Finnish very well so I rely on facial expressions. Me: Mira (and Kati) were moving around quite a lot during the call; can you hear them all the time? Well enough? Nick: I can hear Mira well enough, except when she whispers to someone else or goes to another room. She will usually repeat if I ask. The bigger question is language: I get some Finnish but not enough, and Mira refuses to use English when Kati is around even for things she can explain. Nick noted the importance of actually seeing Mira when she speaks Finnish: as his own Finnish skills were limited, visual, nonverbal cues made a big difference. Importantly, rather than the audiovisual constraints, Nick himself foregrounded the question of language(s). In his opinion and his experience, the fact that Kati was physically present impacted on Mira’s language practices. He said that Mira did not use English because it was easier for her to ask Kati to translate for her. This led me to ask him a follow-up question (Excerpt 7.6). Excerpt 7.6. Email exchange between Nick and I the day after the home visit Me: One clarifying question: If the two of you are engaged in a conversation/interaction and Kati is not around, does Mira speak (only) English with you? Nick: She tries much more. She tells everyone that I live in Switzerland and don’t speak Finnish, and she speaks to me in person in a mix of English, Finnish and Dutch. Even then she will get stuck, especially when I’ve been away for a while. She improves quickly if I am alone with her for a couple of days, but then also hits a ceiling and has trouble expressing herself (searching for words). Hence, according to Nick, the extent of Mira’s efforts to speak English and Dutch was governed by speaker context, especially the non-presence of Kati. Spending longer stretches of time together was also conducive to language development. It was not necessarily the digitally mediated video calls as such that reduced or hindered Mira’s use of English or Dutch, but rather the presence of a third person who could serve as a translator (cf. Excerpt 7.1).

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This was, to some extent, a built-in, unavoidable component of the FaceTime call routine itself: the physical presence of the mother was essential, given that Mira was only four years old and could not entirely independently operate the technology and manage and arrange the calls. The final example comes from the third data collection cycle, when Mira was doing the filming. The setup was similar to that presented in Figure 7.1, except that only one iPad was being used. In this case, Nick was on FaceTime and cooking in his kitchen in Switzerland, and Mira, sitting at her own kitchen table, was excited about the fact that she was filming him herself.2 Nick and Mira were face-to-face. Eventually, Kati came and sat at the table, next to the screen, facing Mira but out of sight of Nick. The excerpt (Excerpt 7.7) concerns a discussion about an imaginary house, which then evolved into talk about colors. The exchange started with Mira’s Finnish utterance and Kati’s exact translation of it into English. Excerpt 7.7. Transcript of a video recorded by Mira; FaceTime call between Mira and Nick at the kitchen table, Kati sitting next to the screen, facing Mira3 01

Mira

02 03 04 05

Kati Nick

06

Mira

07

Kati

08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Kati

Mira Nick Mira Nick Mira Nick Kati

17 18 19

Mira Kati Mira

20

Nick

on vain YKSI talo (there is only ONE house) there is only ONE house what COLOR does the house have? (.) minkä värinen (.) minkä värinen talo? ((low voice)) (what’s the color? what color does the house have?) äiti, miksi kysyt värejä? ((low voice)) (mum, why do you ask about colors?) no isi kysy sitä ((low voice)) (well, dad is asking that) (.) BLUE BLUE house? that sounds nice! WHAT’S YOUR (.) FAVOR[ITE COLOR]? [/I should/] what is your favorite color? /…/ oh that’s hard to say /…/ bright orange (.) kuulitsä mitä isi vastasi? ((low voice)) (did you hear what daddy answered?) bright orange right (.) what is YOUR favorite color? ((low voice)) [kaikki] (all) [what’s your] favorite?

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Mira

22 23

Nick Mira

24

Kati

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Mira

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Nick

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KAIKKI ALL the colors! (all) ah! äiti mikä se bright orange on suomeksi? ((low voice)) (mum what is this bright orange in Finnish?) kirkkaan oranssi ((low voice)) (bright orange) eli ihan kirkkaan oranssi! ((low voice)) (so just this bright orange) it’s a warm /…/ color I like it because it’s very summery

A closer look at the interaction shows two concurrent, alternating types of exchange, with different aims and different participant roles: the main discussion between Mira and Nick (lines 1–3, 9–14, 20–2, 26) and a contingent one between Mira and Kati (lines 5–7, 16–19, 23–5). The main discussion between Nick and Mira was carried out in English. When a brief pause occurred after Nick had a turn (lines 4, 15), Kati joined the conversation and checked that Mira had understood and heard (lines 5, 16), scaffolding Mira to continue and contribute to the discussion with Nick. Mira also used Kati as a resource when she was unsure about a word (line 23). There were, thus, parallel conversations taking place: one in English between Nick and Mira, in normal or slightly raised voices, and another between Mira and her mother, mainly in Finnish and in normal or slightly lower voices. The latter conversation was not directed primarily at Nick, but took place in order to facilitate the conversation with him. Kati was invisibly present: active and passive at the same time. The data show that Kati’s roles took many forms in this nexus. Even if the main participants in the FaceTime calls were Nick and Mira, with Kati occupying a peripheral role, Kati served as facilitator, language interpreter and broker, communication scaffolder and motivator, device holder, and technical operator. Facilitating successful family video-calling routines demands a lot of this “social work” (Ames et al. 2010; Share, Williams, and Kerrins 2018), and we can now add to this the active work that comes with managing different languages in mediated interactions. As a single parent for most of the time, Kati pointed out that she also had to do all the “meta work” (such as ordinary housework) on top of managing the calls, commenting that she was “looking forward to the time when [Mira] is big enough to call her father herself, so that I don’t have to be there to facilitate.” While she sometimes felt overwhelmed by the work, she was also aware of the strength of her position: “It’s a matter of power too, I’m the mediator, I’m in power.” In terms of the politics of space (Villi and Stocchetti 2011: 104), Kati’s role as mediator strongly affected her capacity to influence the distribution of social distance and proximity in the family’s social triad.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS Technologies shape new forms of familial sociality, redefine notions of distance and family models, and allow people to develop a sense of closeness and togetherness even without face-to-face interaction and local proximity (Baldassar 2016; Nedelcu and Wyss 2016). Mira’s family model was formed by her divorced parents’ co-parenting ambitions for her and enabled by their socioeconomic situation, hypermobile history, and present lifestyle. In terms of the role and practices of the three languages at play, Mira’s daily life was dominated by Finnish: it was her strongest language and the language she shared and used with her mother Kati. The dominance of Finnish was reflected in the FaceTime calls. Although Nick used English with Mira and she also spoke some English, she preferred to speak Finnish and to make use of Kati as an interpreter. According to Nick’s reports, his daughter’s English (and to some extent her Dutch) skills developed most when the two of them spent longer periods of time together on their own. Mira’s skills in Dutch were further stimulated by spending time with her Dutch-speaking grandmother (Ruby 2012). It would appear, then, that contextual factors, such as who was or was not involved, which language varieties were viable in a certain context (Chevalier 2012), and which strategies and investments of effort Mira herself found worthwhile, played the most decisive role in terms of the enactment of the language practices. These were the guiding principles, irrespective of whether the communication was being mediated through video calls or took place directly, in person. As for parental language management strategies, both Nick and Kati seemed to find the phatic and emotional function of meaningful communication with Mira more important (Villi and Stocchetti 2011) than deliberately pushing and “forcing” her to speak any particular language in order to develop her proficiency (cf. Armstrong 2014). The video calls meant that Nick and Mira got to meet and interact in a transconnective space on a daily basis and also that Mira was exposed to regular, meaningful, and considerable amounts of linguistic input in English and Dutch (De Houwer 2007; Lanza 1997), which she would not otherwise have been exposed to. Although it can be challenging to have children collaborate (Ames et al. 2010; Share, Williams, and Kerrins 2018), video calls are a convenient way of maintaining contact when children are small and do not yet know how to read or write. In the present study, the multimodal features of the video calls allowed for shared living (Greenberg and Neustaedter 2013) and for Mira and Nick to literally see each other every day. The audiovisual mode helped Nick to interpret Mira when she spoke Finnish by reading her body language. Nevertheless, while video calls make face-to-face contact possible and share many features with normal human interaction (Harper, Watson, and Licoppe 2017), the interaction remains mediated and different. It is 2D rather than

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3D, it does not communicate scents, and it is non-tactile. Further research is required before we fully understand the exact connections between interaction mediated by video-calling and the processes of language development. Communication media such as FaceTime have become “so profoundly embedded in people’s everyday life” that they permeate “a plethora of daily routines, practices, and social interactions” (Kaufmann and Peil 2020: 230). This has important implications for the field of FLP: digitally mediated communication must be included in research protocols. Only then can a fuller understanding of the dynamic ecology of contemporary multilingual families be achieved. In Mira’s case, FaceTime calls formed a significant part of her normal daily rhythm of language mediated activities, which also consisted of attending kindergarten, watching cartoons on her iPad, seeing friends and extended family, and traveling.

NOTES 1 My sincere thanks go to Kati, Nick, and Mira—the names are pseudonyms—who so generously shared their family life with me. The writing of the chapter was supported by the Academy of Finland, Grant No. 315478. 2 She exclaimed delightedly to her father: “Daddy, look I’m handling it!” 3 Transcription symbols: italics Finnish; ( ) translation from Finnish; (.) noticeable pause; [ ] overlapping speech; CAPS emphatic stress; /…/ unintelligible word or phrase; (( )) comment by analyst; ? at end of utterance rising intonation, not necessarily a question; ! at end of utterance animated intonation, not necessarily exclamation.

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Licoppe, C. (2004), “ ‘Connected’ Presence: The Emergence of a New Repertoire for Managing Social Relationships in a Changing Communication Technoscape,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22(1): 135–56. Madianou, M., and Miller, D. (2012), Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Marchetti-Mercer, M. C. (2017), “ ‘The Screen Has Such Sharp Edges to Hug’: The Relational Consequences of Emigration in Transnational South African Emigrant Families,” Transnational Social Review, 7(1): 73–89. Morgan, D. H. J. (1996), Family Connections, Cambridge: Polity Press. Nedelcu, M., and Wyss, M. (2016), “ ‘Doing Family’ through ICT-Mediated Ordinary Co-presence: Transnational Communication Practices of Romanian Migrants in Switzerland,” Global Networks, 16(2): 202–18. Palviainen, Å. (2020a), “Faces and Spaces: Doing Multilingual Family Life through Digital Screens,” in Språkreiser. Festskrift til Anne Golden på 70-årsdagen 14. juli 2020, ed. L. A. Kulbrandstad and G. Bordal Steien, 193–208, Oslo: Novus Forlag. Palviainen, Å. (2020b), “Video Calls as a Nexus of Practice in Multilingual Translocal Families,” Zeitschrift Für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht, 25(1): 85–108. Palviainen, Å. (2020c), “Future Prospects and Visions for Family Language Policy Research,” in Handbook of Home Language Maintenance and Development: Social and Affective Factors, ed. A. C. Schalley and S. Eisenchlas, 236–53, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Palviainen, Å., and Kędra, J. (2020), “What’s in the Family App? Making Sense of Digitally Mediated Communication within Multilingual Families,” Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices, 1(1): 89–111. Parreñas, R. S. (2014), “The Intimate Labour of Transnational Communication,” Families, Relationships and Societies, 3(3): 425–42. Ruby, M. (2012), “The Role of a Grandmother in Maintaining Bangla with Her Granddaughter in East London,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 33(1): 67–83. Scollon, R., and Scollon, S. W. (2004), Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet, London: Routledge. Share, M., Williams, C., and Kerrins, L. (2018), “Displaying and Performing: Polish Transnational Families in Ireland Skyping Grandparents in Poland,” New Media & Society, 20(8): 3011–28. Taipale, S. (2019), Intergenerational Connections in Digital Families, Cham: Springer. Villi, M., and Stocchetti, M. (2011), “Visual Mobile Communication, Mediated Presence and the Politics of Space,” Visual Studies, 26(2): 102–12. Zhu Hua and Li Wei (2016), “Transnational Experience, Aspiration and Family Language Policy,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 655–66.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Managing Language Shift through Multimodality: Somali Families in London SAHRA ABDULLAHI AND LI WEI

INTRODUCTION Britain hosts the largest Somali community in Europe. While the majority of the present Somali population in the UK are fairly recent arrivals, that is, post1980, and their Britain-born children, the community has already experienced significant language shift to English. There is, however, little research on the language shift process and even less on how families and individuals manage the language shift in their everyday social interactions. This chapter attempts to examine how the communication gap between parents and children, and between grandparents and grandchildren, created by the intergenerational language shift is navigated and managed during instances of narrative talk and task-oriented talk in family interaction. We will look at examples of how family members circumvent the language barriers in Somali households, what strategies the families use to manage language shift, and what aspects of communication and their relationships are compromised. In particular, we highlight the use of multimodal resources in family interaction. We situate our study within the broader sociolinguistic research on language shift, family

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language policy, multimodality, and language brokering. But instead of selfreports or interviews, we use ethnographic and interactional data and focus on issues of intra-family language brokering, embodied task-oriented talk, and embodiment in group talk. We will discuss the implications of the findings and the impact of language shift on family relationships, education, and identity.

THE SOMALI COMMUNITY IN BRITAIN Somalis have been migrating to the UK for almost two centuries and consisted of at least five different phases. The first Somalis who arrived in Britain were merchant seamen who settled in port cities such as Liverpool and Cardiff in the 1800s (Kahin 1997) in large part because of the failure of the merchant business which had resulted in their need to seek new work opportunities on the land. It is worth noting that at this time, the northern-most part of Somalia was still a British protectorate following the Geneva Convention of 1884. The second major group of Somali immigrants to Britain was also largely comprised of men, this time wealthy economic migrants from northern Somalia who came after the Second World War. The third group of Somali immigrants were political refugees in the 1980s who escaped Somalia for fear of persecution following the military coup by Siad Barre. The fourth was of whole families, including men, women, and children, who had escaped the civil war which broke out in Somalia in 1991, and finally the most recent group of Somali migrants have been transnational families who have traveled through many other countries before settling in the UK. The Office of National Statistics had a number of 99,484 Somali-born immigrants in the UK in 2016. The largest group live in London, with boroughs such as Brent and Ealing being home to over six thousand Somalis each. Many of the Somali households are also multigenerational, with grandparents often living with their adult children and their grandchildren under the same roof. In such households, grandparents—and specifically grandmothers—are often more involved with child rearing. Studies have shown that in cases where the grandparents are monolingual in Somali, language maintenance is better than in two generation households with no grandparents (Ishizawa 2004). Nevertheless, even in the three-generation households, language shift from Somali to English is still occurring, and the British-born grandchildren are still becoming functional monolingual speakers of English despite having regular contact with their monolingual Somali-speaking grandparents. We will look at examples from such families in the present chapter and show how different generations manage the cross-generational discrepancies in their language proficiencies and preferences in family interactions. There is no official statistics of the number of British-born Somalis. Our own survey with sixty-three Somali families confirmed that English is the

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strongest and preferred language among the British-born generations and their literacy level in Somali is particularly low (Abdullahi and Li 2021). The lived experience of the first author of this chapter who grew up in the UK from age eleven also confirms that English is the primary language of communication among the younger generations of the Somalis in Britain. The community has recognized the challenges posed by the intergenerational language shift and made a range of efforts to tackle the communication problems between the generations caused by the language shift (Abdullahi and Li 2021). The present study aims to examine how members of different generations within the same family deal with such challenges in everyday family interaction.

STUDIES OF LANGUAGE SHIFT, FAMILY LANGUAGE POLICY AND LANGUAGE BROKERING There is certainly no shortage of sociolinguistic research demonstrating language shift (LS) in immigrant and ethnic minority communities all over the world (Roberts 1991; Clyne and Kipp 1999; Zhao and Liu 2010; Schofield et al. 2012, etc.). In the UK context alone, there is evidence of LS in the Chinese community (Li 1994), Sri Lankan community (Canagarajah 2008), and Bangladeshi community (Rasinger 2013), for example, as well as in families who speak one of the autochthonous minority languages of the UK, such as Welsh (Edwards and Newcombe 2005) and Scottish Gaelic (Smith-Christmas 2016). It is no surprise then that the Somali community in London is experiencing the same phenomenon. Somali, being a minority language in a majority English speaking country, has had little support at a policy level to ensure that Somali children develop bilingually both in speaking and in literacy. Fishman (1966) suggested that the average time it takes for the minority language to be replaced or displaced by the majority is over the course of three generations. Although no systematic sociolinguistic study has specifically chartered the course of LS in the British Somali community, it is likely that most Somali families in Britain follow this standard path. Existing evidence suggests that retention of the community language is an unlikely outcome for many migrant communities, especially if the community has a relatively low socioeconomic status compared to other communities (Laakso et al. 2016). The British Somali community is considered to be a socioeconomically disadvantaged minority group (Mohamoud 2011). This is not to suggest, however, that the process of LS is inevitable, as much other research has gone to show how practices in the home, as well as the beliefs and attitudes held by parents, play an important role in mitigating LS (de Houwer 1999) or even reversing it (Fishman 1991; 2008). Indeed, many studies have emphasized the importance of the family’s role in language maintenance (LM) and LS. Fishman’s Graded Intergenerational

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Disruption Scale (GIDS), for example, depicted the various social domains that affect the maintenance of a minority or heritage language and emphasized the role of the “intergenerational and demographically concentrated home-familyneighbourhood efforts” (Fishman 2008: 485). He further stressed that the other efforts made by institutions and the wider community as depicted in the intervention stages are unlikely to be effective if the family domain is ineffective at preserving the minority or heritage language. In the growing field of family language policy (FLP) research, scholars have examined the way the choice and use of different languages are managed and how this management is informed and influenced by wider sociocultural and ideological factors (see de Houwer 1990; Lanza 1992; King and Fogle 2006; Fogle 2008; Curdt-Christiansen 2013; Tollefson et al. 2018; SmithChristmas 2018; Higgins 2018; Li and Zhu 2019). Moreover, much research on FLP has concerned itself with the reasons why certain language practices occur in the home. Li and Zhu, for example, talk about aspirations and motivations that impact language practices which can contribute to LMLS (Li and Zhu 2019). Lanza speaks about emotions and their impact on language use (1992), and de Houwer examines beliefs and attitudes toward languages, measuring how different attitudes shape FLP (1999). Other FLP research takes into consideration the FLP practices implemented by caregivers and their outcomes depending on the child’s own attitudes (King and Fogle 2006; Smith-Christmas 2016). In the meantime, there is relatively little work on how families manage the realities of intergenerational LS on a day-to-day basis in family interaction. To address this question, a closer, instance-focused look at family interaction is necessary. We will examine three instances of family interaction, two of which will be looked at through a multimodal lens. Multimodality, which is an area of research that seeks to analyze human interaction and exchanges by considering the various forms of expression or “modes” used in communication (Kress 2010), has not been applied extensively to studies of intergenerational interaction and particularly interactions which occur in the home setting. Research that has previously combined Conversation Analysis and multimodality have focused on child language brokering in the school context (Nevile 2015; Antonini 2016). Child language brokering, which is when a child acts as an ad hoc translator for their parents in instances where they are dealing with a majority language speaking third party, has emerged as a field of inquiry for understanding how parents and children co-construct and understand meanings. However, research on child language brokering is rarely done in the home setting, and most research combining child language brokering and multimodality has done so outside of the family context. Research that has looked into language barriers within bilingual families has also discussed language brokering or communication brokering as a necessary

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tool to achieve understanding between family members with different primary or preferred languages. Ng, He, and Loong (2004) make a compelling case for the importance of language brokers—and particularly median aged parents as the middle generation—for the purposes of dealing with the language gap caused by LS. In their study of twelve Chinese families in New Zealand, the research team used detailed Conversation Analysis to identify thirty-five instances of language brokering and found that brokering was more prevalent in families that were moderately assimilated into the majority culture, over those who had higher or lower levels of assimilation. This result is congruent with the evidence from our observations within the Somali community in Britain, whose experience of LS and the consequent intra-family language gap is made salient by the fact that many older Somali parents and grandparents are more likely to have a Somali speaking social network of friends, family, and even acquaintances, whereas their children and grandchildren are likely to have a social network comprising largely of English-speaking individuals.

THE PRESENT STUDY The present study was conducted as part of a larger project on family language policy in three immigrant communities—the Somali, the Polish, and the Chinese—in the UK. It was carried out over a period of two years, during which time ethnographic and community profiling data, family interactional data, and a community survey were collected. Ten Somali families were selected and data in the form of audio and video recordings, interviews, and observational notes were gathered. The video and audio recordings, along with observational notes, were made of the participating families on a weekly basis, where the researcher (the first author of the chapter) would visit the homes of the families and observe as well as record. For the purposes of this chapter, however, we will focus on three families and present data from three instances of family interaction, one from each family. The researcher is multilingual herself and is a member of the Somali community in London and, as such, was able to follow the interactions that contained switching and mixing of Somali and English and occasionally other languages— the researcher lived in Norway prior to settling in the UK and has some knowledge of Norwegian but uses primarily English and Somali in everyday interaction. The following interactions are approximately one-to-two-minute long extracts selected from longer pieces of family interaction in the home setting. The extracts were chosen for the specific linguistic phenomena that are the focus of this chapter. One of the interactions (Excerpt 8.1 below) occurs in a two-generation transnational family and features a mother, her two children, and a friend of one of the children. This first family is a large family, comprising of eleven

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children from ages sixteen to thirty-eight. The family is originally from southern Somalia but spent many years living in Norway before arriving in the UK. All the children speak fluent English, but only the eldest five speak fluent Somali and the elder seven speak Norwegian to various degrees of proficiency as well. The mother in this interaction will be referred to as Sadio. She is fifty-six years old, has low levels of English, but speaks both Norwegian and Somali to high levels of proficiency. The conversation extract presented takes place between Sadio, her second eldest daughter Hannah who is thirty-six and her youngest son aged sixteen, named Ahmed. Ahmed lives at home with Sadio whereas Hannah lives in her own home with her children and husband. This interaction is an example of intra-family language brokering, where Hannah acts as the intermediary between Ahmed and Sadio. The other two interactions (Excerpts 8.2 and 8.3) occur in threegeneration families and feature interactions between grandmothers and their grandchildren. Here in both instances the children are of similar ages. The children are reported by the parents as having low abilities in Somali, which is corroborated by our observations of the interactions at home where the children predominantly use English when speaking with family members barring the occasional mixing of Somali words. Similarly, the grandmothers self-report as not being able to speak English, and this is also observed in the home where they speak predominantly Somali with all family members, with the exception of the occasional incident of using some English words as well. Both these families are also transnational families, with the second family having history in Dijbouti, Saudi Arabia, and France. They are relatively recent migrants to the UK, having arrived approximately five years ago. The third family have also lived in Djbouti and France, but arrived in the UK almost twenty years ago, with only the eldest child being born outside the UK. Transcripts for Excerpt 8.1 is text-based, whereas the transcripts for Excerpts 8.2 and 8.3 are accompanied by image sequences which demonstrate the body language in use during the interactions. Analysis of the images will focus on hand gestures and gaze. For all the transcripts, the conventions used are as follows: colon for pauses less than a second, numbers in brackets for pauses longer than a second, dashes for overlap, brackets containing descriptions, and italics for translations underneath the original Somali text.

DEALING WITH LANGUAGE SHIFT IN FAMILY INTERACTION Intra-family Language Brokering This first example occurs between Sadio and her two children, Ahmed and Hannah, while the researcher is also present. Hannah is thirty-six years of age

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and the second eldest in her family, while Ahmed is sixteen years old and the youngest. In this sequence of intra-family language brokering, Ahmed arrives at Hannah’s house shortly after their mother has arrived to visit her grandchildren (Hannah’s children). Ahmed arrives with his friend Zaid who stands behind Ahmed near the entrance to the living room where this interaction occurs. Hannah is sitting on the floor with her two children while the mother sits on the sofa. Hannah is positioned physically in between Ahmed and their mother as this interaction unfolds. The interaction, which consists of thirty-five turns, can be found in Excerpt 8.1. The excerpt begins with a comment made by the researcher regarding Ahmed’s haircut. Sadio in line 4 asks what was said, addressing Ahmed but Hannah responds instead (lines 6–8), mixing English and Somali. Here she begins the turn in Somali, addressing the mother, but shifts to English when addressing Ahmed as she signals to the haircut, and then as she addresses the researcher. It is noteworthy that both here and in line 31, Hannah interjects, offering her translations without being prompted, perhaps as a response to seeing the communication gap between her brother and her mother, or perhaps as a force of habit from being socialized into language brokering as part of regular family language practice at home. In any case, it seems clear that this is expected behaviour, as demonstrated by Ahmed in lines 32–3, where he interjects by attempting to manage the way in which Hannah relays his comment to their mother. The dynamic here, however, does not suggest that the mother is entirely lost without Hannah’s translations either, as even when Hannah is translating, she mixes Somali with English, suggesting that there is some English vocabulary available to the mother in the same sense that there is enough Somali available to both Ahmed and Zaid to offer responses to the mother when necessary. An example of this is when the mother addresses Zaid directly in line 14. He hesitates at first but attempts to answer the question, continuing to do so in the background of the conversation after he is cut off by Hannah, as indicated by Hannah’s comment in lines 34–5. In fact, her comment suggests further the spectacle nature of Zaid attempting to speak Somali and the infrequency with which he must do so. Excerpt 8.1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Researcher. Ahmed: Sadio: Hannah:

(about Ahmed’s haircut) Was that an experiment the lines in your hair? Yes just looking at how I was gonna look it was nice but then it backfired because of the family Maxaa dhahthey? What did you say? Hooyo ma xasoosata markuu the hairdresser barbershopka aathey and he said Manuka or what was it (signaling to the cuts in the hair) and (to researcher) my dad straight away was like come here waryaa

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Ahmed: Sadio: Zaid: Hannah: Ahmed: Hannah:

Sadio: Hannah: Ahmed: Hannah: Ahmed: Hannah:

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Mum do you remember when he went to the hairdresser barbershop and he said Manuka or what was it (signaling to the cuts in the hair) and (to researcher) my dad straight away was like come here boy Why do you guys keep on re-writing the story I had it for like two months and then I shaved it off myself (to Zaid) Habo ma TV cusub baad soo gathateen? Nephew did you get a new TV? Ha urn: :urn: :habo Lubna Yes um: :um: :aunty Lubna - What’s special about a new TV a TV is a TV innit? You need help putting it together Oh waa yaabanahay maanta oo dhan I’m thinking why you guys making it like nobody has a TV Oh I’m surprised this whole time I’m thinking why you guys making it like nobody has a TV Maxaa ku yaala TVga? What about the TV? TV cusub ii soo gateen wixii raban inaa loo dhigo They bought a new TV they need help putting it together And obviously the son said in celebration of the new TV the guy’s gonna order food for us so why are me and Zaid gonna pass up on free food? (To Sadio) Wuxuu yiri He said- And don’t say it in a devious way like (to researcher) you know how she’s gonna - (to Ahmed) Hold on I want to hear Zaid speak Somali I’ve never heard him speak Somali

It may be argued that Excerpt 8.1—as well as the following interactions from the other two families below—suggests that conversations facilitated by a nominated language broker in the home may be an easier way to achieve understanding, as well as perhaps being necessary in instances like this when the interaction is based around storytelling or the exchange of information. Here, the goal of the interaction is to achieve a shared understanding of past and future events, and the question of how an interaction such as the above—where the aim is to relate to one another and share meanings and understanding—is successful without fluency in a common language or the help of a language broker remains to be answered. In the following two examples, however, the goal of the participants is not narrative understanding but rather to complete a task. Here too, exchange of information and mutual understanding are necessary parts of the interactions. But unlike in the above example, the aid of physical objects which we will describe as artefacts, as well as hand gestures, gaze and body positioning, allows for successful interactions with an economical use of language.

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Embodied Multimodality and Task-Oriented Talk We will apply a multimodal lens to the analysis of the second extract below. The exchange lasts for 1 minute and 5 seconds and is between a grandmother and her grandson while the researcher is present and filming. We will call them Kaltun and Abdi, respectively. Kaltun is preparing Abdi for school and has just finished giving him breakfast. Both Kaltun and Abdi mix Somali and English, utilizing certain words along with gestures and artefacts to convey meaning. At the beginning of the clip, Kaltun picks up a glass of milk and begins the interaction by asking Abdi “Milk ma cabesid? Are you not drinking milk?” This is depicted in Figure 8.1. She also refers to the milk by its English name as opposed to using the Somali word for milk, “caano.” Abdi responds by shaking his head as he wipes his mouth, saying, “No time for milk.” The grandmother responds by explaining that there is time because Baashi, who is the uncle tasked with taking Abdi to school, is fine waiting. In this exchange, Abdi produces a sentence completely in English (line 3) and the grandmother responds entirely in Somali (lines 4–5). Yet despite their limited knowledge in the opposite languages, the exchanges are perfectly congruent, depicting clearly that understanding is achieved. In

FIGURE 8.1:  Still from family 2. Grandmother offers grandson milk. She speaks in Somali and he responds in English.

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the next few turns, the grandmother walks out of shot while Abdi interacts with the researcher. After 46 seconds the grandmother interjects, asking Abdi to come over so she can smell his mouth and inspect how well he has brushed his teeth. The following sequence as descried below is depicted in Figure 8.2. The grandmother repeats this instruction twice, more loudly the second time, before Abdi walks over with his mouth opened wide, and the grandmother smells it. She then asks if he has scrubbed his tongue. This turn, depicted in Frames C, D, and E, are accompanied by the grandmother making a gesture where she extends her tongue and moves her hand over it as though holding a toothbrush. Abdi in Frame E mimics the grandmother’s gesture while nodding. She then says, “Haye kaaley cadarka aan koo mariyee. Okay come then let me put some atar (a type of perfume or incense) on you.” To which Abdi replies, “I don’t have time for atar that take a long time ago.” This reply from Abdi is accompanied by an action depicted in Figures 8.3. He extends his hand, touching it to his grandmother’s cardigan, and pushes it away as he steps back. The action lasts 0.1 second and coincides with the words “I don’t have time for atar,” with the motion of pushing completed on the word “atar.” After uttering this turn, Abdi walks across the shot and disappears to the right. The grandmother looks up at the researcher (SA) and asks what he said, and the researcher complies, saying “wuxuu dahay cadar time ma u heysti. He said he doesn’t have time for atar,” and the grandmother laughs. The grandmother’s request for language brokering from the researcher indicates that she required clarification as opposed to not having understood the utterance at all, as it appears that his nonverbal gestures coupled with his turn were not enough to convey meaning in full. Embodied Multimodality in a Group Setting The third example happens during mealtime. It is an interaction that occurs in the background while the mother and the researcher are engaged in another conversation. In this excerpt, which lasts for 1 minute and 55 seconds, the grandmother addresses one of the twins, asking her to hand over her drink so she can bring a cup from the kitchen to the grandmother. In Figure 8.4, Frame A, we see that the grandmother extends her arm out, palm open, and facing up, indicating that she is ready to hold Safiya’s drink so that Safiya can get up and fetch the cup. We also see Safiya in this Frame, whose eyes are directed toward the grandmother’s hand, but she does not do as instructed and instead continues to drink. The grandmother then proceeds to address her twice more, the third utterance in line 5 of the transcript corresponding with Frame D, when the grandmother points to herself as she says, “Keen hade aniga soo ma kuu soo gathinoo? Come then, didn’t I buy you this drink?” To which Safiya responds, “Yeah,” and the grandmother extends her arm out further toward Safiya as seen in Frame E, Figure 8.4.

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FIGURE 8.2:  Sequence showing interaction where grandmother is helping grandson get ready for school.

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FIGURE 8.3:  Continuation of previous sequence. Grandmother offers “atar,” a type of perfume, and grandson refuses.

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FIGURE 8.4:  Sequence from family 3. Grandmother asking granddaughter to bring her a cup from the kitchen.

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The grandmother requests that Safiya bring her a big cup. She repeats this instruction as Safiya hands over her drink (Frame F, Figure 8.4), stating, “Koobka weyn ii keen bax. Bring me the big cup, go.” As Safiya is walking away, she makes a hand gesture where she holds her hands out, lifting one above the other as though indicating height, and repeats, “Kii weeyn waa weeyn! The big one it’s big!” And the grandmother nods while holding her hands out as well, palms facing one another to indicate width. This exchange is illustrated in Figure 8.5. After a few moments, Safiya returns with a cup and hands it to the grandmother and then sits down and resumes drinking from her bottle. The grandmother then holds the cup out in the direction of her daughter (as seen in Figure 8.6, Frame B) who is still engaged in conversation with the researcher. Here the cup is used as a vector, the direction of its tilt drawing a clear line from the grandmother to the daughter. Maria, the other twin, however, notices the cup, which is at eye level with her, and lifts her drink toward the cup, offering the grandmother her drink, as seen in Frames C and D.

FIGURE 8.5:  Image showing grandmother and granddaughter acting out the word “wayn” big to consolidate understanding.

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But the grandmother moves her cup away, drawing it back from Maria in the same instant that Maria pushes her drink forward toward the grandmother (Frames C and D). What’s more, the grandmother’s hand movement with the cup is delivered in perfect synchronicity with her head movement—turning her chin away from Maria and breaking eye contact with her by closing her eyes. This nonverbal exchange occurs over 0.76 seconds, and are clearly understood by Maria, as evidenced by her verbal response in line 23 of the transcript, where she says, “You don’t like it? It’s banana.” The grandmother answers, “Ithinkaa inii soo gathay. I bought it for you two.” The mother then takes the grandmother’s cup and fills it with Pepsi, without breaking both eye contact and conversation with the researcher—as demonstrated by her gaze which is still trained on the researcher in Frame E, Figure 8.6. In other words, the mother who was fully engaged in another interaction, was still able to respond to the nonverbal cue initiated by the grandmother when she held out her cup. As the mother is filling the grandmother’s cup and handing it back to her, Maria indicates that she did not understand the grandmother’s response to her question, as suggested by her turn in line 26, where she uses the interjection “huh,” to index a question. The grandmother repeats her utterance once more, “Ithinkaa inii soo gathay. I bought it for you two,” but Maria does not respond or make any nonverbal signs to suggest that she understands and instead turns her attention to her mother and the researcher.

DISCUSSION In Excerpt 8.1 above, Hannah not only acts as an intermediary between Ahmed and Sadio but also fills in knowledge gaps of the narrative for the researcher. In the below excerpt, we see how she manages all three interlocutors in one turn from lines 6–11. 6 Hannah: Hooyo ma xasoosata markuu the hairdresser barbershopka aathey and 7 he said Manuka or what was it (signalling to the cuts in the hair) and 8 (to researcher) my dad straight away was like come here waryaa 9 Mum do you remember when he went to the hairdresser barbershop 10 and he said Manuka or what was it (signalling to the cuts in the hair) 11 and (to researcher) my dad straight away was like come here boy

Hannah begins by addressing the mother in Somali to explain what story she and Ahmed are referencing, and then switches to English as she turns to her brother for clarification on the name of the haircut, before finally addressing the researcher to add a missing element to the story—the father’s reaction which signals her parents disapproval of the haircut in question. Hannah primarily uses English when addressing her brother, Zaid and the researcher, but shifts to Somali or code-mixes English and Somali when addressing her mother. The

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FIGURE 8.6:  Sequence showing grandmother nonverbally communicate with daughter and granddaughter using cup.

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use of the word “barbarshopka” is an example of code-mixing within a word, where an English noun is made into a Somali noun by adding the suffix -ka. This is usually used when there is not a Somali equivalent for a noun; however, here it is used because the speaker does not know or chooses not to use the Somali equivalent for the word hairdresser. Hannah’s use of code-mixing in the above example is deliberate and suggests that her choice of language is driven by the preference of her interlocutor, perhaps as a result of her comfort with both languages. It seems that Hannah’s code-mixing is less about her ability to produce either language consistently, but instead is a choice made for effect or for the sake of her audience. This is further demonstrated in Hannah’s turn from lines 20 to 21, where she is addressing Ahmed but is code-mixing in her reply. Here, however, the code-mixing is for comedic effect as the Somali phrase that she employs, “waa yaabanahay maanta oo dhan—oh I’m surprised this whole time,” is a phrase which she also delivers in an exaggerated tone to communicate over the top relief for finally understanding Ahmed’s point. What’s more, Hannah’s use of Somali at this junction also has the effect of bringing their mother’s attention back into their conversation, where she was previously engaged in another conversation with Zaid. 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Ahmed: Hannah:

Sadio:

You need help putting it together Oh waa yaabanahay maanta oo dhan I’m thinking why you guys making it like nobody has a TV Oh I’m surprised this whole time I’m thinking why you guys making it like nobody has a TV Maxaa ku yaala TVga? What about the TV?

Moreover, in interaction 1, we also see the dynamic of sibling interaction when practicing intra-family language brokering. 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Hannah: TV cusub ii soo gateen wixii raban inaa loo dhigo They bought a new TV they need help putting it together Ahmed: And obviously the son said in celebration of the new TV the guy’s gonna order food for us so why are me and Zaid gonna pass up on free food? Hannah: (To Sadio) Wuxuu yiri He said Ahmed: - And don’t say it in a devious way like (to researcher) you know how she’s gonna -

From lines 26 to 33, Hannah is performing as a language broker rather instinctively between her brother and her mother, as neither of them explicitly ask her to step into this role. However, there is a clear implicit understanding and compliance with Hannah’s role as the language broker from both parties, and particularly from Ahmed’s side as her younger brother, whose comment in

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line 32 and his following aside to the researcher, further indicate that there is an expectation or a tendency on Hannah’s part to translate on Ahmed’s behalf in a way that he describes as “devious.” Ahmed in this utterance is attempting to manage the manner in which Hannah relays his utterances to their mother, and the playful nature of his comments and description of Hannah’s style of brokering offers an insight into how control of an utterance is also up for negotiation during this style of informal intra-family brokering. Verhaeghe et al. (2019: 15) discuss similar instances of language brokering where grandparents and children are seen “speaking through” other family members in discussions and describe the roles taken on by these family members (usually the parents) as “directors” in addition to being “narrators,” for having to structure and direct the conversations through asking questions. This is also what we observed from Hannah in the case of Excerpt 8.1, whose management of the interaction was a critical component of its flow and direction. In both Figures 8.2 and 8.3, we see that the grandchildren and the grandparents rely heavily on nonverbal signals for the success of their interactions and particularly those interactions that are goal driven. Here the point is expediency; the grandparents produce an utterance in Somali and the grandchildren reply in English. In all the observations made in these families, the grandparents rarely required or requested that the grandchildren produce Somali, and in those instances where they did so in the researcher’s presence, it was most likely a performative choice for the researcher, and the grandchildren did not produce the requested language. This suggests that there was not an FLP that stressed the use of Somali in the home for the grandchildren in these families. The methods of combining nonverbal cues, the use of artefacts, and the repetition of simple phrases as well as code-mixing are enough, it appears, for many of the mundane day-to-day tasks that are performed in the home, albeit more difficult and laborious on the interlocutors, as demonstrated in interaction 3 where the grandmother uses more effort than would otherwise be required in order to have her granddaughter deliver to her a cup from the kitchen. But the larger problem is arguably the fact that it severely limits the ability for grandparents and grandchildren to connect on a deeper level. Emotive language, the sharing of ideas, and even storytelling becomes extremely difficult without the presence of a language broker or multiple language brokers. Tannenbaum (2005) highlights the link between the maintenance of the mother tongue and the relationships between family members and feelings of closeness in the home, concluding that children preferring to use the L2 in the home was evidence of a more loosely attached family that spoke to a distance between family members. In these cases, children would be more engaged with forming their L2 rather than maintaining the L1 as a means of facilitating a sense of belonging to the new group, and for the cultivation of their own identities. In our own families, this was indexed by a lack of interest on the part of the

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children to learn Somali to a higher level. In the case of the third family, this was something that the mother was highly aware of, and her concerns over the implications of her children’s loss of L1 on family relationships was something that she expressed to the researcher. We used to live in France in Paris with my sister for almost 5 years before coming here (to the UK). My sister she still lives there, and her children only speak French as well. We have the same problem all of us. And now when I give to the kids the FaceTime and I say to them to give Salam (say hello) to their habaryar (aunt), they can say Salam and it’s okay, but they cannot say more like “how are you” and talk more like this with their aunt or their cousins. They cannot even talk with their cousins because they (the cousins) don’t speak Somali and they don’t speak English. So how are they going to stay together and keep together as a family when we are gone? I don’t know and this is what scares me. They’re not going to have family and support like we had back home. And the only thing we can do is bring them together and let them see each other and play together as much as we can. In the Somali community, the relationships with extended family have historically been as important as that of the core, nuclear family (Kahin 1997). However, after migration, the increased geographical distance between extended family members resulted in the weakening of these bonds, and the loss of L1 for many second-generation Somalis has contributed further to this weakening as well. We saw in the interactions between the children and grandparents that even goal driven encounters where a task was at hand were effortful and difficult, requiring creativity and embodiment for success unless facilitated by language brokers. This suggests that interactions outside of these kinds and opportunities to talk at length and grow intimate relationships between children and grandparents, let alone other extended family members in Somalia or abroad, are limited. Tannenbaum (2005) goes on to state that the maintenance of the L1 also lends itself to more relaxed and spontaneous relationships between parents and children, which improved overall feelings of closeness and positive interactions between family members in the home. In our own families we were able to observe relaxed communication only when it was facilitated by nominated language brokers in the family as in the case of interaction 1, and in families 2 and 3 where this role was taken on by the mothers for their children. The real effects of this are difficult to measure, as the strain put on these relationships can impact every area of the lives of the individuals, including broken transmission of familial history and identity. However, what we did observe from the families were new ways of coping with these

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realities. In the case of family 3, for example, we saw increased engagement with community resources and events as another way to increase exposure to and encourage the children to develop interest in the Somali culture and heritage, while in family 2 we saw that the mother encouraged her child to watch Somali TV along with the grandmother in the home. These measures are small but important steps taken by these families to encourage their children to develop positive associations with the Somali heritage and language, thereby preventing them from being “cut off from their roots,” (Tannenbaum and Howie 2002: 409) due to a lack of language-based socialization into their culture.

CONCLUSION There has been a significant amount of research looking at the challenges that may arise within transnational families from the point of view that such families encounter language shift as well as a culture shift which brings with it conflicts that may arise from changing value systems from one generation to another (Chan and Leong 1994; Hyman et al. 2001). This chapter suggests that such changes are not necessarily a problem, as the process of intergenerational cultural shift and language shift is often natural and sometimes even important for the self-actualization of those younger generations, as discussed in Zhu Hua (2008). The issue that is problematized here is not that conflict may arise, but rather that there may not be enough tools available to interlocutors for them to communicate effectively to begin with. In this chapter, we have shown three ways in which Somali families have come to create mutual understanding and an ability to communicate despite the limitation of language barriers as a consequence of intergenerational language shift in the community. These examples have focused on language brokering and embodied multimodality as resources employed by these families to circumvent the language barrier and create meaning and understanding when storytelling or completing tasks. By looking at everyday instances of interaction in the home through a detail multimodal lens, we have been able to see how difficult and strenuous interactions can be between family members where a language barrier exists. This added dimension of data separates this chapter from previous investigation into language shift, which relied heavily on interview data and self-reported evidence of the phenomenon. In this way, we have been able to see the differences in quality and use between embodied interactions and those facilitated by a language broker. Further research is required to delve deeper into both language brokering and embodied communication used by family members to understand the various degrees of complexities at play, as well as what factors separate successful from unsuccessful interactions of this type.

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REFERENCES Abdullahi, S. B., and Li, W. (2021), “Living with Diversity and Change: Intergenerational Differences in Language and Identity in the Somali Community in Britain,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2021(269): 15–45. Antonini, R. (2016), “Caught in the Middle: Child Language Brokering as a Form of Unrecognised Language Service,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 710–25. Canagarajah, A. S. (2008), “Language Shift and the Family: Questions from the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora,” Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(2): 143–76. Chan, S., and Leong, C. W. (1994), “Chinese Families in Transition: Cultural Conflicts and Adjustment Problems,” Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 3(1): 263–81. Clyne, M., and Kipp, S. (1999), Pluricentric Languages in an Immigrant Context, Berlin: De Gruyter. Curdt-Christiansen, X. (2013), “Family Language Policy: Sociopolitical Reality versus Linguistic Continuity,” Language Policy, 12(1): 1–6. de Houwer, A. (1990), The Acquisition of Two Languages: A Case Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Houwer, A. (1999), “Environmental Factors in Early Bilingual Development: The Role of Parental Attitudes,” in Bilingualism and Migration, ed. G. Extra and L. Verhoeven, 75–95, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Edwards, V., and Newcombe, L. P. (2005), “When School Is Not Enough: New Initiatives in Intergenerational Language Transmission in Wales,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 8(4): 298–312. Fishman, J. (1966), “Language Maintenance and Language Shift: The American Immigrant Case within a General Theoretical Perspective,” Sociologus, 16(1): 19–39. Fishman, J. (1991), Reversing Language Shift, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, J. (2008), “Language Maintenance, Language Shift, and Reversing Language Shift,” in The Handbook of Bilingualism, ed. T. K. Bahia and W. C. Ritchie, 406–36, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. Fogle, L. W. (2008), “Home–School Connections for International Adoptees: Repetition in Parent–Child Interaction,” in Second Language Acquisition and the Younger Learner: Child’s Play?, ed. J. Philp, R. Oliver, and A. Mackey, 279−301, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Higgins, C. (2018), “The Mesolevel of Family Language Policy,” International Journal of Multilingualism, 15(3): 306–12. Hyman, I., Vu, N., and Beiser, M. (2001), “Post-migration Stress among Southeast Asian Refugee Youth in Canada: A Research Note,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 31(1): 281–93. Ishizawa, H. (2004), “Minority Language Use among Grandchildren in Multigenerational Households,” Sociological Perspectives, 47(4): 465–83. Kahin, M. (1997), Educating Somali Children in Britain, Staffordshire: Terntham Books. King, K., and Fogle, L. (2006), “Bilingual Parenting as Good Parenting: Parents’ Perspectives on Family Language Policy for Additive Bilingualism,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(6): 695–712. Kress, G. (2010), Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London: Routledge. Lanza, E. (1992), “Can Bilingual Two-Year-Olds Code-Switch?,” Journal of Child Language, 19(3): 633–58.

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Laakso, J., Sarhimaa, A., Åkermark, S. S., and Toivanen, R. (2016), Towards Openly Multilingual Policies and Practices: Assessing Minority Language Maintenance across Europe, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Li, W. (1994), Three Generations, Two Languages, One Family: Language Choice and Language Shift in a Chinese Community in Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Li, W., and Zhu, H. (2019), “Imagination as a Key Factor in LMLS in Transnational Families,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2019(255): 73–107. Mohamoud, A. O. (2011), “Growing Up Somali in Britain: The Experience of a Group of Young Somali Men and Women Coming of Age in London, and Their Parents,” PhD thesis, UCL Institute of Education, University College London. Nevile, M. (2015), “The Embodied Turn in Research on Language and Social Interaction,” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 48(2): 121–51. Ng, S., He, A., and Loong, C. (2004), “Tri-generational Family Conversations: Communication Accommodation and Brokering,” British Journal of Social Psychology, 43(3): 449–64. Roberts, M. (1991), “The New Zealand Chinese Community of Wellington: Aspects of Language Maintenance and Shift,” in Threads in the Tapestry of Language, ed. J. Holmes and R. Harlow, 31–70, Auckland: Linguistic Society of New Zealand. Rasinger, S. (2013), “Language Shift and Vitality Perceptions amongst London’s SecondGeneration Bangladeshis,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 34(1): 46–60. Schofield, T., Beaumont, K., Widaman, K., Jochem, R., Robins, R., and Conger, R. (2012), “Parent and Child Fluency in a Common Language: Implications for the Parent–Child Relationship and Later Academic Success in Mexican American Families,” Journal of Family Psychology, 26(6): 869–79. Smith-Christmas, C. (2016), Family Language Policy: Maintaining an Endangered Language in the Home, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Smith-Christmas, C. (2018), “ ‘One Cas, Two Cas’: Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Family Language Policy,” Multilingua, 37(2): 131–52. Tannenbaum, M., and Howie, P. (2002) “The Association between Language Maintenance and Family Relations: Chinese Immigrant Children in Australia,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 23(5): 408–24. Tannenbaum, M. (2005), “Viewing Family Relations through a Linguistic Lens: Symbolic Aspects of Language Maintenance in Immigrant Families,” Journal of Family Communication, 5(3): 229–52. Tollefson, J., and Perez-Milans, M. (2018), The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning, New York: Oxford University Press. Verhaeghe, F., Van Avermaet, P., and Derluyn, I. (2019), “Meanings Attached to Intergenerational Language Shift Processes in the Context of Migrant Families,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, ahead-of-print: 1–19. Zhao, S., and Liu, Y. (2010), “Chinese Education in Singapore: Constraints of Bilingual Policy from the Perspectives of Status and Prestige Planning,” Language Problems & Language Planning, 34(3): 236–58. Zhu, H. (2008), Duelling Values: Codeswitching in Bilingual Intergenerational Conflict Talk in Diasporic Families,” Journal of Pragmatics, 40(10): 1799–816.

CHAPTER NINE

Researching Family Language Policy in Multilingual DeafHearing Families: Using Autoethnographic, Visual, and Narrative Methods MAARTJE DE MEULDER, 1 ANNELIES KUSTERS, 2 AND JEMINA NAPIER 3

INTRODUCTION This chapter provides a detailed discussion of the methodology used in a study that examines the language practices and language ideologies of multilingual signing families. Family language policy (FLP) research has only recently expanded to include previously understudied families, such as those in Indigenous and endangered language communities (Smith-Christmas 2016; 2021), transnational families (Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018; Lee 2021); LGBTQ-identified families (Goldberg and Allen 2013), and adoptive families (Fogle 2012). This chapter focuses on one example of such understudied

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families: mixed deaf-hearing families. So far, FLP research on these families has mainly focused on barriers for hearing parents and their deaf babies and young children learning sign language (see Bruin and Nevøy 2014; Hardin et al. 2014; Kite 2019; Mitchiner 2015; Mouvet et al. 2013; Adami and Swanwick 2019; Swanwick, Wright, and Salter 2016; van den Bogaerde and Baker 2008; West 2011; Wille, Van Lierde, and Van Herreweghe 2019). In most cases, these were framed as acquisition studies and not explicitly as FLP studies (but see McKee and Smiler 2017: Pizer 2013; 2018; and Mitchiner and Batamula 2021). Other research focuses on hearing children and adults who are growing up or grew up in deaf families using a signed language as their home language, either focusing on children’s current linguistic environment in those families (Kanto et al. 2013) or analyzing their current language practices or retrospections on language and communication in their families, often in relation to bimodal bilingualism or language brokering (see Bishop 2010; Bishop and Hicks 2005; Emmorey, Borinstein, and Thompson 2005; Hadjikakou et al. 2009; Müller de Quadros 2018; Napier 2017; 2021; Pizer 2007; Pizer, Walters, and Meier 2013; Singleton and Tittle 2000). Like the majority of FLP studies, these studies of deaf-hearing families mainly use surveys or interviews, mostly with parents or caregivers, with occasional observations and/or recordings. So, the lack of interactional data is remarkable (Purkarthofer 2019b; but see Van Mensel and De Meulder forthcoming 2021). Our study is different and unconventional both in terms of (1) participants and (2) methodology: we focus on how both deaf and hearing parents and hearing children above two years old who are already bilingual or multilingual, and are growing up with a mix of deaf and/or hearing (grand)parents, use different signed and spoken languages in their everyday life. Furthermore, we use mixed methods (including visual methods), and a large part of our data consists of video-recorded family interactions in our own families, mostly at mealtimes and at story time. In this chapter, we focus on how the particular combination of methods and team configuration leads to insights into FLP in multilingual, deaf-hearing families, and contributes to FLP research methodology.

AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC METHODS: RESEARCHING OUR OWN FAMILIES Introducing the Families Our study explores the FLP of our own and each other’s families. Each of the three families has a different configuration of deaf-hearing members and languages used at home (see Figure 9.1). Deafness is more widely distributed in all three extended families (e.g., siblings, aunts, cousins), but given the limited

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FIGURE 9.1:  Languages used by the families at home and deaf vs. hearing family members Note: Grey squares: deaf family member. White squares: hearing family member. X square: deceased.

one-year timeline and budgetary scope of this study, we chose to focus on children, parents, and grandparents only. All families use one or more signed languages and/or one or more spoken languages (sometimes only in written form) at home. The main spoken languages in use across the families include English and Dutch, and the main signed languages include British Sign Language (BSL), Indian Sign Language (ISL), International Sign (IS), and Flemish Sign Language (Vlaamse Gebarentaal, VGT). Other languages are also used to a lesser extent, including Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and mouthings in Marathi (not represented in Figure 9.1). The children and parents in the study are all fluent signers, but the grandparents have various signing abilities. In family 1, Jemina, Andy (her partner), and daughter Tilda (age ten4) are all hearing, while the four grandparents are deaf. Jemina and Andy were born and raised in different parts of the UK, lived together in Australia between 1998 and 2013 (Tilda was born there), and now live in Scotland. Tilda attends a local school where the language of instruction is English, and she has learned other spoken languages as part of the school curriculum. Jemina and Andy work as professional sign language interpreters (between English and BSL, Auslan or IS). They were both exposed to BSL at home from an early age through their deaf parents, although their language biographies are quite different, as Jemina’s parents signed to her from birth, but Andy did not start using BSL until he was a teenager. They signed to Tilda from birth, initially in Auslan and now in BSL. In family 2, Annelies and Sujit (her partner) are both deaf (living in Scotland, after having lived in India and Germany). Sujit was born and raised in India. His parents and brother are deaf and still live there. Annelies was born and raised in Flanders, Belgium. Her parents are hearing (non-signing). She has one VGT-signing deaf sister and a hearing brother and sister. All of them still live in Belgium. Annelies and Sujit’s two sons Aran (age seven) and Oliver

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(age four) are hearing. The children go to a local school where English is the language of instruction.5 Sujit was born deaf and exposed to ISL from birth, both at home and at boarding school. Annelies was born deaf and was initially exposed to signing (VGT) when she was two at a deaf school. But she then moved to a regular school and only actually learned VGT when she was twentyone when she joined a deaf club. She used only spoken Dutch for face-toface communication until age twenty-one—with great efforts, this worked to a certain extent in one-on-one conversations with some family members and friends. She learned BSL, IS, and ISL after leaving Belgium in 2006. In family 3, Maartje is deaf and Jan (her partner) is hearing. Jan did not have any link with sign language or deaf people until he met Maartje seventeen years ago and then learned to sign. Their daughters Roos (age six) and Merel (age two) are hearing. They go to a local Flemish school where the language of instruction is Dutch.6 In this family, all grandparents are also hearing (nonsigning). They all live in Flanders, Belgium. Maartje grew up hard of hearing and became deaf in her teenage years. She learned to sign VGT when she was sixteen when joining a deaf club. Annelies and Maartje are in their late thirties while Jemina is in her late forties. None of the deaf parents or grandparents in the study use assistive hearing technologies in the context of the nuclear family. Different family members thus have different degrees of access to particular languages and language modalities: the deaf family members do not have auditory access to spoken languages used in the family context, although they may have a limited level of visual access through lipreading and on some occasions use speech, mostly for single utterances. Of the six parents in the study, five are white, one is Indian. Three of the children are white, two are of mixed race. All the parents in the study have completed higher education. Four of the six parents have a PhD. This is not generally representative of bilingual and multilingual deaf parents or deafhearing mixed families—we are well educated and highly informed “elite multilinguals” who have the opportunity and the resources to examine, and reflect on, our FLP (see also Piller 2001). This, combined with our professional interests and expertise, means that each of our families takes a very conscious approach in our FLPs (see also Kusters, De Meulder, and Napier 2021). Our families have experienced sometimes hurtful comments from, for example, grandparents or complete strangers about why we sign with our children, especially when they were small (“they are not deaf like you, good!”, “Can they speak?”). Yet, the overall reaction to small hearing children signing is one of awe and wonder (“She signs so beautifully, really great that you can communicate like that!”), especially if they are also fluent in a spoken language, while deaf children’s signing is often politicized and stigmatized (see also

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Everitt 2018). So, we do not have the same experience of stigmatization that many hearing parents of deaf children experience (West 2011). Researching Our Own Families Our method was partially autoethnographic because we focused on our own families, but data was also elicited, annotated, or analyzed by the other researchers in the team and research assistants. The decision to autoethnographically research our own families was intentional: our aim was for a small-scale scoping study, to examine the methodology and FLP authentically. Autoethnography offers a linkage between exploring the self and the subject of exploration (Denzin 2014; Ellis and Bochner 2000) and “places more emphasis on using the personal experiences of the researcher-participant to understand facets of the social world within which s/he is embedded” (Hokkanen 2017: 26). Autoethnography has been used rarely in Deaf Studies research (see O’Connell 2017 as an exception), but this approach is not unusual in linguistic ethnographic or FLP research (see, for example, Caldas 2006; Fantini 1985; Kopeliovich 2013). FLP is sensitive and intimate (e.g., filming conversations at the dinner table, in bedrooms) and asks for a deep understanding of family dynamics and contexts. Researching our own families means we did not need a long period of immersion and are not “strange” researchers coming into previously unknown families. Another reason we researched our own families is that these three families give a rich source of data; they are not just “any” family. A lot of research focuses on families who struggle with signing in the first place. We are families who deliberately sign with our hearing children, and we are not ambivalent about the need for them to sign, which is partially informed by our own childhood experiences in signing or non-signing families. Also, because our families are friends with one another, we are comfortable with the intimate autoethnographic nature of the data. Annelies’s and Jemina’s families live in the same street and the children often see each other on social occasions and at school. Maartje’s and Annelies’s families are close friends, and through this connection, Jemina’s and Maartje’s families also became friends. Our families have spent time together on holidays, and during a holiday in India in 2018, we studied inter-familial language policy (Kusters, De Meulder, and Napier 2021) to complement the intra-familial policy project described in this chapter.

RECORDING FLP INTERACTIONS A large part of our data consists of video-recorded family interactions, mostly filmed at mealtimes and at story time, plus some interactions with (grand) parents, when playing board games or when looking at photographs. We filmed most interactions with an iPad or iPhone, since we learned that using a camera

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with tripod was more time-consuming and intrusive7 as we often spontaneously started filming while setting the table, cleaning the kitchen, or when busy with the children (because we sensed the interaction could be interesting for the study). Also, the children were used to being photographed or filmed with an iPhone or iPad. Sometimes the camera or iPad/iPhone was on a tripod but in other cases we or our partners were filming. Obviously, researching one’s own family is not without ethical concerns about filming children. This happened especially when Aran and Roos were irritated/ annoyed because we were filming “again.” In practice, we did not film every day, usually every few days or every few weeks over a period of several months; but for the children it sometimes felt like more. In most cases, we carried on filming because after a while the children forgot about the camera, although they were aware it was running. We always explained to them that we would ask them before showing the clips to other people, that they could choose not to share, and if they were interested, we showed them coded excerpts. Thus, we (re)negotiated consent on an ongoing basis. Oliver and Merel generally had no problem being filmed, while Tilda had a laissez faire attitude and once reminded Jemina to check that the video camera was turned on. She also showed an active interest while Jemina was working on annotations of the videos in ELAN and asked questions about the coding process. So, we were not just observers but also active participants in interactions (see Smith-Christmas 2016 for discussion). Largely unnoticed by ourselves at the time, in some cases we steered conversations away from potentially sensitive topics, or toward potentially interesting linguistic or other examples, or slightly extended the conversation or story time, because we knew what we were looking for in our data and what we had to attend to in an FLP framework. For example: (1) Jan (Maartje’s partner), who likes to sing with the children, once withheld from doing so until the camera stopped running; (2) Annelies asked Sujit to move when he was narrating a story, because the sun was behind him (putting his face in shadow). Families were also sometimes mindful of the camera, for example, a child asking, “Is it running?” or performing before the camera, or an adult acknowledging the camera is there and has captured a slightly awkward bit of conversation (see Figures 9.2 and 9.3). Even with the observer’s/participant’s paradox in mind, our data represents “sign language in action” (Napier and Leeson 2016) in our families: linguistic ethnographers are always in the context where they do research, co-shaping these contexts, and in this study the researcher impact has been minimized. Labov (1972 in Smith-Christmas 2016: 25–6) stated that recording family members interacting with each other “is conducive to obtaining natural, vernacular speech, as the fact that they are speaking to people they know very well minimizes the presence of the researcher and the recording device.” Also, for deeper analysis and selection of examples to be included in publications,

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FIGURE 9.2:  Oliver and Roos performing to camera

FIGURE 9.3:  Andy having an awkward moment with the camera (while Tilda observes)

we select excerpts which we recognize as being representative of our family communication. Transcription, Annotation, and Analysis of the Video-Recorded Data The video data were annotated by us and three (deaf-hearing) research assistants (see “Working with Research Assistants,” below) using ELAN annotation

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software, which provides a convenient, user-friendly interface for coding video data and interaction by embedding video in a file with different tiers to annotate for language usages, interaction, and other nonlinguistic or paralinguistic elements. We used ELAN to guide our observations of multimodal interactions, as the microanalysis enabled us to identify details which we did not see by just watching the video. We transcribed some of the data ourselves, and experimented with transcriptions of the videos in order to decide on the tiers to use, before we passed the data to research assistants. This is a typical process for multimodal transcriptions (Bezemer 2012; Norris 2004): watching and rewatching interactions, keeping on adding tiers, and then going back and watching again and discovering the layered complexity and overlapping communication. Our main focus was on the choices for languages and modalities, and combinations of them or switches between them. We also wanted to be able to look at the video (albeit playing it at a slower pace) and the tiers at the same time, and if there were too many tiers, this would not be possible. In the end, we decided to put each participant on their own tiers and to make a distinction between “sign,” “speech,” and “other.” For “speech” we added a specifier in advance of the gloss/text: “L” (loud), “M” (mouthing’), and “W” (whispering), and when in doubt we put “?.” For signed conversations, we made glosses of the signs rather than translations to English sentences because glossing helps us to see how much the signing aligns with the speaking (such as when signspeaking: signing and speaking at the same time, cf. Zeshan and Panda 2018) (see Figure 9.4). It was not possible for Maartje and Annelies to ascertain if the mouthing was silent, whispered, or spoken, which is why working with hearing research assistants was also important (see Working with Research Assistants, below). For some of Annelies’s videos which sometimes involved signs from BSL, IS, ISL, or VGT in one conversation or even one sentence, we put the specific sign language after a gloss (e.g., “BATTERY (BSL)” or “SUPPLY (IS)”). Often it was difficult to identify the language in that some signs could be either BSL, IS, or ISL (see Zeshan and Panda 2015); so those were not marked with a specifier. Jemina’s family often also intersperse their signing in BSL with signs from Auslan (which was Tilda’s first sign language) and International Sign.8 For some signs we used online resources such as the BSL SignBank9 to check if they were in fact BSL signs. This also happened in some instances where the children used made-up signs. Initial annotations in Dutch were also translated to English (on a separate tier) for non-Dutch speakers to be able to understand the annotation, although this meant that some language use in Dutch was not represented in the translation (e.g., switching between standard and colloquial Dutch or mistakes in Dutch).

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FIGURE 9.4:  Final ELAN tier template (Maartje’s family)

From the start of our project, we were interested in how deaf-hearing families (trans)language (De Meulder et al. 2019) within specific contexts. Thus, when annotating we also looked for specific “other” features such as eye gaze and physical contact. We were often uncertain of how much detail to annotate and even what to put on the tier “Other.” For example, we decided to make notes on eye gaze only when we found remarkable examples of eye gaze (such as someone accessing signing from their peripheral vision or changing from speaking to signspeaking when noting that a deaf family member was watching the conversation). We also decided to put gestures of hearing non-signers in the tier “Other,” not in “sign.” In the end, the use of the tier “other” differed slightly from family to family due to differences in attention to “Other” detail. Our use of the “Other” tier was crucial to the project though: it helped us identify the importance and frequency of touch in family sign language communication, more so than is the case in general in sighted family communication. This included signing on each other’s body (such as making a sign on a small child’s body or face—Figure 9.5), touching a child’s throat to feel vibrations of the vocal cord to decipher what a child is saying, to feel the rhythm of a song (Figure 9.6), and rubbing the hand of a child that wants attention to ask to wait briefly until another utterance is finished (Figure 9.7). It also helped us to identify “sign language in action” as occurring in natural interactions, for example, holding something/someone while signing, one-handed signing, touching/waving/calling people with voice/tapping on table, and so on.

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FIGURE 9.5:  Maartje signing “mother” on Merel’s face

FIGURE 9.6:  Annelies feeling Oliver’s throat as he speaks

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FIGURE 9.7:  Jemina rubbing Tilda’s hand asking her to wait

Working with Research Assistants Recruiting research assistants (RAs) for this study proved to be challenging because of the required language combinations (especially in the case of Annelies’s family) and the need to annotate spoken language utterances in different languages (requiring a hearing assistant to go over this data too). We recruited RAs we were comfortable with (because they would be looking at personal and intimate data, such as our dinner and bedroom conversations) and who were familiar with our families. Because the children are still young and/ or because conversations within the home and family are often highly contextdependent, it is often challenging to decipher what children are signing, even for us as parents, let alone for an “outsider” assistant. The RAs we decided to work with were thus familiar with ELAN and with the families whose data they were transcribing. Maartje’s data was transcribed by herself and by a Flemish hearing RA who knows VGT, Dutch, and English. Some signs were hard for the Flemish RA to understand because they were highly context-specific, for example, sign names for children’s friends, or idiosyncratic signs, and Maartje checked the transcript and filled in the gaps. In Annelies’s case, the videos recorded in the nuclear family in Scotland and with the grandparents in India were transcribed by her husband Sujit and then passed on to the same Flemish RA to add sound-based information from either Dutch or English. Videos recorded in Belgium (with the grandparents speaking Dutch) were fully annotated by the Flemish RA. Jemina’s data was transcribed by herself and a British RA who knows BSL and English.

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The use of ELAN, while a convenient annotation tool for this project, easily conceals the existence of sensory asymmetries (Kusters et al. 2017; De Meulder et al. 2019) in multilingual multimodal practices between deaf and hearing people. The final ELAN file, although rich in information, might not accurately represent how a deaf person perceives an interaction, since a deaf person receives/perceives only part of the sound-based utterances. For example, children might tell a story in which they use mostly speech and only minimal signs. Maartje/Annelies or the deaf grandparents in the project can sometimes lipread part of it, but not always. In a fully annotated ELAN file, the existence of these sensory asymmetries can be easy to overlook. What the video data show us is that family language repertoires are broader and more complex than simply “signed or spoken.” Family members engage in extensive translanguaging by signspeaking, switching between and blending modalities, using fingerspelling, and pointing (e.g., drawings, book, pictures). Our data thus complicates the language ideology of “signing [a specific sign language] at home.” Because our video data is multimodal and multilingual, this does not mean we have an “open” family language policy in which anything goes, that is, we do not freely switch between sign and speech. In fact, and this is also what our field notes, biographies and portraits show (see next sections), we are very conscious of our linguistic repertoires and sensorial asymmetries within our families, which means that we always have the need for signing in the back of our minds. Our data reveals that it is “sign” (the modality) that is important in our family communication, more so than which sign language(s) are used or mixed (cf. Said 2021 on the importance of creating a linguistic soundscape).

FIELD NOTES/DIARIES Because we could not always film, we also observed, reflected, and laid our observations and thoughts down in fieldnotes. For example, we have no recordings in the bathroom, or when it is time for dressing and preparing for school, where a lot of communication happens especially with small children; no recordings of how people in other rooms are called by deaf people; or in dark bedrooms where people would make more use of voice, including deaf parents. We made detailed field notes of such situations instead. We also made notes on regular situations (mealtimes) where we were not filming and noted when an interesting example had happened. Because all three of us have been heavily invested in, and reflective on FLP since our children were born, we already had occasionally kept diaries or notes in the years before the project, and we revisited these. After the official end of the project, we continued to make regular field notes or diary entries about our FLP, of unrecorded observations and reflections.

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In our notes, we also reported on conversations we had about our FLP within our family and with other people. Below, we include some excerpts. These fieldnotes were helpful for us to document language choice decisions and changes in our FLPs over the months and years and to complement the other data. Annelies December 18, 2018—India (Sujit’s Deaf Parents’ Home) Sujit’s mother came into the living room, where I was sitting on the sofa with Aran, and asked Aran if he wanted the cream that was on top of the milk that she had just boiled. She fingerspelled “C” and spoke “cream.” Aran said yes and went to the kitchen. I had not understood the interaction and frowned. Sujit’s mother then signed “cream” to me, which I understood. Sujit used this example in a conversation with his parents, criticizing their habit to speak sometimes to the hearing grandchildren, thereby sometimes excluding other deaf adults. Maartje February 25, 2019 (Translated from Dutch) Roos is reading aloud from the book Een stipje in de sneeuw (A Dot in the Snow). She starts with signspeaking everything. “Stipje glijdt over het ijs” (“Dot slides over the ice.”). She signs “ijs” as “ice cream” (the “licking” sign in VGT). I ask her why she signs it like that. She changes her sign to another one (Y-handshape sliding down on the chin). “I want to do it like this for now,” she says. “Do you know what it means?” she asks? I say it means nothing. She replies, “Oh yes, it means ‘silent.’ ” And that’s true. She continues to read aloud, signspeaking, and then says she doesn’t want to sign everything at the same time. “I will read aloud and you can follow me on my lips.” In our field notes, we often reported on metalinguistic communication (hence we identified them as interesting to make notes on), so field notes helped us to complement the detailed analysis of video-recorded interactions with more reflective accounts of specific interactions. We also made notes on our concerns and on shifts in FLP over time, and these helped us draft the biographies discussed in the next section.

NARRATIVE METHODS Language Biographies For ourselves and our partners we wrote language biographies (around ten pages, in English). Our partners added to the biography that we first drafted on their behalf. These included information about language-related experiences

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throughout childhood, and how these informed the FLP when our children were born. For example, Maartje and Annelies grew up deaf of hearing non-signing parents in Belgium in the 1980s and 1990s, while Jemina grew up hearing of deaf signing parents in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s within an extended deaf family. For Annelies and Maartje, their FLP presented specific challenges because they were raising their children in language(s) different from the one they were socialized in. The language biographies also documented changes in FLP as the children grew older and/or when the families moved to another country (Jemina’s family from Australia to the UK, Annelies’s family from India to Germany to the UK). For all of us, writing the language biographies was a cathartic experience because it allowed us to reflect on our language experiences. The biographies (constituted from memory and with the help of field notes) help to historically and contextually situate our FLPs because while our study was specific in time and space, our FLP was negotiated and created long before that period (and might continue to change). Purkarthofer and Steien (2019) state that FLP research has a strong focus on the here-and-now. The here-and-now is important but can at times leave elements of parents’ lives aside, yet narratives about past upbringing are often used to construct current FLP. Thus, we agree that language “practices in the home are entwined with family histories and trajectories,” and these in turn are tied to broader societal developments (Higgins 2018: 306). Some excerpts from our language biographies: Excerpt 9.1. Annelies I hated the cochlear implant [CI] and had a very hard time adapting to its sound. It did help me in communication though: I could really understand people much better when wearing the implant in combination with lipreading. (…) However, the sound stressed me out physically and physiologically –I switched it off at every occasion I could (…) (e.g. when using the toilet) and then dreaded the moment I had to switch it back on. (…) [After moving to Bristol] I decided that I won’t use the CI again, ever, since I recognised it caused me undue stress. Some people asked me why I did not use VGT with Aran. (…) I had only learnt VGT for one year before moving to Bristol, and we were only occasionally in VGT spaces. I figured that he would pick up VGT later, e.g. by interacting with my sister and friends, and he can understand basic VGT pretty well now. I think that when we moved to Germany in 2013 (Aran was 1.5) we really started mixing languages a lot more. [When he started Kindergarten,] German was a language that was used daily (…) between Aran and me. Aran would use ISL signs with either English or German mouthings. Sometimes he wanted me to speak the German words for terms in his books [which I could do to some extent because I had learnt German at school]. (…) German has now rather completely disappeared from our family communication.

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Excerpt 9.2. Maartje In October 2012, Roos was born. Jan and I had had many conversations when I was pregnant about our FLP. I knew I didn’t want a repetition of my own experience growing up in a non-signing family, and I wanted to be able to communicate with my child without any intermediaries. So when Roos was born I started signing to her, and I have done ever since. In the beginning this felt strange, not because she was ‘hearing’ (I’ve never seen her like that) but mostly because I didn’t grow up signing and had no examples or role models to look to and didn’t have the lived experience. I’d seen deaf parents signing with their children of course, but this is different from experiencing it yourself. We never really ‘announced’ our decision to sign to my or Jan’s parents. We just did. When we are at grandparents I speak to them but sign to Jan, Roos and Merel. I often loathe these situations because voices are so powerful and it is often hard to get Roos’ or Merel’s attention. When I’m signing to my children people often don’t realize I am telling them something, I am engaging in a conversation. I am not just waving my hands about. They often just interrupt. The grandparents understand this now, but with strangers and people not knowing this it is different. Excerpt 9.3. Jemina My brother and I were raised by my parents initially using ‘SSE’ (Sign Supported English). They were advised not to sign by a social worker, as it may damage our speech development, but as my mum was raised in a deaf family, and had other hearing family members who spoke and signed, she knew it was ok. So she insisted on signing, but they also spoke ‘just in case’ and to make sure we had exposure to English too. My father’s mother frequently suggested to my parents that they should not sign with us, so whenever we saw her they did not sign…. I was exposed to BSL outside the family too. Either through spending time visiting or on holidays with other deaf families and their kids or going to the deaf club. Before Tilda was born, Andy and I had many conversations about what our family language policy would be. We both felt it was important that she could sign as we have so many deaf family members and friends. So we always signed with her from when she was born. We used Auslan rather than BSL, as that was the sign language we used every day [at the time as we lived in Australia], and because there are many similarities to BSL, we knew our parents would understand her. When she was very young we typically translanguaged more – using signspeaking with Auslan and English. We did explore other options like, signing only (no voice) at certain meals or in certain rooms (e.g. bath time) but that didn’t work. Nevertheless, she picked up signing, and actually I kept a list of her first signs/ words. When she was around 10 months old she had a long list of signs but no spoken words yet (e.g. mummy, light, more, milk, rain). We

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had to make a video for her childcare nursery so they could understand what she was asking for! The biographies helped us to locate our FLP in a longitudinal time frame and to explore the familial and societal historical roots for our FLP, which for example led to aversion against speech-based communication in the family. Semi-structured Interviews Each couple was interviewed (together) by the other two team members. All interviews were carried out in IS and/or BSL and lasted approximately one hour. The interviews were semi-structured and picked up on elements in the language biographies as well as the video-recorded interactions. Examples of questions were: Do you anticipate a shift in FLP and if so, how/when/why? How does the age of children impact on FLP? What is the impact of emotions on FLP? For example, in the interview with Jemina and Andy, Annelies and Maartje asked Jemina why signing was important to her and how their FLP might change in the future: Jemina: I value signing for different reasons. My heritage. I’m 4th generation of deaf people. Of my generation only [one cousin] is deaf. Heritage reasons are important to me. For Andy it’s more about language and communication but for me it’s also about family. I’m here because of them. Sometimes this elicited introspection was emotional or surprising for the interviewees. The interviews often also served as a precursor for the drawing of the language portraits (see “Visual Methods,” below).

VISUAL METHODS Language Portraits After each interview, every family member (except for the grandparents and Oliver and Merel) drew language portraits (Bush 2017) and then provided a narrative on what they had drawn and why. Language portraits (LPs) are empty whole-body silhouettes in or around which research participants color or draw languages, language variants, or other aspects or modalities of communication. Usually, the drawing/coloring of a LP is accompanied or succeeded by a verbal (or written) narrative explaining and commenting on the portrait. LPs have been used in recent FLP work to visualize linguistic repertoires and language choices (e.g., Purkarthofer 2019a; Obojska and Purkarthofer 2018), and Maartje and Annelies both have recently used this method in other research projects (Kusters and De Meulder 2019). The method was successful with the parents but less so with the children, because they struggled to understand what we asked them to

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FIGURE 9.8:  Jemina’s language portrait

do. With children, spontaneous drawings were a more successful visual method (see “Children’s Drawings,” below). The language portraits gave insights into each individual’s experience of their own linguistic repertoire in relation to their bodies and emotions (see Figure 9.8). In the narratives describing the language portraits, people sometimes talked about topics we touched on in the interview. For Jemina, for example, in the interview previous to the drawing of the LP, we talked about how their FLP might change if the grandparents were no longer around (see excerpt above). When narrating her portrait, Jemina touched on this again: Jemina: The first thing I drew was a heart (points to heart). That’s what made me cry (tears in her eyes). Because that’s my heritage, close to my heart. My family, the world where I belong to, the benefits I’ve had… I wouldn’t be who I am now if I didn’t have my deaf family so that’s really important to me (tears). Actually, this interview and drawing really hit me because I realized “wow … (looks at Andy) that will all disappear. I won’t always have them [my parents], so it won’t be the same? (touches heart) That’s me. Children’s Drawings Tilda and Aran made drawings in which they drew their family languages and/or languages they use with their friends (see Figures 9.9 and 9.10). This

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FIGURE 9.9:  Aran’s “our languages” bar graph.

was not a planned part of the study but happened spontaneously. At a dinner in October 2018, Sujit and Annelies were talking about a meeting of the multilingual parents group at the school—Aran picked up on that and asked what they were talking about. Annelies explained “multilingual” as “using many languages” and said “we are a multilingual family too.” Aran responded, no, we use only two languages: English and sign. Annelies responded, “But we also use Dutch sometimes at story time, right? And do we use only one sign language?” Aran responded, “We use Indian, British and IS.” Annelies then talked about mouthing Marathi words when using ISL signs for food items. Annelies concluded, “I think we are using six languages.” Then Aran went to take a piece of paper and started to write: “our languages” asked us

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FIGURE 9.10:  Tilda’s drawing “Our family languages”

how to spell “bar graph” (by explaining what he meant) and started putting his languages in a bar graph with percentages. He resisted putting Marathi in it, put a low bar at Dutch because “we don’t use it every day” and then he wasn’t sure how much English he uses: “I only use it with Oliver.” He wasn’t sure how much BSL and ISL and IS we use; so he guessed. He said he didn’t know how to separate the sign languages but that he thought we use more IS. Then he started filling in the bars—when Annelies asked what the fillings and colors meant he said the fillings were decorative rather than related to the languages. Annelies shared the drawing and the abovementioned conversation in the WhatsApp group that the three of us use to discuss the project, and Jemina read it out to Tilda and showed her Aran’s bar graph, asking Tilda if she thought they were a multilingual family and Tilda responded, “Yes definitely.” So Jemina asked how many languages they use. She said, “Mostly English and BSL but we also use a bit of ASL, Auslan and daddy sometimes speaks to me in French. So, five.” Then she asked if she could draw her own bar graph, and while drawing she asked, “We also use IS, right? So that’s actually six!” The children’s drawings, which focused more on enumeration and quantification than the language portraits which focused more on emotion

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and embodiment, gave us some insights in how our children interpreted the language use at home.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION This chapter has provided an overview of the methodology used in a study that examined FLP (practices and ideologies) in families that are hitherto underresearched: mixed deaf-hearing multilingual families. The team configuration and the particular combination of methods complemented each other. Our combined positionalities as women, mothers, deaf, hearing, signers, speakers, and researchers bring deep insight. The partial autoethnography allowed for rich data and analysis, without needing a long period of immersion first. The mixed methodology (video recordings, narrative, and visual methods) and the analytical tool used (i.e., ELAN) each provided us with different insights into family language dynamics, also linked to temporalities (cf. Purkarthofer 2019c). The video recordings provided episodes of language practices in the present. The field notes and diaries provided episodes and laid down observations that were not video-recorded, spontaneous conversations in the families about FLP, as well as changes in FLP over the specific time period of the study. The biographies documented longitudinal changes: past, present, and future. Similarly, the interviews also gave insights on past, present, and future language practices and ideologies but elicited by others rather than documented by the interviewees themselves. The visual methods were not planned in our initial proposal but provided valuable data. The language portraits gave insights that were not in the diaries, the interviews, or the language biographies, about past, present, and future, and about emotions related to languages. The children’s drawings that were not elicited by us for the study gave insight into the present (and sometimes toward the future) and into children’s agency in FLP. Indeed, children are not passive recipients of language but active agents who see their own and the family’s language use as gradable and measurable (Crump 2017). As such, the methodology for this FLP study has grown organically, from our own interests, life experiences, expertise, and those of other family members.

NOTES 1 University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht, the Netherlands and Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. 2 Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. 3 Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. 4 Age at the time of the study.

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5 During the course of the project, Aran went to school full-time while Oliver went to an English-speaking nursery in the mornings and was home with his father in the afternoons. 6 During the course of the project, Roos went to school full-time while Merel went to daycare (in Dutch); she started school in April 2019. 7 For a future project, we might consider using wearable cameras. 8 See Crump (2017) for more about the transcription of fluid languaging. 9 https://bslsignbank.ucl.ac.uk/.

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Purkarthofer, Judith (2019a), “Building Expectations: Imagining Family Language Policy and Heteroglossic Social Spaces,” International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3): 724–39. Purkarthofer, Judith (2019b), “Using Mobile Phones: Recording as a Social and Spatial Practice in Multilingualism and Family Research,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 20(1): n.p. Purkarthofer, Judith (2019c), “Looking Back and Moving Forward: Temporality through Visual Methods,” presentation at workshop visual prompts and visual methods in multilingualism research, MultiLing, Oslo, June 17–19, 2019. Purkarthofer, Judith, and Steien, Guri Bordal (2019), “‘Prétendre comme si on connaît pas une autre langue que le Swahili’: Multilingual Parents in Norway on Change and Continuity in Their Family Language Policies,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 255: 109–31. Said, Fatma (2021), “ ‘Ba-SKY-aP with Her Each Day at Dinner’: Technology as Supporter in the Learning and Management of Home Languages,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. Singleton, Jenny L., and Tittle, Matthew D. (2000), “Deaf Parents and Their Hearing Children,” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 5: 221–36. Smith-Christmas, Carrie (2016), Family Language Policy: Maintaining an Endangered Language in the Home, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith-Christmas, Cassie (2021), “‘Our Cat Has the Power’: The Polysemy of a Third Language in Maintaining the Power/Solidarity Equilibrium in Family Interactions,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. doi: 10.1080/01434632.2021.1877720. Swanwick, Ruth, Wright, Sue, and Salter, Jackie (2016), “Investigating Deaf Children’s Plural and Diverse Use of Sign and Spoken Languages in a Super Diverse Context,” Applied Linguistics Review, 7(2): 483. doi:10.1515/applirev-2016-0009. van den Bogaerde, Beppie, and Baker Anne E. (2008), “Bimodal Language Acquisition in Kodas,” in Hearing, Mother Father Deaf: Hearing People in Deaf Families, ed. Michele Bishop and Sherry L. Hicks, 99–31, Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Van Mensel, Luk, and De Meulder, Maartje (eds.) (forthcoming 2021), “Exploring the Multilingual Family Repertoire: Ethnographic Approaches,” special issue of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. West, Donna (2011), “Deaf-Hearing Family Life: Three Mothers’ Poetic Voices of Resistance,” Qualitative Inquiry, 17(8): 732–40. Wille, Beatrijs, Van Lierde, Kristiane, and Van Herreweghe, Mieke (2019), “Parental Strategies Used in Communication with Their Deaf Infants,” Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 35(2): 165–83. doi:10.1177/0265659019852664. Zeshan, Ulrike, and Panda, Sibaji (2015), “Two Languages at Hand: Code-Switching in Bilingual Deaf Signers,” Sign Language and Linguistics, 18(2): 90–131. Zeshan, Ulrike, and Panda, Sibaji (2018), “Sign-Speaking: The Structure of Simultaneous Bimodal Utterances,” Applied Linguistics Review, 9(1): 1–34. doi:10.1515/ applirev-2016-1031.

PART III

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CHAPTER TEN

Family Language Policy and Language Maintenance among Turkmen-Persian Bilingual Families in Iran SEYED HADI MIRVAHEDI, MOJTABA RAJABI, AND KHADIJEH AGHAEI

INTRODUCTION The Turkmen language is a part of the Eastern Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages which is spoken by Turkmens in different regions in Central Asia and the Middle East such as the Republic of Turkmenistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Caucasus (Stavropol Krai). This chapter focuses on the Turkmen speaking community in the North and Northeast cities and towns of Iran (e.g., in the provinces of Golestan and North Khorasan), where Turkmen is not an official or institutional language; thus, the maintenance of Turkmen primarily falls on the community’s shoulders. Situating our investigation of family language policy (FLP) in Turkmen-Persian bilingual families within the broader historical, cultural, sociopolitical as well as geographical context of Iran, we investigate ethnolinguistic vitality of Turkmen and its maintenance

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or shift processes from parents’ perspectives. We seek to contribute to FLP scholarship by integrating the analysis of linguistic and nonlinguistic factors such as the specific demographic make-up of the city and its impact on family language policy and language learning, religion, and gender-specific language ideologies and practices (Schwartz and Verschik 2013a). This will further our understanding of how ostensibly private choices at home are connected to forces in the public sphere, shedding light on the ways faith, family, and language practices are conceptualized and practiced (cf. Moore 2016). Moreover, examining Turkmen families’ language policies allows us to bring forth, and contribute to the body of research on perspectives and epistemologies from the Global South in sociolinguistics (e.g., Levon 2017; Milani and Lazar 2017) and in FLP studies (e.g., Gomes 2020).

ETHNOLINGUISTIC DIVERSITY IN THE ERA OF PERSIAN NATIONALISM IN IRAN Contemporary Iran, formerly known as Persia until 1934, with a population of approximately 83 million is home to a multitude of languages and ethnicities. Although there are no official statistics on the ethnolinguistic make-up of the country, it is estimated that the population is made up of Persians (51 percent), Azerbaijanis (24 percent), Gilakis and Mazandaranis (8 percent), Kurds (7 percent), Arabs (3 percent), Lurs (2 percent), Baluchis (2 percent), Turkmen1 (2 percent), and other groups (2 percent) (Tohidi 2009). Notwithstanding the noticeable size and the historical presence of regional and minority languages in the country, however, the rise of Persian nationalism since the late nineteenth century and its function as the dominant ideology over the past two centuries has precluded the development of non-Persian languages in Iran (Soleimani and Muhammadpour 2019). In the 1905 Constitutional Revolution, Persian was declared the only official language of the country (Mirvahedi 2019a), which was later taken to repress non-Persian languages and identities in favor of “one country, one nation, one language” policy during the Pahlavi dynasty (1925– 79) (Soleimani and Muhammadpour 2019). While Persian has remained to be the only official language of the country, circumstances for speakers of minority language started to slightly improve after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. With the establishment of an Islamic government bringing on a new discourse on equity and equality, Article 19 of the Constitution was formulated to disapprove of any discrimination based on color, language, and race (Paul 1999). Thus, All people of Iran, whatever the ethnic group or tribe to which they belong, enjoy equal rights; and color, race, language, and the like, do not bestow any privilege. (Article 19 of the Constitution)

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Accordingly, in order to address the question of equality and equity with respect to speakers of non-Persian languages, Article 15 of the Constitution states: The official language and script of Iran, the lingua franca of its people, is Persian. Official documents, correspondence, and texts, as well as textbooks, must be in this language and script. However, the use of regional and tribal languages in the press and mass media, as well as for teaching of their literature in schools, is allowed in addition to Persian. (Article 15 of the Constitution) Although the discourse of equality and inclusion has been heard since 1979, what has taken place in practice has been minimal. Teaching non-Persian languages within a bilingual program, and its prerequisite conditions such as standardization of languages, corpus planning, teacher training and so on, has never been officially and systematically executed. This has made speakers of non-Persian languages find it extremely difficult to read and write in their own languages (e.g., see Mirvahedi and Jafari 2021; Mirvahedi 2018a). Persian has thus become the dominant language in formal and informal literacy practices (Mirvahedi 2016) turning minority languages into oral/aural languages in practice (cf. Karimzad and Sibgatullina 2017; Mirvahedi 2018b). While non-Persian languages have not found their way into the education system, institutional support in the form of radio stations and provincial channels that broadcast programs in non-Persian languages has been available for non-Persian speakers over the past decades. Yet, research shows these channels have not been appealing enough to attract a noticeable audience. For example, Mirvahedi’s (2017) research on Azerbaijanis’ attitudes toward Sahand TV, a provincial channel for Azerbaijanis in Tabriz, shows that only 1 percent of people regularly watch the channel. Instead, over 30 percent of the surveyed families reported watching Turkish programs broadcast on Satellite channels from Turkey. Turkish channels have been particularly interesting to Azerbaijanis because of the linguistic proximity of the two languages, much more appealing programs, and potential benefit which the knowledge of the Turkish language may bring for families and their children in future (Mirvahedi 2012). As a result of the Persian nationalism and the institutionalization of Persian as the only official language of the country, all non-Persian languages ranging from the largest ones such as Azerbaijani (e.g., Mirhosseini and Abazari 2016) and Kurdish (e.g., Rezaei and Bahrami 2019) to Zoroastrian Dari with 8000–150000 speakers (see Elhambakhsh and Allami 2018) have existed in diglossic situations. In such circumstances, Persian functions as the language of higher official domains and institutions while the non-Persian languages remain to be the languages for intergroup interactions and a means of accessing and identifying with ethnic heritage culture. Under such circumstances, not

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receiving much support on the part of the government for their heritage languages, non-Persian families are left on their own to maintain their heritage language by transmitting to their children while they grapple with concerns of ensuring their children’s academic achievement by preparing them for Persianmedium schools. It is such issues that we set out to focus on in extremely under-researched Turkmen-Persian bilingual families in the city of Gonbad-e Kavous. Applying a FLP approach to understanding language maintenance/shift processes, we seek to understand not only what languages are used at home but also for what reasons, as well as how parents’ language ideologies are shaped, and how they wish to achieve their goals.

FAMILY LANGUAGE POLICY AND LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE In his well-known Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), Fishman (1991) emphasizes the role of family in language maintenance and/or reversing language shift. For language maintenance or reversing language shift to take place, Fishman places the most emphasis upon face-to-face interactions and small-scale social life at the family and community level (Fishman 1991: 4). Family in this sense becomes “the critical domain” (Spolsky 2012), and the intergenerational transmission of language at home becomes the essential contributing factor to language maintenance, without which all other efforts to maintain a language would be like “blowing air into a tire that still has a puncture” (Fishman 1991: xii). The critical role of family in language maintenance has been amply attested in the literature. In particular, the literature on parents-child interactions and ethnic heritage language maintenance suggests that parental language practices is a primary predictor of children’s acquisition of their mother tongue (De Houwer 2007). Döpke’s (1992) in-depth analysis of parent-child interactions in six German-English speaking families in Australia, for example, revealed how certain conversational characteristics of the families, for example, the quality of input (i.e., child directed speech) rather than the quantity of input, sensitivity to the child’s interactive needs, and the parents’ ability to elicit verbalization in the minority language from the child, were essential factors in successful intergenerational transmission of a minority language. Arguing for a qualitative approach to the study of parent-child interactions, Lanza (2007) further showed how different parental discourse strategies toward child language mixing, ranging from minimal grasp strategy to adult’s switching to the child’s preferred code, could bring about different levels of proficiency in languages among children. Although these and many other studies investigating language socialization at home suggest that it is the actual interactions at home that shape the younger

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generation’s proficiency in the ethnic heritage language (see Schwartz and Verschik 2013b), it does not mean that parents’ language beliefs about the significance and functions of languages in their lives always align with their language practices. FLP scholarship has shown that while parents may support their ethnic heritage language, they could end up in using the societal, dominant language at home (e.g., Yu 2010). This happens due to the fact that parents establish a strong connection between their ethnic heritage language and ethnic and cultural identity (Tseng 2020), but they fail to maintain the language in interaction with their children (Kheirkhah 2016; Mirvahedi 2021), or as the children grow up, they bring the societal language in the home (Mirvahedi and Cavallaro 2019). What such studies sum up is that language maintenance similar to other social phenomena do not happen in a vacuum. While parents may consider the heritage language to be a core value that should be maintained (Smolicz 1981), and thus making family language policy seem “self-induced and self-policed” (Blommaert 2019; 5, emphasis added), parents’ and their children’s agency is informed in interaction and response to structural affordances and constraints outside the home (Mirvahedi 2020; Canagarajah 2008). Language maintenance literature in the context of Iran as well attests to these findings. Research has shown that speakers of minority languages in Iran typically express positive attitudes toward their ethnic language. Examples are findings from quantitative studies on Azerbaijani (Rezaei, Latifi, and Nematzadeh 2017; Mirhosseini and Abazari 2016) and Kurdish communities (Rezaei and Bahrami 2019) that show the participants have strong emotional attachment to their language, without which they could not be identified as Azerbaijani or Kurdish. However, qualitative studies using interviews and observations suggest that speakers of these minority languages have hesitations toward using the language in certain domains. This hesitation to use the ethnic language has found its way to the critical domain of home in some cities such as Zanjan, having led to the Azerbaijani children’s shift to Persian (Mirvahedi and Jafari 2021). Taqavi and Rezaei (2019) found that language shift in Zanjan was shaped by age and gender factors; Azerbaijani bilingual females use Azerbaijani to their older family members while they preferred to use Persian to address other family members. Azerbaijani bilingual males also used Azerbaijani with older members, brothers, and male friends of theirs, while they chose to use Persian to speak with their female family members, friends, and children. Our research on the under-researched Turkmen-Persian speaking families finds its legitimacy and rationale here as it will contribute to the limited existing literature on language maintenance and shift in the context of Iran. We seek to shed light on parental language ideologies and practices by advancing discussions on such topics in the field as gender roles, religions, and exogamy/ endogamy patterns in FLP scholarship. We intend to address what TurkmenPersian speaking parents believe and do with the languages they know, and what

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factors and forces and through what channels inform the parents’ ideologies and practices at home.

THE RESEARCH SITE This investigation is part of an ongoing research in Gonbad-e Kavous (also Gonbad-e Qabus), a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a multilingual, multicultural city in Golestan Province in northeastern Iran. This city was formerly called Gorgan or Jorjan, because of the ruins of the historical city called Gorgan, the capital of the Ziyarid dynasty. According to the latest census in 2016, 348,744 people in 97147 households live in Gonbad-e Kavous. Located adjacent to the Caspian Sea and rainy forest of Northern Iran, the city enjoys a favorable geopolitical position and the weather conditions that has attracted migrants from local cultures and various ethnic groups with a variety of languages making it look like “a mini Iran.” These groups comprise Turkmen, Persians, Azerbaijani Turks, and Sistani and Baluchis. In the last few decades, having lived as nomadic herdsmen for years, a large number of Iranian Turkmens have now chosen to settle in permanent homes in towns and villages, and change their famous horses2 for motorbikes. What is apparent from the demographic structure of the city of Gonbad-e Kavous is that neighborhoods are either Turkmen dominant where citizens are bilingual in Turkmen and Persian and come from a working-class or middle-class background or non-Turkmen dominant which is home to people from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. What is of great importance is the fact that Turkmen people are Sunni Muslim, while the rest of the population is predominantly Shi’ite. As we show below, this religious identity of Turkmen communities may play an important role in language maintenance by encouraging the young to marry within their community.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY In this study, we adopted a qualitative inquiry which attempts to explore things as “they are undertaken, experienced and narrated by people” (Heller, Pietikäinen, and Pujolar 2018: 9). The data come from two focus group interviews with two families—the interview with mothers and fathers were conducted separately. Our decision to undertake separate interviews with mothers and fathers was motivated by our observation in prior semi-structured interviews with other families that women, traditionally being in the male dominant Turkmen society, were either reticent to express themselves at the presence of men or their spoken opinions were influenced by their husband. Because the two groups were not aware of each other’s responses, this also allowed us to corroborate their answers while we could examine a social phenomenon through both women’s

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and men’s eyes. The interviews were done in Persian. The choice of Persian as the language of the interview was due to the fact that the researchers were not Turkmen speakers. Yet, the participants could use Turkmen in cases they could not express an idea or a concept; however, given their fluency in Persian, switching to Turkmen did not take place during the interviews. Interview questions revolved around what languages the families predominantly spoke at home, what they believed about the status, function, and values of languages, what concerns they had about their children’s academic success in Persianmedium schools, their integration pattern with non-Turkmens in the city, as well as the potential differences in language ideologies and practices of mothers and fathers. The transcribed data were then codified to extract and analyze themes according to the guidelines proposed by Charmaz (2006). Participants The participants included two middle-class Turkmen-Persian bilingual families currently living in Gonbad-e Kavous. Table 10.1 summarizes the participants’ demographic information (names are pseudonyms): TABLE 10.1  Demographic Information

Family one

Length of marriage

Parents’ age

Parents’ job

Children’s age and gender

8 years

Father 34

Teacher

Daughter (7 years old)

Mother 32

Homemaker

Son (3 years old)

Father 34

Bank clerk

Son (3 years old)

Mother 26

English teacher

(Aagh) Family two (Atabai)

4 years

DATA ANALYSIS Family Formation Processes One strong theme that emerged in the data concerned how family was conceptualized and formed in the Turkmen community. As the parents’ responses to our question regarding their children’s future marriage illustrate, Turkmens typically practice endogamy, and it is unlikely to find families who would approve of their child’s marriage to a person outside their Turkmen speaking group. Mrs. Atabai: 100% Turkmen. I’m very sensitive to this issue. Mr. Atabai: At the moment, no. It might change in the future, if, say, we immigrate to another country or something. But if my child

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Mr. Aagh:

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were 25 now and wanted to get married to a Persian, I would not approve of it. Me too, 100% Turkmen. But I’m more sensitive to my son’s choice. I might be OK with my daughter’s marriage to a Persian but I would not be able to get along with my son marrying to a Persian. My child marrying a Persian? No, never!

Although it was never clearly mentioned in the interviews, our observations over the years in the city suggest that there exist two main reasons for such a marriage pattern. First, families believe that it is extremely difficult for people outside the Turkmen community to relate to their specific ethnic and cultural identity and practices, including the use of the Turkmen language. Second, religious identity seems to be playing a significant role in endogamous marriages among Turkmens. Being Sunni Muslims, Turkmens tend to refrain from establishing marital relationships with Persians who are typically Shiite Muslims. If a marriage outside the Turkmen community were to happen, the marriage with other Iranian Sunni Muslims such as Kurdish or Baluchi people would be more likely. Very low rate of exogamous marriages among Turkmens means that the likelihood of preserving the language is high because both parents could and would speak the same Indigenous language (see Pauwels 2016; Stevens 1985). Yet, as FLP scholarship has amply shown (e.g., see Haque 2019; Macalister and Mirvahedi 2017; Smith-Christmas 2016), even parents from the same linguistic background may decide to speak another language to their children, necessitating looking into the dynamics of language use in the family. The Dynamics of Language Use at Home The Dominance of Turkmen Language use in family language policy scholarship is considered the “practiced” (Bonacina-Pugh 2012), thus the “real” (Spolsky 2009: 9), language policy of the family. The significance of language practices lies in the fact that it is the actual language use that ultimately provides the optimum condition for language learning and the intergenerational continuity of heritage languages (De Houwer 1999; 2007; Lanza 2007). Our participants’ report of their language use at home shows that Turkmen is the dominant language of the households that has clearly played a critical role in successful language maintenance. Mr. Atabai: I completely (always) talk in Turkmen. My wife speaks Turkmen 90–95% of the time. Sometimes maybe she says a

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sentence in Persian, and that’s all. She does not have a complete conversation. She may say “give me this glass” in Persian. Mrs. Atabai: I think we mostly speak Turkmen at home. Although minority languages like Turkmen do not receive effective institutional support from the government, the intergenerational continuity of Turkmen has not been disrupted over the years mainly due to the fact that Turkmen remains to be the dominant language of face-to-face small-scale interactions in the community, and more importantly, in the families. In Fishman’s words, family as “an unexpendable bulwark” of language maintenance has served as a defensive wall against outside noxious influences securing the intergenerational transmission of languages (Fishman 1991: 94). However, the parents’ following comments show that their reading and writing level is very low. Mr. Atabai:

For example, just imagine that now they bring us Makhtumqoli’s poems.3 Maybe in three pages we can only understand two, three verses. We generally understand it, but there are also many words that we do not understand. Mrs. Aagh: I like to read and write. I like to read [in Turkmen]. Mrs. Atabai: But we don’t know how. Mr. Atabai’s reference to a famous Turkmen poet, i.e., Makhtumqoli, and their inability to read and understand his poems and Mrs. Aagh and Mrs. Atabai’s conversation should not be surprising. Because Turkmen is not taught at schools, an inevitable corollary has been the gradual decline of Turkmens’ literacy skills. However, since the same Perso-Arabic alphabet is used to write Turkmen, Turkmens educated in Persian-medium schools may write and read by weaving the letters to each other if they have to (see below for wedding invitation cards that are written in Turkmen). The parents’ further comments also reveal that the dynamics of FLP is far from simple. We find that Turkmen is not the only language spoken at home; mothers often promote Persian, and Turkish finds its way in the households through the media. Preference for Persian by Mothers Research on the role of men and women in language maintenance/shift has shown that such roles differ from one community to the other. While women lead language shift in one community, they become the guardians of heritage languages in other communities (see Pauwels 2016, for a review). Our data unveils women’s stronger preference for Persian in Turkmen families.

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Mrs. Aagh:

We almost always speak our own language, but if my daughter asks a question in Persian, I like it. I like speaking Persian sometimes so that she becomes more fluent in Persian, so that she can communicate with her friends at school more easily. Interviewer: so you don’t show any resistance like by not responding her in Persian? Mrs. Aagh: No, no, I actually like to speak Persian with her. Mrs. Atabai: My husband, when I pay attention, I see that he likes to speak with my son in Turkmen, but because he himself has lived in Tehran, I think his Persian is good. I see that he himself sometimes speaks Persian too, but he says he likes and prefers to speak Turkmen more. But when I think about it, I see that I speak with him (my son) in Persian more. He knows both Persian and Turkmen. Mrs. Atabai: Even my father prevents me from speaking Persian, when I use Persian to talk to my son.

The mothers’ clearly outspoken preference for Persian in Turkmen families resonates with findings of other studies on Azerbaijani families in northwest cities of the country. Mirvahedi (2017), for example, shows that Azerbaijani girls aged between seven and fourteen living in Tabriz prefer to watch their favorite cartoon in Persian rather than Azerbaijani. As noted above, Taqavi and Rezaei’s (2019) research in Zanjan also reveals that while Azerbaijani bilingual females use Azerbaijani to speak to their older family members, they choose Persian to speak to other family members. Women also seem to influence Azerbaijani bilingual males’ language choice as Azerbaijani males are reported to choose Azerbaijani to speak to their older family members, their brothers, and their male friends, but they speak in Persian to their female family members and female friends as well as their children. Turkmen and Azerbaijani women’s tendency to use the dominant language in the wider society and consequently leading in linguistic change may be due to their historically lower social position in their community. Women have been shown to strategically use the dominant language more than men as a means of moving up the social ladder, reap the advantages of learning and using the dominant language, and achieve socioeconomic gains and acquire symbolic capital (Aikio 1992; Cavanaugh 2006; Gal 1978; Holmes 1993; Mukherjee 2003; Roman, Juhasz, and Miller 1994; Yu-Hsiu Lee 2013; Smith-Hefner 2009). Resistance against Language Shift by Fathers The discrepancy in men and women’s tendency to use Turkmen and Persian is reflected in various social practices. For example, while the bride and/or her family typically use Persian in wedding invitation cards sent around, cards sent

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out by the groom or his family must be in Turkmen, the violation of which brings about stigmatization and/or mocking on the part of relatives and friends. Mrs. Atabai: The women’s cards should be all in Persian. I have not seen any in Turkmen. Mrs. Aagh: Turkmen is for men … Interviewer: … how was your own cards? Mrs. Atabai: Mine was in Persian. My husband’s was in Turkmen. Mrs. Aagh: Mine too. While this reflects the impact of gender in language choice in Turkmen families, we also found that Turkmen men actually exercise their agency to maintain their heritage language. Mrs. Atabai’s account of her husband’s encounter with a neighbor is a prime example. Mrs. Atabai: … my husband now, there is a Turkmen guy who speaks Persian, I’d like to make him [the husband] understand that that guy has grown up like that, he does not know Turkmen, and you have to speak Persian with him, you should not try to speak Turkmen with him, but he says no, and he always speaks Turkmen with him. But we women are not like that in many situations. My aunt lives in Tehran. We call her and if she is at school, she speaks Persian with us. We ask why? She says she will be embarrassed if they find out she is Turkmen. Mr. Atabai: … I think the child first learns his mother tongue completely, he can express all his needs and answer if someone asks him something. When he is through with it, we can then see when it is time to learn Persian. Mr. Aagh: sometimes if my audience is someone close (who speaks Persian) I keep on speaking Turkmen even if he/she insists on Persian. I myself first ask things in Turkmen, if my addressee is Persian, he/she will ask me to repeat it in Persian, but if my addressee is Turkmen and I speak Persian, he/she will make you feel embarrassed about it. While the mother (Mrs. Atabai) in the first excerpt narrates a story that shows her husband’s resistance to accommodate to a Turkmen neighbor’s use of Persian, the second quote by the husband (Mr. Atabai) shows his strong desire for their child to gain mastery over Turkmen. His prioritization of Turkmen over Persian, what has come to be known as Early Second Language Acquisition setting, has been shown to be a successful way to maintain heritage languages (De Houwer and Bornstein 2016; De Houwer 2017). Similar to Korean migrant

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families in New Zealand (Kima and Starks 2010), the father’s role in language maintenance may come from the fact that the father’s authority in a Turkmen family is considered the most important, and that other members are expected to follow. Unlike the participating fathers in Doyle’s (2018) study in Estonia whose efforts were often refuted by their own inadequate linguistic competence in their heritage language or their children’s resistance, the fathers in our study encounter no such challenges. Yet, other factors seem to be influencing the children’s acquisition of languages at home, namely the media. The following section examines this issue. The Media: Satellite Channels and the Presence of Turkish at Home Since the late 1990s, satellite dishes have permeated the Iranian society giving families access to hundreds of channels almost free of charge. Although this motivated the government to provide the population with different channels to impede the “cultural invasion” of such channels–one of which was the provincial channels, as noted above–satellite channels have found their foothold in the households throughout the country (Mirvahedi 2019a). Among them are Turkish channels which have been very popular with families, particularly with those who speak a Turkic language such as Azerbaijani (Mirvahedi 2012). Speakers of Turkmen, which is a Turkic language as well, seems to have taken an interest in Turkish channels too. Mr. Aagh: Our dominant language is Turkmen, but Turkish is kind of gaining a foothold. Because we have a satellite dish, my daughter has been watching Turkish channels since she was one, and now I think she has mastery over it. Although, as Mr. Aagh notes, the dominant language of the family is Turkmen, and perhaps it will not harm their daughter’s acquisition of Turkmen, popularity of Turkish channels with speakers of Turkic languages in Iran is worth expounding. First, the increasing popularity of Satellite channels shows that how provincial channels have not succeeded to attract speakers of minority languages, thus failed to serve the communities as effective institutional support. Second, as Mrs. Atabai’s comment below shows, Turkish in addition to Persian brings yet another rival language to the domain of home, to the extent that young children may learn Turkish instead of Turkmen. Mrs. Atabai: … now we have a case in our kindergarten. He’s come this year … he does not know a word of Persian or Turkmen. He always speaks Turkish. We ask why, they say because he has been in front of the satellite [TV] since he was a baby.

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Mrs. Aagh: Like my niece … I do not think my daughter will forget Turkmen. I’m concerned that she may not learn Persian well. Nowadays, I make her watch a series of Persian channels that show cartoons. Located at the crossroads of Asia and Europe and increasingly integrated with the West through membership in organizations such as NATO, the Council of Europe, and the G-20 major economies, Turkey is seen as a country of great geostrategic and geopolitical importance. Given this, the country holds large economic, political, cultural, and social potential. The advent of satellite dishes in Iran has offered access to hundreds of channels, including Turkish channels, at little cost. The linguistic proximity of Turkish and other Turkic languages in Iran, for example, Azerbaijani and Turkmen (Boeschoten 1998), has made it possible for the children who speak a Turkic variety in Iran to pick up Turkish by being exposed to it through cartoons and movies from very young ages (Mirvahedi 2012). While Bani-Shoraka (2003) considers access to such media to be a contributing factor to what she calls the revitalization of Azerbaijani language and identity, Turkish programs have shown to have some other language ideological effects resulting in what Karimzad (2018) calls “selfsubordination.” That is, speakers of Turkic languages in Iran see the variety spoken in Turkey as “stronger,” “purer,” and “more authentic.” Thus, besides the instrumental value of knowing Turkish which could open doors to Turkey, this ideology might also drive some families to invest more in Turkish than in their own Turkic mother tongues. Our observation here resonates with findings of Aarset (2016), Cuban (2014), and Porter et al. (2018) that illustrate how parents draw on media, including national, international, terrestrial, satellite, and social media, to enact their language policies. Whether it is to improve their children’s ethnic language, or get them to learn another language, for example, the official language of the country or a language they value more than others, parents draw on technology to achieve their goals set for their children. Demographic Make-Up of the City and Its Impact on the FLP Schwartz, Moin, and Leikin (2011) argue that parents’ language-related strategies in achieving children’s bilingual development can be divided into two types: (a) internal (i.e., actions performed for children’s bilingual development inside the home) and (b) external (i.e., actions performed to support children’s bilingual development outside the home). While the internal strategies include language socialization at home (e.g., Lanza 2007), parents may reach outside the home to find support for their children’s language acquisition such as choosing to live in a particular neighborhood or enrolling their children in a certain school. As noted above, the city of Gonbad-e Kavous is structured

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in a way that some neighborhoods are predominantly occupied by Turkmen communities, while others are occupied by Persian speakers or speakers of other languages. As a result, schools functioning in each neighborhood have different demographics of students and teachers. The parents in our study report that they actually draw on this demographic affordance to achieve their linguistic goals. Mrs. Atabai’s account of her sister’s low proficiency in Turkmen and her own moving to a Turkmen-speaking area as well as Mrs. Aagh’s choice of a Persian teacher for her daughter depict this very well. Mrs. Atabai: I exactly remember that my mom felt very concerned that she [my sister] would end up like my cousin (who lives in Tehran and cannot speak Turkmen). Then they moved her [my sister] to a Turkmen-speaking school. But during my elementary and high school years I was also in schools where students were all speakers of Persian. I remember when we moved to Turkmenspeaking area in the second year, I would go home and tell my mom with great surprise that the students wore Turkmen pants. I remember that we had a math teacher who taught math in Turkmen. Mrs. Aagh: Previously, my daughter’s teacher was Turkmen. I was keen to have a Persian teacher for her so that she could be fluent in Persian, so we changed her class to one with a Persian teacher. In the interview, Mrs. Atabai gives a full account of how her parents talked to her younger sister in Persian at home for some reason, but at some point, they felt very concerned that she might fail to be able to speak Turkmen at all. As one of their strategies, they enrolled her in a school in a Turkmen-speaking area in the city hoping that their daughter will pick up Turkmen in interaction with students and teachers, as well as getting familiar with cultural traditions such as Turkmen clothes.4 Mrs. Atabai’s own proficiency in Turkmen was shaped at home before she went to school. Thus, although she was in schools with predominately Persian-speaking staff and students, her parents had no concern about her Turkmen skills. Finally, her account of her math teacher unveils the complexity of policy implementation. As noted above, Article 15 of the Constitution requires that all formal writing and textbooks be in Persian suggesting that Persian must be used as the medium of instruction across the country. However, in parts of the country where a minority language is spoken, this policy is not implemented consistently. Teaching and management staff in educational settings in bilingual regions appropriate policy according to needs that arise in the classroom. For instance, as Mirvahedi (2019b) shows, Azerbaijani teaching staff in kindergartens and preschools in Tabriz have come up with a policy of their own when they have to deal with children of varying

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degree of Persian proficiency; they use Azerbaijani in the first three months and then gradually shift to Persian in the following months and years. In sum, the particular structure of Gonbad-e Kavous has provided Turkmen families with the possibility of reaching outside the family to achieve bilingualism in children; by moving to certain areas in the city, they can immerse their children in the language they wish to invest in. This illustrates how parents’ choices outside the home could serve as an important step in the practical realization of family language strategies for the children’s linguistic development (Van Mensel 2016; see also Curdt-Christiansen 2009). No Vision of Change Our final question posed to the parents was whether they would be willing to enroll their children in Turkmen-medium schools if they were available. We made it clear that Persian would be taught as a second language in those schools. Their answer reveals two themes: (1) they do not seem to see it happening in near future given the sociopolitical realities of the Iranian society, and (2) there is no use in learning the language formally. Mrs. Atabai: I’m not interested in learning it because I don’t see any necessity. I don’t feel that I should learn more than what I know. It doesn’t benefit me. Even reading and writing. What I’m saying is what benefit will that have? Mrs. Aagh: If someone says everything should be in Turkmen, I think that’s not going to happen. Maybe when it is possible, we will not be around. Mrs. Atabai’s and Mrs. Aagh’s comments above suggest how the dominance of Persian as the institutional societal language has been so overwhelming that the parents do not find a particular benefit to learn their heritage language in educational settings. This shows how the dynamics of language ideologies and practices of families, and the language maintenance/shift processes, in general, cannot be understood in separation from the broader sociolinguistics and political ecology in which families find themselves (Mühlhäusler 1992; Hornberger and Hult 2008).

CONCLUDING REMARKS FLP has been shown to play a pivotal role in language maintenance (King, Fogle, and Logan-Terry 2008). Parental language ideologies and practices are in particular significant in situations where home languages are not institutionally supported outside the home, and thus, the responsibility of the

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ethnic/heritage language maintenance falls on the shoulders of the community members (Grenoble 2011). The Turkmen language in Iran is a case in point. While Turkmen is subjected to “monolingual reductionism” (SkutnabbKangas 1998: 12), and “marginalizing ideology” (Lotherington 2004: 698) in institutions outside the home, our analysis shows that the family has remained as the bedrock of language maintenance and the intergenerational continuity of the Turkmen language. One main reason for such a strong tendency to maintain the Turkmen language at home that we found in our research lay in how families were formed. We observed that family formation processes in the Turkmen speaking communities relied on their ethnic and religious identity to the extent that they oftentimes refrained from marrying outside their own group. Being Sunni Muslims and speakers of a minority language does not leave many options for Turkmens when it comes to the issue of marriage. The majority of Iranians are Shiite Muslims, and the remaining Sunni Muslims speak another minority language, which is one of the Indo-European languages, for example, Kurdish or Balochi, and very different from Turkmen. Endogamous marriages among Turkmens thus make it possible for both partners from the same ethnolinguistic background to communicate in Turkmen to each other, increasing the likelihood of its transmission to their children. Yet, as we showed above, the dynamics of language use at home is far from simple, and other factors external to the domain of home have come in play influencing the maintenance and vitality of the Turkmen language. We have shown that how the lack of supportive educational policies for Turkmen has led to a decline in the Turkmen parents’ literacy skills to the extent that they find it difficult to read and write their ethnic language regularly, which has turned the language into an oral/aural one in the context of home. However, Turkmen is used as a literacy language in other domains such as wedding invitation cards sent out by the groom’s family, which, if not practiced, results in the ridicule and stigmatization of the family. Although using Turkmen in writing is limited to only few domains and might not be considered an influential factor in language maintenance, it suggests the significance of the Turkmen language for men. As noted above, even after a family is formed, Turkmen men are found to be more protective of their ethnic language, identity, and culture. While we found that women sometimes used Persian at home, and were keen to have their children improve their Persian at a young age, men not only prioritized learning Turkmen over Persian for their children, but also exercised their agency in maintaining the language, for example, using Turkmen in interaction with a fellow Turkmen who uses Persian. For men, the Turkmen language seemed to be a core value, without which one could not be Turkmen. Accordingly, Turkmen fathers’ role in language maintenance could be considered pivotal.

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In addition to the discrepancies in men’s and women’s language preferences that let Persian in the family unit, our findings have also shown that the broadcast media play a key role in shaping the language ecology of the family. Being a Turkic language, there is linguistic proximity between Turkmen and Turkish, making it easier to understand and gradually learn Turkish by osmosis. Some families thus find it attractive to watch Turkish programs which results in their children’s informal learning of Turkish. By contrast, some families expose their children to Persian cartoons as a strategy to improve their Persian. These two languages compared to Turkmen enjoy a stronger and more attractive presence in the media and offer benefits for upward social mobility. Parents were also found to draw on the affordances offered by the particular demographic structure of the city. As the city of Gonbad-e Kavous is structured in a way that neighborhoods are dominated by different ethnolinguistic groups, the Turkmen families have the option of living in a neighborhood with predominantly Turkmen occupants, or a neighborhood with citizens of mixed ethnolinguistic backgrounds, which means Persian has to be used as a lingua franca among them. Thus, depending on their goals for their children, for example, improving their Turkmen or Persian, the parents could choose different schools with Persian or Turkmen staff and students to realize their objectives. In line with Schwartz and Verschik (2013a), we also argue that a better understanding of language policy of families would entail the elimination of the boundary between the linguistic and the nonlinguistic, allowing us to incorporate into our analysis sociopolitical, historical, geographical, demographic, and material structure of the context where families find themselves (see also Mirvahedi 2020). Given the particular sociopolitical and historical context in which minority languages in Iran have existed, our analysis showed that the Turkmen parents interviewed did not seem to be willing to or even hope to witness any changes in the status and function of the Turkmen language in the society in near future. The parents did not believe that the government would provide any effective institutional support, such as teaching the language in schools. Viewing the natural language acquisition of Turkmen in the home environment as adequate, one parent went even further arguing that the formal learning of Turkmen would not have any benefits as it had no societal use. Finally, we hope this study would trigger more research on the Turkmen community in Iran. In particular, we would like to call for more ethnographic studies to examine the dynamics of language use in the families that could capture the dynamics of FLP, the children’s voices and their agentive roles in shaping FLP, and generally how language maintenance or shift is “talked into being” in interaction on a daily basis (Gafaranga 2010). Given the particular make-up of the city as well as the limited literacy practices we pointed out

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above, we would also like to call for research on the linguistic landscape of Gonbad-e Kavous. Studies need to be conducted to examine to what extent, if at all, Turkmen is used in public sphere, or similar to other bi/multilingual cities in Iran, Persian is predominantly used in both private and public signage (e.g., Mirvahedi 2016). These studies will provide us with more insightful evidence into the families’ practiced language policy and their success or struggle to maintain their ethnic language.

NOTES 1 Different numbers are cited for the Turkmen population; 719,000 speakers (Simons and Fennig 2018), 1,600,000 (Tohidi 2009). 2 The Turkoman horse is a famous breed noted for its endurance, which has been raised and sold for a living by Turkmen people. 3 Magtymguly Pyragy (Persian: Makhtumqoli Faraghi; Turkmen: Magtymguly Pyragy; c. 1724–1807) was an Iranian-Turkmen spiritual leader and philosophical poet who made great efforts to secure independence and autonomy for his people in the eighteenth century. 4 Ethnic traditional clothes may not have a direct impact on language maintenance, but they have a symbolic value reinforcing ethnic identity. The prime example of this is Kurdish people who wear their traditional clothes almost in every occasion. Although there is no regulation and dress codes against wearing such clothes to schools, some ethnic groups such as Azerbaijanis have abandoned wearing their traditional clothes in many settings.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Family as a System: Values and Ideologies behind Family Language Policies of Diverse Arabic-Speaking Multilingual Families FATMA F. S. SAID

INTRODUCTION Transmitting language from one generation to another is often looked upon as a given in which children naturally learn the language of their parents. However, this process is a complex, difficult, and often time-consuming one for multilingual families wishing to raise bilingual children. The newly established field of family language policy (FLP) offers a comprehensive lens through which to understand the nature, factors, and intricacies in the process of how families transmit their language(s) to their children (Higgins 2018; Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018; Palviainen and Bergroth 2018; Van Mensel 2018; Hua and Wei 2016; Smith-Christmas 2015; Schwartz and Vershik 2013; Kirsch 2012; Bhatia and Ritchie 2012; Tokuhama-Espinosa 2003; Okita 2002; Piller 2001). FLP is understood to “examine language policy in relation to language use and language choice within the home among family members” (King, Fogle,

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and Logan-Terry 2008). FLP from the outset was straightforwardly applicable to multilingual contexts because of its interest in understanding factors that influence language use and learning most notably (at the time) in how parents managed the relationship between educational and minority or home language learning (see, for example, the earliest work focusing on FLP by Lukyx 2003). This chapter focuses on Arabic-speaking multilingual families and their language ideologies. Although much work now exists on FLP in largely Western settings, there is paucity of work on Arabic-speaking multilingual families (cf. Abed Elkhalik 2018; Gomaa 2011; Yazan and Ali 2018; Said and Hua 2019) in both Western and a wider array of contexts. The chapter aims to address the gap by offering data on different constellations of Arabic-speaking multilingual families with the goal of presenting distinctive data that proposes a diversifying account of how families form and negotiate their FLPs (see Gomes 2018; Smith-Christmas 2017; Spolsky 2004; King and Fogle 2017, who call for more diverse work). Second, the chapter seeks to reexplore the notion of “family” as an entity that directly shapes how FLPs are formed. Although, this is acknowledged in FLP studies by adopting the Family Systems Theory (Bowen 1978) a clearer notion of how FLPs are created within and by the family as a unit emerges. FLPs are built on language ideologies which Silverstein (1979:193) defines as “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use.” Parents understand that their language-related decisions and practices affect children’s language learning. De Houwer (1999: 83) refers to this as “ ‘impact belief,’ which is the parental belief that parents can exercise some sort of control over their children’s linguistic functioning.” Such awareness is evident in the data of this chapter, whereby parents enact specific practices (reading in Arabic, attending Arabic language schools) to support the learning of the heritage language (HL). In looking at current literature on Arabic-speaking multilingual families, it is always intriguing to read studies that cite religion as the sole motivation for language maintenance of Arabic (e.g., Yazan and Ali 2018; Gomaa 2011); when the language of the Qur’an is completely different to the everyday spoken Arabic (which has at least twenty-two different dialects) and each one is distinct from the other (Sulieman 2003). This does not mean that the spoken Arabic is completely different; but by mastering spoken Arabic, one cannot have direct access to the Qur’an or religious texts and additional instruction in Qur’anic or Classic Arabic is required. Intriguingly, among Arabic speakers there are some who argue that learning Classic or Qur’anic Arabic is like learning a second language (see, e.g., Said 2011). Similarly, Rosenhouse (2014: 911) considers the different Arabics to constitute what she terms “a subtype of bilingualism” arguing that speakers of Arabic ought to be considered multilinguals because their dialects are in fact two languages. Given these views (which the scope

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of the chapter will not allow further discussion of), it seems that religion as motivation for maintaining Arabic offered by parents or sensed by researchers is oversimplified and in need of further analysis. Due to the fact that Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam, it therefore, to an extent, defines the ethnolinguistic identities of all Muslims but is not motivation enough to warrant FLPs designed to support the transmission of everyday Arabic. If the above held true, then all Arabic-speaking multilingual families would transmit the language with ease, clarity, and military-like precision; however, this is not the case (see, e.g., Said and AlGhamdi 2018). In contrast to previous studies, I argue below that upon delving deeper into how the family is organized a richer understanding develops of how the subtle ever-present core values of religion, gender, and motherhood intersect to create diverse FLPs reflecting, above all, the very nature of each family system. The motivation to learn Arabic is no longer associated with simply religion at the superficial level—though it remains vital—but increasingly with the family configuration and ascribed values of what it means to be a family and a loyal member of an ecosystem that requires the sound upbringing of a child. Four families’ FLPs are investigated in this chapter, one single-parent family, one sojourning family (in the UK from Saudi Arabia), and two two-parent families residing in the UK and Saudi Arabia. The families create strong systems through which they influence the use and learning of the Arabic language. Socialization into the reverence of Arabic takes place early in the lives of the children and hence they agentively partake in designing, modifying, and enacting FLPs with their parents. Though configurations differ (e.g., sojourner families vs. non-sojourner families and single-parent families vs. two-parent families, or bilingual couples vs. monolingual ones), the strong desire to transmit Arabic can be found in equal eagerness across all the families and their settings. Similarly, each family prioritized parenthood and in turn the mothers concentrated on their own role as mothers; sometimes excluding their husbands from decisions that, for example, directly affect the family financial situation. In family 1, the mother changed the children’s Arabic school, because she was unhappy with the standards of teaching; she viewed such a decision as solely hers to make, even though the consequences of such a decision impacted the whole family. Significantly, the differences in family structures revealed that, distinct from the other mothers, the single mother appeared to be the most consistent in applying, articulating, and making arrangements that supported her declared FLPs. Hers was the only family in which the children could read Arabic by the age four; she did not want them to “feel the loss of anything” (Reem, VF4), including language—one she felt offered them a strong sense of being. Similarly, the mother in the sojourning family did not equate the transmission of Arabic and her role as a mother to her religious duty. This was unlike the mothers in the other families, who bound their role of mother to that of transmitter of

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the Arabic language. They used metaphors during interviews to express their understanding of motherly duties as religiously ordained. The diversity of the families in this chapter goes beyond their shared ethnolinguistic identities, and in fact, first, it is the family configuration that governs FLPs with the supporting ideologies merely justifying language management. Second, mothers lead in establishing particular language practices and behaviors that come to define the family system based on how the mother herself interprets her role as “mother” and main caretaker. Religion seems merely to further clarify these characteristics and desires but not determine them. The learning of Arabic on the abstract level is connected to religion in that children can perform their religious duties and access their pan-Muslim identities; however, on a deeper level the transmission of Arabic symbolizes successful motherhood. The unique data presented here offers findings from underexplored environments of Arabic-speaking multilingual families and their (socializing) language practices that offer another angle from which to view the nature of FLP, language maintenance, and bilingualism.

CORE VALUES AND LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE The chapter argues that the core values (Smolicz 1992) and parental (cultural) ethnotheories (Fogle 2013; Harkness and Super 2006; Harkness et al., 2015) about the meanings of motherhood and of childrearing, the families in this study uniformly hold dear, become apparent in the FLPs. Core values are defined as “whenever people feel that there is a direct link between their identity as a group and what they regard as the most crucial and distinguishing element concerned becomes a core value for the group” (Smolicz 1981:77). Whereas “parental ethnotheories” are understood to be “the nexus through which elements of the larger culture are filtered, and as an important source of parenting practices” (Harkness and Super 2006: 62). These cultural beliefs “influence practices” that ultimately “define relationships within the family” (Harkness et al. 2015: 1). Similarly, these core values and parental ethnotheories together determine to a large extent the practices families, and in particular mothers, undertake to enact their values. It is, therefore, no revelation that these same core values and cultural ethnotheories then arbitrate on the one hand how family members understand their own roles within the family and, on the other, how FLPs are communicated, administered, and negotiated. The central importance the family occupies, and the position members are (self or other) appointed to (including children [Raithelhuber 2016]), affects among other aspects of family life, what language ideologies and FLPs families create together. Religion is a core value and its relationship with language maintenance has long preoccupied scholars. Fishman (1991) led the field in exploring religion

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as a motivator for language maintenance and connected intergenerational maintenance of, for example, Arabic and Hebrew to the learning of the Qur’an and the Old Testament respectively. Likewise, Baker (2011: 57) highlights that religion “can be a strong and important vehicle for the maintenance of a majority and a minority language. The use of Classic Arabic in Islam, Hebrew in Judaism, and German among the Protestant Old Order Amish in Pennsylvania illustrates that religion can be a preserver of language.” For example, Clyne and Kipp (1999) found that the use of Arabic among Australians of Egyptian and Lebanese background in Melbourne had a strong link to religion. They concluded that the Muslim community had been successful in maintaining the Arabic language and transmitting it to their children because religion was a motivator. Meanwhile, di Lucca, Masiero, and Pallotti (2008) found that Moroccan Arabic speakers in Italy were in fact moving away from Arabic maintenance and more toward Italian. They argue that the main factor that led to a shift in Arabic was the participants’ nonconnecting of religion to the Arabic language. Finally, Gogonas (2012:113) contrasted Coptic and Muslim Egyptian speakers in Greece and found that the Muslim Egyptians were the “language maintainers.” He concludes that “religious practice leads Muslims and Copts to view Arabic and Coptic as core values of their identity” (ibid.) and hence push to maintain these languages with more success. Even among non-Arab non-heritage Arabic language learners, the Arabic language occupies a key importance because of its centrality to texts and the Qur’an in Islam (Al Shlowiy 2021; Szczepek Reed et al. 2020). In non-Arab families, Muslim parents establish a “family religious language policy” (Moore 2016), through which they ensure to teach their children Arabic as a key to accessing religious texts. In previous work carried out by the author (see Szczepek Reed et al. 2017), it was found that both Arab and non-Arab parents send their children to weekend schools to learn Arabic and some of those schools also taught Qur’anic recitation. The central importance the Arabic language plays in religious literacy is also illustrated in Al Shlowiy’s (2021) work in which he argued that Arabic has become a “Muslim lingua franca” that also “strengthened their religion” in South Asia because of the efforts those families make for their children to learn Arabic. Finally, Bezçioğlu-Göktolga and Yagmur’s (2018) study shows that Turkish families in the Netherlands similarly invested in their children’s learning of Arabic for religious reasons. Religion therefore appears to be a powerful motivator for the maintenance of liturgical languages. But I ask, is it a powerful enough motivator for the learning of everyday Arabic? To answer the above question, I ask two main questions: (1) how do we understand the notion of a family as a system in FLP? and (2) how does the specific context of Arabic-speaking multilingual families contribute to our understanding of (1)? The remainder of the chapter endeavors to provide empirical and theoretical answers; thereby offering an alternative yet

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complementary lens that may present new insights into FLP for understanding complex language ideology and management situations.

FAMILY AS A SYSTEM The family or status of family features heavily in the data this chapter presents. The central significance parents in this study attach to the concept of family shapes how they say they raise their children; including how and why they transmit their language(s) to them. Many fields of study have recognized the dominant effect the family unit plays on the lives of young children and how inevitably the experiences of childhood go on to affect children far into their adulthood (though important, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the idea, see Attachment Theory for example, Ainsworth [1978]). The field of family therapy views the family as a system (an idea taken from General Systems Theory, see von Bertalanffy 1956) with each member positioned as an integral part to that system. The theory came to be known as Family Systems Theory (hereafter, FST). Bavelas and Segal (1982: 90) point out that in fact “the basic terms and concepts of systems theory seem to fit naturally the ‘system called a family.’ ” Bowen (1978), a proponent of FST, described the family as both a “relationship system and emotional system.” The view is that children are socialized into how to make relationships with others (both within and outside the family) and how to understand their emotions (O’Connor, Hetherington, and Clingempeel 1997) from the home, family, and most specifically parents. Gavazzi (2011: 33) explains that “the family is thought to be understood through the recognition that family members (as the parts of the system) interact with one another in such a manner that, overtime, these interactions become patterned behavior.” These patterned behaviors are unique to each family, are locally negotiated and created, and hence from this perspective each member contributes to those behaviors that then come to define the family as a unique entity. The family is a self-organizing, organized and selfsocializing unit that is autonomous yet interconnected to and affected by society at large. It has its own habitus (Bourdieu 1994) which are internalized yet socially constructed systems of dispositions that allow for particular, in the case of this chapter, language practices which are repeated until they become characteristic of the family. Below, Figure 11.1, is a depiction of the family system. Each of these families act as small whole units with each member affecting the behavior of the “whole” family unit through communication (Bavelas and Segal 1982: 90–1). Each member is equally affected by outside input and hence brings to the family external influences which can, oftentimes, through individual agency influence change in family behavior. There is an inner circle

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FIGURE 11.1:  Family systems model (adapted from Christie-Seely’s (1985) model for use in medical settings).

system immediately outside the family system consisting of extended family and friends all of whom have more influence on the family system than the outer circle systems of religion, culture, education, and society. In FST, the family is an open system and open to change and modification; however the systems in the outer circle are more resistant to change rendering them closed systems. As a theory, FST views the family from a holistic perspective and focuses on the “interactive” and “bidirectional” relationships among the family members (Broderick 1993). This holistic idea complements the principles of FLP partly founded on the language socialization paradigm (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986; Duranti, Ochs, and Schieffelin 2011; Herle et al. 2018), in which all members in the family are understood to possess agency hence allowing socialization to be enacted by both young (novice) and older (experts) members (Fogle 2012). Both FLP and FST recognize that the family and family home are important first environments in the making of “family” and in the learning about the world, which undoubtedly also includes language. Previous and other ongoing projects by the author (see Said and Hua 2019; Said, 2021a, 2021b) point to the indelible impact family relationship dynamics have on the language maintenance and learning process of languages. Perhaps by using, as far as is possible, some principles of FST together with the FLP paradigm, a renewed understanding of the role the family as a unit plays in FLP and management will be presented.

METHODOLOGY The sociolinguistic project was designed to generate data from multiple sources rendering this a data-driven project (Creswell 2014). The aim was to use data to generate findings and be able to answer the research questions as a result

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of inductive analysis. For this reason, parents were not informed about the true nature of the project; instead, they were told that the project is about multilingual families in the UK. This step was taken in order not to influence parental behavior. The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the ESRC (2015) ethical framework and once approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of York, UK; the researcher set up a Facebook page and sent WhatsApp messages inviting multilingual Arabic speaking parents to take part with their families in the project. Interested families were then chosen based on the following criteria: (1) that the parent(s) have lived in the UK for more than five years, (2) that they have more than two children (3) that the children are all under the age of ten, and (4) that they speak English and Arabic. Of those who responded, four families were then recruited to take part, they completed a demographic survey before the remaining data collection sources were submitted. Data was collected over a period of five months through a family linguistic background survey (mentioned above), audio-recorded monthly home interactions, audio-recorded interviews with parents, and mothers’ monthly diary entries. The researcher appointed the mothers in each family to record one interactional episode a month and two interviews were conducted once at the start to expand on the demographic information in the surveys. A second interview took place once all data had been collected. The interactional home data was transcribed and then analyzed through interactional sociolinguistics (Schiffrin 1996) and mothers’ diaries and interviews were analyzed through thematic analysis (Braun and Clark 2006; Creswell 2014). All names are anonymized to protect the participants and no exact locations of living are offered either. Reflexive practice (Attia and Edge, 2017) was important in this project because as a researcher I shared the same linguistic background as the participants. Hence designing the project to be data-driven, assisted and ensured that assumptions I had about the community were not brought into the analysis. All analyses were based on evidence from the data itself. The benefit of possessing knowledge about the community helped me to ask specific questions in the interviews and push parents to expand (especially in the second round of interviews) about why they focus on Arabic (see Said, forthcoming).

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION The analyses of findings solely focus on parental ideologies and their reports about language practices in the survey and first interviews. This is followed by thematic analysis of aspects in the data that directly answer the research questions.

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DEMOGRAPHIC SURVEY There was the option for each parent to record their responses, but each family said both parents shared the same ideas. It became apparent later that this was not the case and that in fact most of these were the ideas the mothers in each of the families held. This action itself already affirmed that mothers in these families take it upon themselves to carry out the role of HL transmitters. Family 1 (F1) is a two-parent multilingual family with an Iraqi mother (Zainab) and Lebanese father (Muhanad), and they have three sons (Faris, Ghaith, and Saif). Both parents arrived in the UK before the age of fifteen, and their children were born in the UK. The mother and father emphasize the importance of Arabic and say they put utmost effort in ensuring their children have access to Arabic beyond their Saturday school classroom. “For me the most umm … most thing, important like I need to know I took care of it, the most important thing is that outside the compulsory class they can see and speak Arabic” (VF1). Zainab is a stay-at-home mother and previously worked as a copywriter and the husband is an architect. Family 2 (F2) is a two-parent interlingual family (parents are not from the same background following Yamamoto’s (2001) definition). The mother is a UK-born Yemeni-Omani (Anisa) and the father is English-Scottish (Josh), the children (Tala and Lana) are being raised as bilinguals in English and Arabic in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. When the children are older, the parents intend to send them to school or an educational institution where they can learn Classic or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The mother is a translator for an Arabic-German publisher and the father is a lecturer in English language. Josh is learning MSA in evening classes twice a week, he learned the alphabet a month after arriving in Dammam and can now read and conduct basic communication with his students. They have now lived in Saudi Arabia for three years. Tables 11.1 and 11.2 summarize the responses. Family 3 (F3) is a sojourning bilingual family of Saudi parents who came to the UK three years ago for the mother (Fatima) to complete her PhD in nutrition. They have three children, Nujood (aged seven), Kareem (aged five), and Sultan (aged three). Isa owns his business in Jeddah and is obliged to go back every couple of months. The complex nature of the sojourning families of constantly moving between cities and countries and how they negotiate and form their FLPs requires more attention because the contexts further reveal the nature of family language planning. In the interview it seems that the mother did not begin thinking about planning for Arabic language learning in the first two years of living in the UK, and she remembers that it was “only when I went back and my daughter (Nujood) refused to speak Arabic to Maama (Fatima’s mother), that I asked myself ‘what are you doing?, I thought

two girls: 4 and 2.5

Father (38): British

two-parent: Mother (33): Yemeni-Omani

Family 2 (F2)

three boys: 2,5, and 7

Father (35): Lebanese

Mother (30): Iraqi

two-parent

German (mother)

English, Arabic (mother), Swahili (mother),

Father and children born in the UK. Mother arrived in UK at two years old. Now family reside in Jeddah for the past four years.

Mother from seven years old and father from eighteen. All children born in the UK.

Family 1 (F1)

English, Iraqi, and Lebanese Arabic, French (father), Italian(father)

Country of residence and number of years living there

Family type Languages spoken (ages and ethnic by members of the background of family parents and children)

TABLE 11.1  Summary of Demographics Survey

Girls: None, at home

Father: First degree in English

Mother: Degree in Arabic language and translation

Boys: Arabic school on weekends and after school Italian classes once a week.

Father: standard Arabic and Italian (degree architecture)

Mother: Arabic literature degree

Formal education in languages spoken

They live in Jeddah. But travel once a year to Oman or Dubai, UAE or Manchester, UK.

Once a year to Lebanon and Dubai, UAE

Other languages are good.

Both Arabic and English are important. But Classic Arabic needs work and needs learning.

Extra languages are good.

Classic Arabic needs to be learned and taken seriously.

English will be learned easily.

Arabic is very important.

Travel to Arabic Declared ideologies about speaking countries languages (which of your languages is the most important?)

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Girl: 7

two boys: 3 and 5

Mother (38): Libyan

Single

Family 4 (F4)

Boy: 5

two girls: 3 and 8

Father (39): Saudi

Mother (36): Saudi

English, Arabic, French, Italian

Sojourning English family: In UK for Mother’s PhD study

Mother and all children born in UK.

Parents and children born in Saudi Arabia.

Family 3 (F3)

Saudi Arabic

Country of residence and number of years living there

Family type Languages spoken (ages and ethnic by members of the background of family parents and children)

degree in dentistry

GCSE in Arabic (high school qualification)

Children: for five and eight years old Saudi Curriculum online

Father: High school diploma in Arabic (degree in engineering)

Mother: First degree in Arabic

Formal education in languages spoken

No travel

(father resides in the UK for half the year).

Twice a year to Jeddah and to Riyadh

English is easy.

Arabic is very important and needs work to learn and master.

Other languages can be learned later if needed.

Arabic must not be lost so children can communicate back home.

English is very important and especially the accent.

Travel to Arabic Declared ideologies about speaking countries languages (which of your languages is the most important?)

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I need a plan’ ” (VF3). This explains why the family declare that English is important for the accent, but that Arabic must also not be forgotten. Family 4 (F4) is a single-parent bilingual family, the mother (Reem) is Libyan born in the UK. She resides with her two sons (Ahmad, aged three, and Nuh, aged five) and her older daughter (Deema, aged seven). In the interview the mother revealed that the children were exposed to Italian from birth because their father is Italian, but since the separation they have not had contact with the father because these arrangements are still being negotiated in court. Of all the mothers, Reem seemed to be the most under pressure to transmit Arabic to her children, and she explicitly equated transmitting Arabic to her children to being a good mother—“if I can do it, then I am good mother” (VF4). Such a sentiment echoes King and Fogle’s (2006) findings that parents equated bilingual parenting with good parenting or successful transmission of the language as good mothering (Okita 2002 ; Curdt-Christiansen 2009). The theme of good parenting, good family, and good mothering are echoed numerous times throughout the data, as will become clear below next. All the children attend Arabic school (except F3) on Saturday mornings in their respective cities. The schools offer a space in which children have the opportunity to mix with other children who are also being raised bilingually to speak Arabic. The school legitimizes the language and parents’ efforts to transmit it to the children. The next table provides data on the reported language practices the families cited and together with interview comments the context in which languages are used is discussed:

TABLE 11.2  Language Use Family

F1

F2

F3

F4

How often is English used? How often is Arabic used? In which language(s) do you read the most? In which language(s) do you watch TV? How much time spent together as family?

Most of the time Some of the time English

Most of the time Some of the time English and sometimes Arabic

Some of the time Most of the time English and sometimes Arabic

Most of the time

English and sometimes Arabic Weekends and every day after 4pm.

Mostly Arabic and sometimes English Weekends and every day after 3pm.

English and very rarely Arabic Weekends and every day after 6pm.

Mostly Arabic and sometimes English Weekends and every day after 5pm.

Some of the time English and the children are reading in Arabic

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Although the families speak more than two languages, Arabic and English dominate within the home for communication, reading, and watching television. In the interviews, families said that they use YouTube and other online platforms (video streaming, game sites, Arabic satellite TV sites) to access Arabic language online. The main reason behind using YouTube was for children to learn “Arabic in a fun way because they can’t do that here with us or on Saturdays [at Arabic school]” (VF1). In particular, the mothers in F1 (Zainab), F3 (Fatima), and F4 (Reem) said they watched “Karazah” channel because of its creative and high-quality content. Reem (F4) says that YouTube plays an important role in allowing her and her children to access Arabic media and digital content because she could not otherwise afford to install Arabic satellite TV. Technology and Arabic digital content therefore become a lifeline for HL learning for the families (Said, 2021b). The use of technology presents an opportunity for the family to learn Arabic and to maintain a relationship with extended family members. Zainab says, “Youtube is a real life saver, you know sometimes, if I feel the teacher did not teach something well, I try to look on Youtube for a better way of explaining, I have not been disappointed so far” (VF1). The attendance of Saturday schools, the watching of cartoons and other content online and on satellite TV, as well as communication through digital devices with relatives bolster the children’s and parents’ use of Arabic. These language practices or behaviors are created within each family system and each member plays a role in modifying and maintaining them until they come to define the families. Mothers in these families have established language-specific behaviors and the family adheres to these, Reem says, “before I never trusted the internet, but my friend had at the time taught her sons to read Arabic using Youtube. I said, ‘hey, I can do that too’ and I did, and they were great they went along with it” (Reem, VF4). The family is an open system (Becvar and Becvar 2013), and the mother was influenced by her friend to introduce new behavior within her system. The issue of which Arabic to teach was a theme that emerged (see below on how themes were extracted), parents were asked in the second interview, “which Arabic are you trying to teach? FuSHa (Classic/Qur’anic) or Spoken?” This question surprised some; Reem (F4) and Zainab (F1) both said they had not given much thought to the distinction but assumed that they wanted to teach both. The schools and the internet helped them, they said, in teaching Classic Arabic, but then they questioned their own abilities. “I am not sure how much my own ‘ammiyah (spoken Arabic) is useful to them, like to do I speak enough to them, right?” (V2F1). Reem felt that in reality her children would “maybe be stronger in their FuSHa (Classic) because between work, school, Saturday school and other things I have to do, I cannot see myself sitting down and, I don’t know, making them speak to me in Libyan [Arabic]” (V2F2). After this interview, Reem informed the researcher that she was planning on introducing

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time on weekend evenings to speak to the children in Libyan Arabic and was thinking that perhaps exploring Libyan vlogs on YouTube may be useful. Reem’s drive is to constantly be “my best self ” (V2F4), her motivation, and FLP is based mainly on her family situation and how she views herself as a mother. Anisa (F2) said that for her it was just the “FuSHa (Classic) because let’s get real we are never gonna speak proper Arabic, like my own house like, yeah, so we are just gonna not ignore Josh, we will speak both I guess, but with some like Arabic there because that’s important for them” (V2F2). Anisa’s interlingual marriage and Reem’s single-parent status means that their FLPs are designed and motivated by their individual family configurations and not based on religious or cultural expectations.

EMERGING THEMES Once the transcripts were completed for the interviews, the researcher conducted a four-step thematic review process (Clarke and Braun 2013), which included the following: (1) read through all the data and made notes on themes as well as incorporated notes from the first interview; (2) generated initial codes; (3) generated themes based on the numerous codes already identified in step 2; and (4) themes were reviewed and finalized through linking them to current themes in other studies in the literature and on the second interviews. Several themes emerged from the data: language as commodity, language as symbolism, emotion and language, mothers and mental health, and good parenting. For this chapter, the theme of family and motherhood as sacred is explored.

DIVINELY ORDAINED MOTHERHOOD The importance of the family unit was a theme that emerged throughout the datasets in this project. The family and the family home are sacred in Arab culture (Naber 2018; Abudi 2011; Khater 2011), whereby each man and woman are responsible for their family and its welfare. This is a core value that encompasses motherhood, childrearing practices, rules related to the home and all those who fall within the realm of “family.” Examples from interviews show how mothers, in particular, make a connection between language learning and motherhood. Zainab (VF1) says, It is very hard work to teach Arabic … but it’s my duty that’s the way we do things it’s the mother she’s the queen … there is a hadeeth [sayings of the Prophet Muhammad], you know it I am sure … that “each of you is a shepherd and each shepherd is responsible for his flock” … so the way I understand that and really the meaning is that I have to be responsible for my babies … hehe my flock, I need to feed them, clothe them, take care of

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their health and mental [sic] too … and teach them Arabic … it has to be to me … ummm … that is the way only really I think … you know like a good shepherd does … does it make sense? The core value of family is presented here with the ethnotheory that the mother is at the center of it, “she’s the queen” and is expected to take responsibility for her family and with that their HL learning. Zainab writes the same idea in one of her early diary entries, “I’m a shepherd and I need to ensure that these kids have the best chance at life as their Mama so language is one of those chances” (F1D03), the overemphasis of her role as leader of her flock is repeated again in the final interview. She says, “Yeah, you see? I tried everything to give them Arabic, no way can they stray we are doing this together and I think I have good leadership skills” (V2F1). The affirmative response was to a comment I made, “It seems you work hard for the children to learn Arabic.” Again, her use of “stray” is in relation to the metaphor of herself as a shepherd and her children as her flock who are susceptible to straying unless they are guided by her. Reem (F4) equally makes some mention about the value of a “good mother.” She explains, In the family the mother is everything, I need to push myself, even though it is hard, a good mother she works hard to look after the kids and I need to take care of their learning of Arabic, a good mother does these things, like a good mother dresses and feeds the kids, I look after their school and particularly their Arabic, God will ask me—what did you do? (VF4) The notion of “good mother” is a statement that Reem repeats again and again in the interviews and in the diary entries. Her motivator for teaching Arabic is to “prove I can do it” (VF4) because she feels judged and viewed as “not enough” (VF4) for her children by some members of her family because she is divorced. By teaching the children Arabic, she says she will pass on the language “single-handedly” (VF4) and be able to be a good mother. Religion is also a motivator for Reem when she refers to being asked by “God” about her motherly duties. Close analysis of Reem’s responses reveal, however, that although religion does play a role, there is another motivator at play that serves as an even stronger motivation; the idea that as a single parent she cannot be seen to have failed. In this sense, Reem’s family system dictates how she translates her role as mother and what responsibilities she attributes as part of motherhood. The pressures single mothers undergo are well-documented (e.g., Klett-Davies 2016; Millar et al 2012); perhaps, the reference to religion simply contextualizes how she already positioned herself as a single mother.

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Additionally, Anisa (F2) views that family is the key to my stability, they are my anchor and I need to look after the girls offer them all the right things in life, things I did not get … I push for Arabic because it is hard and I think if I start now they will find it easier, Josh can’t do it and so I need to step up (VF2). She adds, “I am the mother they are an amaanah (trust) on my rugbah (neck) and what will I say about it? That I didn’t have time to raise them well? That I didn’t have time to teach them Arabic?” The theme of religion is conjured up again directly and subtly here and bound to ordained duties of a mother. The expression “a trust on my neck” is like the English “a millstone around one’s neck,” an idea that is said to have originated in the Bible (Mt. 18:5). The metaphor describes the heavy burden an individual is made to carry and that if they do not fulfil that burden, they will be destroyed with the very weight of it around their neck. In Arab culture, something around one’s neck is a heavy responsibility and is usually employed to mean such a duty was God given, with the carrier subject to the highest levels of accountability. This is Anisa’s view of her duty as mother especially where she equated raising the children “well” with teaching “them Arabic,” it is as if the two are synonymous and interchangeable. This core value and ethnotheory of viewing the mother as the center of the entity of the family is “singled out for special attention because [as a core value it] provides the indispensable link between the group’s cultural and social systems” (Smolicz 1981) and in this case their family systems. There is a focus on the learning of Arabic more than that of English, even for F3 residing in Saudi Arabia. Families ensure (as Table 11.2 above shows) that they have books and digital and television access to the Arabic language. Fogle (2013: 99) underlines that these ethnotheories in fact “involve discourses engrained in parents’ own socialization and histories, discourses appropriated from public sources such as expert or medical advice, and discourses that develop within the family among family members as ways to explain day-to-day processes and emerging identities.” These beliefs are cultivated over time and each mother draws upon specific facets of the ethnotheories upon which they depend to gauge how well they are enacting their motherly duties. Though the mothers bind motherhood to teaching Arabic and in turn to religious duty, Fatima (F3) does not. She instead outlines that “for me … and in our culture … ya’nee almilla [I mean the culture]it’s the family it all begins with the family and ends with it … it’s hard to do all these things but my life is nothing without them, I need to make sure they get everything it is my duty” (VF3). When asked what language had to do with her feelings of family and why she introduced the topic in the interview when the conversation was simply about language in the home, she said after a long pause, “Well … it’s…

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it’s… it’s … because my being a mother means that I have to take care that they get accepted in their society and Arabic means they will get accepted and they will know what is what” (VF3). Fatima’s idea is that if her children speak Arabic, they will be accepted by their fellow Saudis when they return to Saudi Arabia. Fatima has taken responsibility for language teaching issues related to her children and attributes that to the cultural expectation of what the mother should do. Sociocultural issues, and not religion, sets the standards of what falls within the remit of duties for her as a mother. The amount of time spent together (see Table 11.2 above) creates families that cultivate good relationships with one another (Gavazzi 2011). One expression that was highlighted in the analysis was the “we do such and such” or “we will go to such and such”; the emphasis on “we” to refer to events conducted as a family was used throughout discussions with the families. Mothers did not differentiate between themselves and the children, the reference to family is always in the unitary whole. These expressions echo similar findings in Kramer-Sadlik’s (2013: 229) work on how families spent time together in her longitudinal study of modern families in the United States. She notes that in the Italian families there “is no corresponding idiom in the Italian language for the English term family time” (emphasis in original). Although, in Arabic family time can be formed as an expression, it is not traditionally used to mean a time the family spends together, as it would in English. In Arab culture, like in the Italian example, spending time with the family is natural and therefore expected; hence it is not viewed as an event that requires planning. In FST theory, families who spend extensive amounts of time together are viewed as more interconnected than those who do not; hence any issues that may arise affecting the members would be better managed by the system compared to those families that do not invest in spending time together. Enquiry into family dynamics and relationships is important because in previous research (see Said and Hua 2019) it was argued that perhaps a strong family bond has a role to play in successful language maintenance of a HL. The core values and ethnotheories of what it means to be a mother and how the mother positions herself in the family system highly influence how mothers enact their parental duties. By considering the role of language transmitter as part of the mother’s duty, the women here are also inadvertently gendering the above role to be that solely of women. In the final interview I asked Muhannad (F1), why Zainab takes all the responsibility for HL teaching, he said, “I try to help and I buy books or offer to help with Saturday school homework, so I do perform my bit, I support her” (V2F1). As he finished Zainab added, “Yes, but sometimes I think if I do it, I will know in my head they get it and besides I read more Arabic than Muhannad” (V2F1). It is the positioning she has chosen for herself that drives her highly involved parenting style for HL transmission and management of how the children acquire Arabic. She justifies

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this need to be in control of HL transmission by claiming more competency in Arabic than Muhannad. New research on parental involvement in children’s education during Covid-19 emergency remote learning uncovered that mothers more than fathers were disproportionately involved in ensuring children continued to receive their education (McLaren et al. 2020). It may also be that this disproportionate burden is a result of parental ethnotheories based on the roles mothers in particular think they should carry out in order to fulfil their roles of motherhood (see Said, Jaafarawi, and Dillon 2021). FST proposes that families establish circles of behaviour that are bidirectional in nature. “The child’s behavior leads to the parents’ and the parents’ behavior leads to the child’s, in a circular fashion. Thus, a systems approach asks: what circles are happening in this family? Are there behaviors that lead back to themselves?” (Bavelas and Segal 1982: 90). During data analysis, I asked: what circles are happening in this family? Are there language practices that lead to other language practices that lead back to themselves? Here, parents implicitly reward behavior by facilitating spaces and times that create possibilities for such behavior to continue, for example, the provision of digital resources that support the learning of Arabic or the creation of a small home library to support HL literacy. The interactional data demonstrated that children speak Arabic, which is prized, and parents reward that behavior explicitly and implicitly, thus creating a circular motion of behavior that repeats and replicates overtime leaving an indelible impact on children’s experience with their HL. This was true in families 1, 2, and 4. The other mundane circular motions of behavior here are the instances in which mothers make time to complete Arabic homework with their children or to watch Arabic content and then praise children for engaging in such activities—all of which reinforce the use and learning of the HL. Children come to understand that their behavior is pleasing to parents and garners praise which in turn encourages them to continue to complete their work or spend time with parents watching Arabic content. The result then is that, at least in their younger years, children learn the HL because the learning and use of it become ingrained in the family system practices. In FLP terms, families then become distinct from one another based on whether and to what extent they use the HL within their home space. In relation to the role children play in these families, based on the data, it would appear that they adhere to their mothers’ planning and organization of HL activities. There seems to be an absence of explicit resistance in the data by the children to engage in Arabic learning. But this may be because of the young age range of children in the families. The mothers in this dataset centered their experiences as mothers and as transmitters or facilitators for the learning of the Arabic language and therefore children’s experiences were not accounted for.

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CONCLUSION The chapter has not only introduced data on what the underrepresented Arabic-speaking multilingual families think about and manage their languages, but it has also highlighted the influence core values or ethnotheories and family structures, as systems, have on the formation of FLPs. Adopting a worldview that enmeshes FST and FLP, illustrated that agency is an expected action of every individual regardless of age, rank, seniority, or experience in language. Second, that outside influences play a role in shaping family behavioral patterns, including those related to FLP. Extending our understanding of the inner workings of a family from the lens of FST has aided this chapter in better understanding the notion of family as a system and how the specific contexts of Arabic-speaking multilingual families contribute to our understanding of FLP formation. Significantly, the chapter has exemplified the delicate relationship between how family configurations, parental language ideologies, religion, gender, ethnotheories, and core values simultaneously intersect and mutually and bidirectionally inform one another to create distinct FLPs. Religion does play a role in influencing cultural ethnotheories about parental duties which include the transmission of Arabic. However, to assert that parents transmit Arabic to their children solely because of the liturgical status of Arabic is simplistic and does not do justice to the unique context of Arabic or to the complex contexts of the families. This is a subtle yet important finding that was absent from previous studies on Arabic language FLP studies. The chapter touched upon the complexity of Arabic language management for Arabic-speaking multilingual families. On the one hand, Arabic is the language of Islam and on the other it is the language of a people. The diglossic nature of Arabic (see Ferguson 1959; Fishman 1991), whereby it has two roles that of the formal (Classic and Modern Standard Arabic for religion and literature) and informal (Spoken Arabic for everyday use), means that families naturally feel the need to teach both language types. The situation is somewhat challenging with parents increasingly finding it difficult to achieve the acquisition of both English and Arabic (formal and informal) at similar levels. These parents are, by default, acutely aware of their FLPs and their associated ideologies by virtue of speaking Arabic—a diglossic language. Further work is needed to understand how diglossia, ethnotheories, and religion play into FLP and what children themselves think of their HL learning of Arabic. It is hoped this chapter made way toward such a discovery.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

“I Want to Maximize the Benefit for My Children”: Marriage Migrant Families’ Strategic Family Language Policy and Practice in South Korea BONG-GI SOHN

INTRODUCTION This study presents the ways in which foreign mothers in South Korea (henceforth Korea) who belong to a new type of intercultural/interethnic damunhwa (multicultural) family, which consists of a Korean man married to a foreign woman, articulate a neoliberal ideology about their own language(s). Although the Korean government has enthusiastically designed a multicultural and multilingual family language policy (FLP) for the integration of damunhwa families, there has been a lack of support for family multilingualism (Park 2019; Kim and Kim 2015). Instead, the language of damunhwa mothers is selectively

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promoted based on what is viewed as profitable and valuable for advancing Korean interests (Sohn 2018; Sohn and Kang 2021), which is as part of a topdown mandate facilitated by the government. Contrary to what is promoted by the Korean government, recent work on FLP (King, Fogle, and Logan-Terry 2008; Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018; Higgins 2019, Zhu, and Li 2016) highlights that “family is not self-contained, closed off to other social institutions and economic conditions” (Canagarajah 2008: 173), and family alone cannot nurture multilingual speakers. Such discussion provides understanding of “the complex relationship between family language practice and the wider sociocultural and sociopolitical forces” (Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018: 126), thereby highlighting the culturally, politically, and economically specific nature of FLP (Fogle 2013). These insights are highly relevant to the discussion on the emergence of neoliberal management of FLP, which intersects with state policy and practice on the language of immigrant families. Presenting an ethnographic case of multilingual and multicultural families in Korea inspired by Bakhtin’s chronotope understanding (Blommaert 2015) and families as a neoliberal agent (Curdt-Christiansen and Huang 2020), I first show how the first language (L1) of minoritized families, particularly damunhwa mothers, is commodified under a highly gendered and instrumentalized stateled language policy. I also demonstrate how damunhwa mothers cannot successfully practice their FLPs due to entangled chronotope conditions, demonstrating divergent identities of damunhwa mothers and their children.

NEOLIBERALISM, CHRONOTOPE, AND FLP As neoliberal economic policies and systems have “stressed the opening of markets, … the privatization of the public services sector, and the commodification and capitalization of biological life” (Reddy 2005: 103), the role of the individual and the family have been heightened rather than expansion of the welfare state (Harvey 2005). As market fundamentalism has spread, individuals have needed to become self-reliant because the state’s capacity to achieve security and welfare for its citizens is reduced. The neoliberal subject embodies ideal agency in the logic of market fundamentalism, which expects the individual to become a rational, calculating, and risk-taking entrepreneur who participates in the market freely and takes full responsibility in cases of economic loss. The individual is also a rationally informed consumer who enjoys the diverse choice of goods and services that the market offers (Inoue 2007). This neoliberal governmentality infiltrates the everyday lives of individuals and families. Yet, further complexity should be taken into consideration when discussing FLP. The idea of the chronotope, the literal translation of timespace introduced by Bakhtin (1981), allows an understanding of the complex and often contingent

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and shifting nature of minority/immigrant families’ FLPs, not only responding to but also shaping language policy and practices. Blommaert (2015: 111) explains that “a particular timespace triggers ordered complex attributions that defines the plot (what can happen and how), the actors (who can act and how), the moral or political normative universes involved …, the trajectories of plot and character development, and the resulting effects.” Thus, chronotopes of damunhwa mothers invoke particular characters and identities in narrative, configurating narratives of here-now and there-then in which their social and political worlds and actions are continuously negotiated and understood in culturally and socially specific ways. The idea that the chronotope enables or constrains character development (Woolard 2013) is key to FLP analysis, specifically for damunwha mothers. In its vision of what these mothers’ lives would entail, the Korean government expected them first to become Korean wives and mothers and then to slowly transform into bilingual mothers and workers (Sohn 2018). Yet, there are other identities that damunwha mothers could create, which are tied to their specific family timespace configurations that trigger alternative roles, codes of conduct, and criteria for judging behaviors (Blommaert and De Fina 2017). These roles may or may not be aligned with what is expected from them. In other words, individuals make linguistic choices that are compelling and relevant in specific timespace conditions, which the government does not recognize. The idea of the chronotope thus serves as a framework for understanding how particular timespace conditions affect how mothers are expected to act and behave as well as how they are perceived and vice versa.

THE “MARRYING OFF SINGLE FARMERS PROJECT” IN KOREA: DAMUNWHA FAMILIES Due to globalization and migration, there has been a surge in international marriages in Korea, made possible by domestic politics and economic conditions. In the early 1990s, Korea experienced a shortage of women available for marriage in rural areas. Due to the expediting of industrialization and urbanization since the 1960s, the population of rural areas in Korea had become low, male-gendered, and aged (Kim 2014), with more single men than single women. One attempt to solve this was to encourage a higher birthrate through international and interethnic marriages. In the late 1980s to early 1990s, several farming leaders began to arrange marriages between Korean men and Korean-Chinese women from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Although Korean-Chinese1 have not always been positively viewed in Korea— as they are seen both as brethren and second-class foreigners (Oh 2014)— they were welcomed in this case, as they were recognized as having a similar phenotype, culture, and language. The arranged marriages were initiated

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by local ministries, and Korean men who participated were provided with a subsidy of approximately CAD $2,000–8,000. This subsidy would cover most of their marriage costs (M. Kim 2014). The project was called the “marrying off single farmers project.” This practice has been severely criticized by a number of Korean scholars because the foreign woman is seen as a commodity, and thus the marriages facilitate human trafficking and human rights violation issues (A. E. Kim 2009). Nonetheless, the number of international marriages grew rapidly, at its highest constituting 13.6 percent of total marriages in 2005 (Statistics Korea 2020). Among the population of marriage migrants in 2017, 83.8 percent were female. They immigrated from 193 countries. Between 2009 and 2019, the largest proportion came from the PRC (49–57 percent) 27–32 percent of whom were Korean-Chinese and 22–7 percent Chinese. There were also international marriage migrants from Vietnam (22–7 percent), Japan (4–9 percent), and the Philippines (5–8 percent; Korea Immigration Service 2009, 2020). Over the years, there have been burgeoning hostilities toward these marriage migrants, as they are seen as members of “inferior” ethnic groups from Southeast Asia who will threaten the “superior, holy, collective” identities of Koreans (M. O. Kang 2015). Although the damunwha family has been highly stigmatized in Korea (M. Kim 2014; Lee, Kim, and Lee 2015), in recognition of increasing diversity, the government started to respond to the demographic changes that these new family formations created. From the mid-2000s, the Korean government began to create multicultural policies for these families, yet they were developed from an assimilative and deficit perspective in which damunhwa families were portrayed as being in need of governmental support. In 2012, the government reframed these families within a neoliberal perspective and began to acknowledge damunwha families as active agents who contribute to Korean society with their multilingual capital (Kang and Sohn 2016). The mothers and children were then seen as multilingual human resources who not only solved the population decrease but were human resources who proudly bridged between the mother’s country and Korea (Ministry of Education [MOE] 2012).

STATE-LED FAMILY LANGUAGE POLICY FOR DAMUNWHA FAMILY While a shift toward neoliberal values has taken place with regard to damunwha families, research on these families thus far has been limited to the negative effects of the state-led language policy and assimilative discourses that devalue the linguistic and cultural resources of foreign wives (Han and Price 2015; Lee, Kim, and Lee 2015; Park 2017; 2019). It has been shown that damunwha

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children are pressured to assimilate into the dominant culture and that they have limited opportunities to develop their bilingual identities (M. Kim and T.-Y. Kim 2015; J. Shin 2019a). Even though there is a neoliberal framing of these families’ multilingualism, previous studies have focused on how monolingual FLPs still prevail in the home, without fully taking into consideration how the ever-changing top-down mandates are handled in families. Furthermore, there are growing voices that promote bilingualism in Korea (Jang 2012). Often, this promotion is guided by “resource” perspectives, elevating it into a national resource to enable Korea to be more competitive in the global economy (Sohn and Kang 2021; J. Shin 2019b). Nevertheless, family bilingualism is treated in a tokenistic manner and left behind, while the notion of treating language as a resource remains to coincide with “selling” the language of the Others (Petrovic 2005, Sohn 2018). An outcome of the neoliberal shift in perspective toward damunwha families is that their languages are supported outside the home through government resources. Several L1s of damunhwa mothers (e.g., Mandarin, Japanese, English) whose languages are viewed as valuable to Koreans are offered outside of the home context in a limited manner and taught by other damunhwa mothers. Multicultural Family Support Centers, which provide various social supports for damunhwa families, offer two hours of language classes per week, which is not sufficient for damunwha children to develop their home languages and bilingual identities. In addition, not all heritage languages are taught. Mandarin is one of the languages that is most widely taught nationwide in the Multicultural Family Support Centers (103 programs in 217 centers), while other languages, such as Vietnamese, Thai, Russian, Tagalog, Cambodian, Mongolian, and Nepali, are scarcely represented (Ministry of Gender Equality and Family [MGEF] 2013). In particular, although Vietnamese is the second most common language in damunwha families, only thirty-two support centers offered Vietnamese at the time of writing (MGEF 2013). A child whose mother is Vietnamese may learn Mandarin while being pressured to be fluent in Korean. In the K–12 system, there are no universal provisions to support languages other than Korean as part of the national curriculum. Until 2016, there was an assumption that “children will naturally acquire their mother’s L1” (MOE 2006: 18), with little discussion of how FLPs such as one-parent one-language policies (OPOL) can be practiced in the family. In 2014, MGEF (2014) created a new bilingual position called a “bilingual coach” and asked acculturated damunhwa mothers who were fluent in two languages to mentor other damunhwa families to nurture bilingual environment at home. This is another neoliberal reframing of FLP in which the policy commissions acculturated damunhwa mothers to educate other women like them in efforts to socialize this population into bilingual national resources. It also indicates how the government facilitates the transformation of bilingual

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damunhwa mothers into national service workers, ultimately appropriating them into good citizens who will assist with converting damunhwa families into human resources that will proudly bridge between the mother’s country and Korea.2 Thus, the government has little desire to nurture damunhwa mothers’ L1s in families but does so with the bilingual coaches and also in community centers favoring a few languages that are seen as providing cultural and economic capital. The L1s of all damunhwa mothers are therefore not being viewed as emerging heritage languages that might better tie them to the community and create a sense of belonging. Under such conditions, the mothers are left to manage two languages (Korean and their L1) in the family, which not only exacerbates the application of Korean-only FLPs at home (Han and Price 2015: Lee, Kim, and Lee 2015; Park 2017; 2019) but also instrumentalizes bilingual FLP. As the neoliberal discourse puts an emphasis on individual responsibility to accumulate the skills needed to survive, damunhwa mothers become major neoliberal subjects by maximizing opportunities for their children’s social mobility. Although many studies on Korean FLP have focused on middle-class Korean families’ strategic language investment, intergenerational gendered projects such as jogi yuhak (H. Shin 2016; Song 2012; 2018) and kirogi families (H. Lee 2010; Y. Kang 2012) are examples of Korean FLPs facilitated by neoliberal ideologies (H. Shin and J. S.-Y. Park 2016). Damunwha mothers who live in Korea cannot be separated from social discourse conditions, particularly when they were seen as the primary caregivers (Lee, Kim, and Lee 2015). Furthermore, it is important to note that the FLPs of damunwha mothers are not static but chronotopically evolve as they become more experienced members of their host society and continuously negotiate their transnational identities with various people, including their families, friends, and communities. With these points taken into consideration, it is important to examine how damunwha mothers articulate a neoliberal ideology about their own languages for their children in their narrations of chronotope conditions.

METHODOLOGY This study is an extension of a larger ethnographic study (Sohn 2018) examining the family language socialization of damunhwa mothers in contrast with the national-level language policy designed for damunhwa mothers in Korea. In this study, I examine how two focal damunhwa mothers—from Japan and China— whose L1s are valued for their usefulness to Korea’s international prosperity make sense of their families’ FLPs. Although the government-designed FLP does not endeavor to support damunhwa families in nurturing family multilingualism, the participating damunhwa mothers may have socialized themselves and their families in different ways from what the national policy suggests. In addition,

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FLP is timespace sensitive, meaning that damunhwa mothers are envisioned to become wives but also mothers, workers, and other identities. With these considerations in mind, I investigate three guiding questions: 1. How do damunhwa mothers state their views and perspectives on their L1s for their children? In other words, do they make sense of their language(s) as resources, rights, or problems? 2. How does the concept of a chronotope illuminate the mothers’ desired FLPs, and why? 3. How do families make decisions about FLPs by referencing the larger forces of neoliberalism and report how their stated FLPs shape their lives? Data were collected through interviews (Briggs 2007; Holstein and Gubrium 2004), following ethnographic principles (Green, Skukauskaite, and Baker 2012). Through the perspectives of chronotope (Blommaert 2015) and the interview as a co-constructed narrative (Talmy 2010; 2011), I present how damunhwa mothers described their family home language policies and practices and what facilitated or hindered the implementation of their desired FLP. To do so, I focus on what influenced each participant to implement an FLP with her children and how she made sense of mother-child multilingual socialization trajectories between Korea and the mothers’ countries of origin. Through this, I present the ways in which damunhwa mothers figure their pasts, presents, and futures as multilingual mothers by echoing discourses of neoliberalism in FLP (Song 2018; Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018) combined with linguistic nationalism that selectively promotes the value of female marriage migrants’ linguistic and cultural capital. The analysis focuses on what the participants said during the interview rather than how they said it. However, this does not mean that it disregards the importance of narrative in action (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012) in interviews. While I acknowledge that their narrative accounts are performative and co-constructed, the centrality of the analysis is what they report during the interview. I treated interviews as accounts, which were derived from a constructionist methodological orientation (Briggs 2007; Holstein and Gubrium 2004). This means that the reported stories in interviews are not seen as facts but as social practices (Talmy 2010; 2011). In other words, the interviews are not a transparent window into participants’ inner states; they are inherently co-constructed by the participants and me. Acknowledging coproduction of stories in the research interview, I limit the scope of the analysis to content (Clarke and Kitzinger 2004; Braun and Clarke 2006), focusing on the timespace themes of the stories that contrasted with the government’s vision of damunhwa mothers. The interviews were conducted in Korean, transcribed into Hangeul (the Korean writing system), and translated to English. I present the participants’

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accounts both in Korean and English to make their stories accessible to Korean readers. The English translation was verified by others who use English as an L1. In my translation, I aimed to maintain the meaning between Korean and English as closely as possible.

RESEARCH CONTEXT AND PARTICIPANTS Nabi City, located in Wooju Province (pseudonym), was selected for this study because of its demographics, size, and multicultural population ratio. In addition, it is a rural region that is heavily affected by international marriages.3 Most areas in Wooju Province rely on small-scale agriculture (Y. Lee et al. 2013). Among the international marriage migrants in Wooju Province, the greatest numbers were from Vietnam (43.9 percent), followed by the PRC (23.4 percent) and the Philippines (15.5 percent; Y. Lee et al. 2013). There is also a small group of Japanese marriage migrants brought in via a marriage initiative coordinated by the Unification Church between the mid-1990s and early 2000s. The two damunhwa mothers were chosen to reflect different countries of origin whose L1s are viewed as valuable resources but who have different attitudes toward language and FLP practices: Bosam Hwang from the PRC and Michiko Watanabe from Japan.4 They were also chosen because they came to Korea in the early period of international marriages (the early 2000s). The participants were in their early to mid-30s at the time of the interviews. They had each received a college/university education in their country of origin. Yet, they were the prototypical early international marriage migrants who moved to rural areas for marriage. Both participants had been married more than ten years. Bosam Hwang, a Korean-Chinese woman who grew up in China, migrated to Korea in 2001 and married a Korean man in Nabi City. Bosam reported that she grew up in the northwest part of the PRC, and her dominant language was Korean. She said she used Korean in her hometown and as the medium of instruction in her school, which many Korean-Chinese attended. Yet, she regularly used Mandarin in the busier parts of her town. After her migration to Korea, she most frequently used Korean. She said her brother and parents also moved to Korea, which is indicative of the Korean-Chinese mass exodus after the PRC and Korea established diplomatic ties in 1992 (J. W. Kang 2012). Yet, as I mentioned earlier, Korean-Chinese people occupy a complex position in Korean society. Bosam said she tended to expose her Korean-Chinese identity only selectively and presented an aspiration that her two children (Minjung: grade 3; Minsoo: grade 1) become full members of Korean society. Seeing a growing interest in learning Mandarin as a foreign language in Korea, Bosam carefully exposed her bilingual identity where it would be valued (e.g., sending her younger child to a Mandarin after-school program) and refrained from overseeing her children’s Mandarin development. Since a few months

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before the interview, she had been working as a Mandarin instructor at a community center in Nabi City that offered after-school programs. I interviewed her twice; first in Minjung’s school, then at her home, and maintained the relationship after the study was completed. Michiko Watanabe came from Japan in the early 2000s via a marriage initiated by the Unification Church and reported hardships of living in rural Korea with her indifferent Korean husband. Upon arrival, she became busy raising two children and learning Korean in a sink-or-swim situation. Recounting this experience, Michiko portrayed her life in Korea as quite demanding and explained how her difficult transnational experiences influenced her to become a dedicated Japanese language teacher to her children (Jungwoo: grade 4; Jungmin: grade 3). Despite tensions between Korea and Japan due to different interpretations of the Japanese colonial invasion, Japanese has been a widely learned foreign language and enjoys status for accessing higher education, pop culture, and commerce (Kubota 2015). She said that as compensation for her hardship, she wanted her children to become successful Korean-Japanese bilinguals. She said that she maintained a Japanese-only policy at home using a one-parent one-language (OPOL) policy and she said her children know basic Japanese. Michiko had taught Japanese in various foreign language programs: at a private language institution, in after-school programs, and at community centers. At the time of the interview, Michiko had received bilingual teacher training and was about to teach Japanese for a semester in various elementary after-school programs in Nabi City. I interviewed her once in her children’s school and periodically chatted with her after that.

FINDINGS Michiko reported using an OPOL policy at home, under which she used Japanese exclusively with her children. On the other hand, Bosam addressed her redistribution of mother as language provider to other Mandarin-speaking damunhwa mothers and reported that Mandarin was scarcely used in her own family. To help understand these different practices, I draw specific attention to how these women’s chronotopes led to divergent practices of multilingual socialization of their children. Using a particular timespace frame (i.e., herenow, there-future), I next discuss Michiko’s and Bosam’s stories of their past, present, and future. “I Want to Maximize the Benefit for My Children”: Bilingualism as a Resource for Children’s Future-Here and Future-There Mobility When Michiko entered South Korea in 2000, she said she learned Korean by herself; her husband did not help her after she arrived (September 17, 2012).

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While they did not have any shared language, Michiko reported that she looked up words in a Japanese-Korean dictionary to communicate with her husband. Her husband made little effort to have mutual language learning exchanges, Michiko said. One of the salient themes in Michiko’s promotion of her L1 is related to her children’s future. For example, in explaining how her maintenance of her Japanese nationality allowed her children to obtain flexible dual citizenship, Michiko told me the importance of teaching Japanese to her children: “because of their higher education. [When they apply for a] university, [they] have the benefit of entering a Japanese university as a foreigner or as a Japanese person in Korea. So I intentionally teach Japanese” (그, 대학교 때문에요. 대학교에 그, 일본 대학교에 외국인으로 들어가거나, 한국에서 일본사람으로 들어가거나. 그런 혜택 있으니까, 일부러 일본어도 가르치고; September 17, 2012). In addition, Michiko reported that even if her children had poor academic performance in their school and were not eligible to access the possibilities she described, there would still be a way for them to use Japanese: “Even if [they are] bad at school, [they] can go [to a university] via [their] Japanese language. If they like Japan, they can go to Japan. This is a big benefit [and they] must take full advantage [of this opportunity]” (공부 못 하더라도. 일본어로 갈 수가 있고, 어 뭐 일본 좋다라고 하면 일본에 가도 되고. 네, 이런 좋을 점을 최대 이용해야 되니까; September 17, 2012). In addition to incorporating an OPOL policy at home, she said she had sent her children to a Japanese public school in Japan for a short-term early study abroad where she grew up, mobilizing her transnational networks and knowledge to socialize her children into Japanese-Korean. Michiko presented how transmitting her cultural attributes (e.g., nationality and language) to her children might enable her to achieve self-realization through them. She related her hardships to her marriage and residence in Korea, stating, “Through my enduring hardship by coming to Korea … As a return [I]‌want to maximize the benefit [for my children], Yes. That’s why I’m doing it” (제가 한국에 와서 고생하는 … 대신으로 좋은 점을 최대 이용하고 싶어서, 음. 그렇게 하는 거예요; September 17, 2012). By describing these future possibilities presented by the transnational context between Korea and Japan, Michiko emphasized that her role as an L2 teacher was critical for her children’s access to future social and economic mobility as they flexibly became either Korean or Japanese. Thus, Michiko’s Japanese identities—as a citizen and as a Japanese language user—were valuable for her and her children. “There Is No Time”: Accounts of the Here-Now Condition Although Michiko stated that she strived for her children to be bilingual, she raised a concern regarding her role as mother and the major source for her children’s L2 development under an OPOL policy. Describing the family’s

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here-now sociolinguistic condition, Michiko claimed that there was little spare time for her children to learn Japanese. She said, “When [the children] return from school, it’s evening. As soon as [they] get home from school, [I]‌can’t make [them] start studying [immediately]. And there is homework. Well, there is no time” (학교갔다 와서 오면은, 뭐 저녁이잖아요. 집으로 오자마자 공부 시키지도 못하죠. 숙제도 있죠. 거 시간이 없어요; September 17, 2012). Listing the kinds of school-related activities that her children did after they returned home from school, Michiko said her children’s school-related activities were “the biggest problem” that prevented her from teaching them Japanese. This quote illustrates the multiple conditions that her children have to navigate, enabling us to understand how the mundane activities of school-aged Korean children circumvented the family’s furthering of the OPOL in Michiko’s home. “What They Need to Know Is Korean”: Adhering to Here-Now and Here-Future Conditions Unlike Michiko, Bosam refused to teach her children Mandarin. Instead, she chose to manage her children’s education. Bosam said that her entire family moved to Korea at the time of her marriage and suggested that her children were bound for monolingual social lives and identities in Korea. For example, when I asked Bosam to rank the languages surrounding her children—Korean, English, and Mandarin—using directive markers, such as here and there, Bosam provided a hierarchical structure of languages based on social, economic, and political relations and how such particular timespace conditions might have different implications for her children’s multilingual socialization. First, indicating territory-bounded language and identity relations, Bosam stated, “If [they] are planning to live here, basically what [they] need to know is Korean” (뭐 여기서 살려면 이제 기본적으로 알아야 하는 건 한국어고; September 7, 2012). Then, she described English as a transnational language that can be used without territorial restriction. Finally, Bosam contrasted Mandarin with English and stated, “China hasn’t yet gone this far. But in the future when China gets developed, and since there is so much possibility for [China’s] development, [I]‌think it will be necessary to learn Mandarin” (중국은 아직꺼지는 그거는 안 되잖아요. 근데 앞으로 발전하면은 중국, 앞으로 발전 가능성이 있기 때문에 중국어도 배워야 한다고 생각; September 7, 2012). Therefore, the formulation of a particular linguistic chronotope—Koreanhere-now, English-worldwide-now, and Mandarin-not-yet-but-future—allowed Bosam to envision a particular language-learning trajectory for her children. The stated here-now sociolinguistic condition contributed to the reification of Korea as a monolingual society and justified Bosam’s children’s monolingual socialization. Bosam’s reporting of English being used in transnational contexts might have implications for her promotion of English to her children. Finally,

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Bosam’s statement that the PRC had not yet reached global power but had potential to do so suggests a promise to teach Mandarin to her children. Her emphasis on Korean socialization may have had implications for her identity as a Korean-Chinese person that would not necessarily be positive in Korea. Bosam mentioned that some of her Korean-Chinese friends had discussed the possibility of sending their children to their hometown so they could become bilingual like their mothers. Disagreeing with her friends’ discussion of developing early study-abroad strategies for their children, Bosam stated, “Because basically [they] need to know Korean history. If [they] are not planning to live there [PRC] permanently, [they] need to know more about history over here” (왜냐하면은 기본적으로 한국인 역사도 알아야 되고, 뭐: 어차피 거기서 막 눌러 앉고 뭐 살 저거 아니면은, 여기 역사를 더 잘 알아야 하니까요; September 7, 2012). Through presenting different transnational contexts, Bosam formulated divergent generational identities. Indicating the characteristics of here (Korea) and there (the PRC), Bosam presented how different chronotopic conditions would allow for different transnational experiences and identities for her children. She continued that if the children were likely to live in the PRC as Chinese, they should be learning Mandarin. However, if they were to live in Korea, learning Korean culture and practices should, in her opinion, take precedence over the children becoming bilingual. By presenting one languageone culture with here-now and here-future possibility, Bosam presented her aspiration for her children to become Korean rather than Chinese. “I Tell My Younger Kid to Learn Mandarin in the Center”: Mandarin as an Extracurricular Activity Although Bosam refused to be a Mandarin teacher for her children, this does not mean that she completely neglected the emerging power of the PRC, which has also affected language education in Korea. She said, “Mandarin is, compared to the past, it is a bit of a trend” (뭐 중국도 또 뭐 이제 옛날에 비해서요, 요즘에는 또 약간 또 추세잖아요, September 7, 2012). Bosam continued to articulate, “Nowadays China is so big. Their economic size is so [big] that they have so much potential for development, foreseeing far into the future. So [Koreans] tend to learn [Mandarin]” (이제 중국도 워낙 크다보니까 이제 뭐 이제 또 이제 경제 뭐 경제 규모같은 것이 있어서 대게 발전이 있어서 이제 먼 미래를 봐서는 배우는 저거 있고; September 7, 2012). In this regard, although Bosam did not present herself as the main L2 instructor for her direct family’s L2 development, she told me stories of how her younger child, Minsu, was learning Mandarin at the Nabi City Multicultural Family Support Center near her house. Yet, Bosam discussed how she pursued L2 learning for her children differently based on their grade levels. Bosam described Minsu as a younger student who had not entered the academically

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intensive grades, whereas Minjung, “she is in a higher grade, she needs to focus on academic stuff” (큰얘같은 경우에는 지금 고학년이다 보니까 학업것을 중요히 생각해야 할 것 같아서; September 7, 2012), which kept Minjung from learning Mandarin. Then, Bosam listed Minsu’s conditions: “And the little one is just in Grade 1, it is the period for playing, [his school] finishes early and there is a Mandarin class right after school” (근데 짝은 얘들은 지금 막 1학년이고 하니까, 노는 시기고, 그래서 여유있게 끝나고 바로 타임에 중국어가 있어요. 수업이; September 7, 2012), thereby indicating Mandarin as a form of play and Mandarin class as a time-filler for the younger child. Bosam did not present herself as the main Mandarin-Korean language provider but rather as an educational manager of her children. In response to the various characteristics of her children, Mandarin as a trend herenow, and the availability of the Multicultural Family Support Center, Bosam organized different activities for each child, providing different here-now L2 learning environments for Minsu and Minjung. Fashioning Mandarin as less important than the school curriculum, Bosam said Minsu was freer to play or study Mandarin as a form of leisure, while Minjung was more consumed with academic success due to the Korean educational system. Bosam also described the particular chronotopic conditions of Minsu and the welfare center that enabled Minsu to learn Mandarin. Mandarin had only recently become available at the time of the interview, as part of a government policy change. She presented the Mandarin class as one of the younger child’s extracurricular activities, and her narrative also highlighted that the program was available to Minsu’s after school. When I asked about Minjung’s and Minsu’s degrees of Mandarin proficiency, Bosam told me, “Minsu knows more [than Minjung] things like greetings. Since he learned it in his class. … If the older one asks, [I]‌sometimes teach [her], [but I] sometimes say ‘Ah! I don’t know’ ” (인사 뭐 그런거 민수는 좀 더 알아요 왜냐면 배웠기 때문에… . 큰얘는 뭐 뭐야뭐야 하면은 가르쳐 줄 때도 있고… . 뭐야 하면 “아 몰라” 그럴때도 있고; September 7, 2012). Bosam’s children may have been heading toward different multilingual socialization outcomes. Although Bosam continued to not fully embrace herself as the main linguistic expert for her children and trivialized Mandarin in relation to her children’s academic development, the affordance of the language program available to Minsu in accordance with Mandarin as a trend here-now condition offers some possibility of heritage language learning and/or maintenance without Bosam’s full parental involvement.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION This study demonstrates how damunhwa mothers, whose L1s are viewed as valuable commodities, navigated their identities as bilingual teachers for their

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children under the highly neoliberal conditions of Korea, which extend beyond traditional responsibilities for childrearing and domestic work. Although the Korean government has enthusiastically developed a state-level bilingual FLP for a new type of intercultural/interethnic damunhwa family, and this type of FLP is key for nurturing multilingualism in Korea, by comparison, the government has neglected family plurilingualism and other roles (e.g., language user other than Korean for their children, mothers as bilingual teachers). In these conditions of a state-driven, nationalistic FLP in which heritage language development is undervalued, damunhwa mothers in the rural cities, who have limited resources and opportunities, have to be selective about what they do for their children. The limited material and ideological affordances for intergenerational language transmission in these families have produced neoliberal subjects whose FLPs are guided by a globalized bilingual future. Michiko’s promotion of her children’s L2 development was presented as, to some extent, instrumental—an opportunity and potential—enabling her children’s upward social mobility and transnational Korean-Japanese identities. By creating flexible Korean-Japanese identities for hereand/or there-future possibilities, Michiko’s story highlighted the degree to which she needed to endure her here-past and here-now hardships to be the main source for her children’s bilingual development. This, in return, serves as a self-realization as a good, wise bilingual mother. For this reason, she actively incorporated OPOL and short-term study abroad. Nonetheless, she encountered difficulty when her children’s here-now conditions contradicted her stated aspiration, which limited her capacity to raise her children as full-fledged bilinguals. On the other hand, Bosam’s FLP can be seen as a rejection of an ascribed identity as a bilingual teacher for her children as well as an aspiration to raise them as Koreans rather than Korean-Chinese. By framing a Korean-herenow and Korean-here-future, she rejected the possibility for her children to become Korean-Chinese who could potentially be seen as second citizens in Korea. Instead, she emphasized the importance of her children obtaining full membership in Korean society through learning Korean language and culture. Nevertheless, she acknowledged that she did not overlook the growing possibility of the PRC and the government-funded Mandarin program in Nabi City. She showed ways in which she encouraged her younger child to learn Mandarin in the hope of preparing him for a Mandarin-not-yet-but-future possibility, but his study of Mandarin was limited to an extracurricular activity. In this way, Bosam may have been aligning with what the government implicitly envisioned for Korean children who were not damunhwa children, raising her child as a Korean child who was learning Mandarin as a foreign language. The mothers’ stories illustrate their efforts to do the best they could under the neoliberal and nationalistic state-led bilingual family policy, so that their children could go beyond their parents’ social standing. While the mothers’ L1s

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were presented as the language of the future, their stories indicate how their L1s clashed with their children’s here-now sociolinguistic conditions that did not impact the family’s immediate life. Under the entangled constellation of chronotopic conditions, damunhwa families are bound to produce marketable bilingual identities that conform to neoliberal ideologies about languages. This upward-mobility-oriented discourse dependent on the mother’s labor could diminish what heritage languages mean for families, including their immediate here-now situations. For these reasons, it is important to pay attention to grassroots actions where heritage language development of damunhwa families is supported by more ecological, reflective, and gender-sensitive approaches to bilingual education (e.g., Higgins 2019; Lanza and Li 2016; Li 2012). These may include online spaces, friendship networks, and informal gatherings. These spaces may plausibly reconceptualize the promises of heritage languages in Korea, opening possibilities to explore what bilingual identity and multilingual development mean for damunhwa families, particularly in here-now conditions. Acknowledging multilingual practices as a here-now condition could also impact the ways in which people understand the diverse linguistic resources and translingual practices circulating in the country, which continues to inscribe monolingualism. Developing a more nuanced understanding of the current sociolinguistic conditions of globalized countries will promote changes in thinking about multilingualism and the marginalization of heritage languages and their speakers, not only in Korea but beyond.

NOTES 1 At the end of the Chosun dynasty, around 1890, there was a Korean diaspora to northern China, near the Korea-China border. After Korea achieved independence from Japan, Korea was divided into two independent governments—North and South Korea—due to different political views. Because of North Korea’s communist ideological structure, it became a close ally to the PRC. Consequently, many Koreans living in the PRC could not return to South Korea and instead faced difficult and economically harsh conditions as they settled in the PRC and assimilated into their new home (The Academy of Korean Studies 2010). 2 The Korean Institute for Healthy Family (2017), a government agency which is under MGEF, documented how many deliverables that the bilingual coaches have completed but little is reported as to what languages are encouraged. 3 As international marriage became popularized in Korea, it extended to others such as urban, working-class Korean men living in Seoul or other metropolitan cities (Seol, H.-K. Lee, and Cho 2006). 4 The pseudonyms were assigned to reflect as closely as possible the national identities expressed in the names participants used in their daily life.

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Ministry of Education (2012), Damunhwahaksaeng gyoyuk seonjinhwa bangan balpyo [Announcement of Advancement Plan for Multicultural Student Education], Seoul, South Korea: Ministry of Education. Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (2013), “Damunhwagajogjiwonsenteo tongbeon-yeogjeondam-inlyeog mich ijung-eon-eogangsa baechihyeonhwang” [“The Report of Bilingual Translation and Interpretation Staffs and Bilingual Instructors in the Multicultural Families Support Center”], Seoul, South Korea: Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. http://www.mogef.go.kr/mp/pcd/mp_pcd_s001d. do;jsessionid=L-wzbHR2whwIpI+7q16ezvls.mogef20?mid=plc503&bb tSn=693020. Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. (2014, January 15). “Gugmin daetonghab-eul wihan damunhwagajogjeongchaeg gaeseonbang-an balpyo: Jeongbu 3.0 jeongbogong-yulo damunhwasa-eob jungbog·bihyoyul eobsaenda” [“Announcement of Improvement Plan for Multicultural Family Policy for National Unification: Eliminate Duplication and Inefficiency in Multicultural Family Policy through Government 3.0 Information Sharing”] [Press release]. Seoul, South Korea: Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. http://www.mogef. go.kr/nw/enw/nw_enw_s001d.do;jsessionid=+QcXrkKP3qKGBZ7STY6KGi8s. mogef11?mid=mda700&bbtSn=703667. Oh, K. H. (2014), “Tjungguk joseonjokt iju damnone natanan diaseuporaui samgwa jeongcheseong” [“Life and Identity of Diaspora Appeared in Discourses of Korean Chinese (Joseonjok)’s immigration”], Journal of Multicultural Society, 7(1): 35–61. Park, M. Y. (2017), “Resisting Linguistic and Ethnic Marginalization: Voices of Southeast Asian Marriage-Migrant Women in Korea,” Language and Intercultural Communication, 17(2): 118–34. Park, M. Y. (2019), “Challenges of Maintaining the Mother’s Language: MarriageMigrants and Their Mixed-Heritage Children in South Korea,” Language and Education, 33(5): 431–44. Petrovic, J. E. (2005), “The Conservative Restoration and Neoliberal Defenses of Bilingual Education,” Language Policy, 4(4): 395–416. Reddy, C. (2005), “Asian Diasporas, Neoliberalism, and Family: Reviewing the Case for Homosexual Asylum in the Context of Family Rights,” Social Text, 23(3–4): 101–19. Seol, D.-H., Lee, H.-K. and Cho, S.-N. (2006), Gyeolhon-iminja gajogsiltaejosa mich jungjang-gi jiwonjeongchaegbang-an yeongu [Marriage-Based Immigrants and Their Families in Korea: Current Status and Policy Measures] (2006–55), Seoul, Korea: Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Shin, H. (2016), “Language ‘Skills’ and the Neoliberal English Education Industry,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(5): 509–22. Shin, H., and Park, J. S.-Y. (2016), “Researching Language and Neoliberalism,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(5): 443–52. Shin, J. (2019a), “Ways of Living in the Context of Globalization: How South Korean Minority Adolescents Construct Their Identities,” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2019(164): 83–98. Shin, J. (2019b), “The Vortex of Multiculturalism in South Korea: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Characterization of ‘Multicultural Children’ in Three Newspapers,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 16(1): 61–81. Sohn, B.-G. (2018), “From Language Learners to Bilingual Providers: Second Language Socialization of Bilingual Mothers in South Korea,” PhD thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

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Sohn, B.-G., and Kang, M. (2021), “ ‘We Contribute to the Development of South Korea’: Bilingual Womanhood and Politics of Bilingual Policy in South Korea,” Multilingua, 40(2): 175–98. Song, J. (2012), “The Struggle Over Class, Identity, and Language: A Case Study of South Korean Transnational Families,” Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16(2): 201–17. Song, J. (2018), “English Just Is Not Enough!: Neoliberalism, Class, and Children’s Study Abroad among Korean Families,” System, 73: 80–8. Statistics Korea (2020), “Guggabyeol gugjegyeolhon geonsu 2000–2019” [“The Number of International Marriage Per Country 2000–2019”], Daejeon, South Korea: Korea National Statistical Office. Available online: http://bit.ly/2gfIHsP. Talmy, S. (2010), “Qualitative Interviews in Applied Linguistics: From Research Instrument to Social Practice,” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 30(1): 128–48. Talmy, S. (2011), “The Interview as Collaborative Achievement: Interaction, Identity, and Ideology in a Speech Event,” Applied Linguistics, 32(1): 25–42. The Academy of Korean Studies (2010), Encyclopedia of Korean Culture. Available online: http://encykorea.aks.ac.kr. Woolard, K. A. (2013), “Is the Personal Political? Chronotopes and Changing Stances toward Catalan Language and Identity,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(2): 210–24. Zhu, H., and Li, W. (2016), “Transnational Experience, Aspiration and Family Language Policy,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 655–66.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Coloniality and Family Language Policy in an African Multilingual Family CAROLYN MCKINNEY AND BABALWAYASHE MOLATE

INTRODUCTION Indigenous multilingualism (Garcia and Lin 2018) where children grow up with two or more languages is the norm in many contexts across the world, especially in countries in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Yet there are relatively few studies of early language socialization and family language policy (FLP) in such contexts. For families where parents, though both long-standing citizens, come from different minoritized language backgrounds and where the language practices of the home differ from that of schooling, language choices are often complex and entangled with relations of power. As CurdtChristiansen and Lanza (2018) point out, what languages to use in such multilingual homes and in raising children is a central concern of FLP. They also point out that FLP is a “critical domain for multilingual development, language maintenance and cultural continuity” (128). As our research will show, this is certainly the case in South Africa where a former Colonial language (English) is firmly entrenched as the only “legitimate language”

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(Bourdieu 1977) in high status domains, and where the languages spoken by the majority of citizens have become minoritized. The history of colonization and apartheid have produced particular language hierarchies which have profound consequences for family multilingualism and language choices. This chapter presents a case study of the intersection of language ideologies, language socialization practices and strategies for family language management (Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza, 2018) in a middle-class African multilingual family in South Africa. We aim to expand the field of FLP with our focus on multilingual families in a postcolonial context where the languages of the majority have become minoritized, and where children born postapartheid are experiencing different language in education policies from their parents. We use the theorizing of de/coloniality to understand the language ideologies shaping FLP in our case study family. South Africa is a linguistically diverse country with official constitutional recognition of eleven languages: Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu, English, and Afrikaans. During apartheid, extensive resources were poured into enabling the Dutch derived creole Afrikaans to be used in high status domains such as schools, universities, parliament and the legal system. Language was also used as a powerful tool to divide African people into ethnolinguistic groups, each segregated into distinct geographical areas and schools. “Bantu” Education was provided initially through the nine Indigenous languages in primary schooling followed by a switch to English and Afrikaans language of instruction in high school. Despite the attempts to divide Black people on ethnolinguistic grounds, multilingualism amongst South Africans is common. Apart from Indigenous multilingualism, all children are expected to learn at least two languages at school, one of which must be English. Given its dominant role in education, it’s not surprising that research on language ideologies of Black middle-class parents as well as in previously white schools shows how English is often exclusively valued as a language of learning and mobility (Makoe 2014; Dixon and Peake 2008; McKinney et al 2015). Some have argued that the choices of Black middle-class parents to send their children to English medium previously White schools is leading to language shift (De Klerk 2000; Kamwangamalu 2003a; 2003b). While children growing up in “townships,” residential areas historically constructed for Black people on the periphery of towns and cities, will be immersed in African languages on a daily basis, this is not the case for Black middle-class families who have moved to the more affluent, previously White suburbs.1 Through our case study family, we aim to shed light on the dynamics of language, race, and social class in multilingual middle-class South African families. We begin by reviewing some of the recent FLP literature in relation to our own research focus, paying particular attention to language dynamics in

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postcolonial contexts of Indigenous multilingualism. We will provide a brief overview of the relationship between coloniality, language ideologies, and multilingualism in Africa which have enabled the minoritizing of languages spoken by numerical majorities and the continuation of monolingual language ideologies into the present in South Africa. Not only has coloniality shaped the current status of languages and elite versus Indigenous multilingualism but it also contributes to the normative view of family as two parents and their offspring living together in one home. We then outline our methodological approach before presenting data from our case study of a multilingual Black family residing in an affluent suburb in the Western Cape province of South Africa. The Ngxanga2 immediate family includes two parents in professional careers—Mma (mother), born into a Tswana family in the North West province, and Tata (father), born from a Xhosa family in the Eastern Cape province. They have two daughters, Viwe (six years) and Bontle (eleven years), both attending English-medium schools in the previously White suburb in which they live. There has been a relative burgeoning of research in FLP recently as evidenced by the number of journal special issues on the topic, including Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (2016), Multilingua (2018), and International Journal of Multilingualism (2018). Amongst other themes, attention has been paid to contexts of trilingualism and multilingualism (King and Fogle 2017), transnational migration and families (Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018; Zu Hua and Li Wei 2016), heritage languages and language revitalization (e.g., Higgins 2019) and Indigenous multilingualism in Singapore and Malaysia (Dumanig et al. 2013; Lim 2009; Curdt-Christiansen 2016). Issues of language and power are often foregrounded, for example, in tensions over the status of “College Hawaiian” over Hawaiian used by community elders (Higgins 2019), and the role of language in education policy in shaping parental decisions about family language use, such as the emphasis on English in Singapore (Curdt-Christians 2016). South Africa provides an opportunity to expand FLP research to contexts where Indigenous multilingualism is the norm, yet monolingual competence in an autochthonous language, English, has higher status. Our case study family follows the linguistic norm where bilingualism and multilingualism are well established, as is evident in the three named languages of Setswana, isiXhosa, and English included in their linguistic repertoire. The analysis will show that while multilingualism in South Africa is Indigenous rather than a consequence of transnational mobility and migration, mobility across regions within the country contributes to sustaining multilingualism. We will also show how the entanglements of language, identity, and power are central to understanding FLP decisions and strategies for the Ngxangas.

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COLONIALITY, LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES, AND MULTILINGUALISM Maldonado-Torres (2007) describes coloniality as that which “survives colonialism,” the multiple and entangled power relations of superiority and inferiority established under colonialism that continue to produce unequal relations of power globally and locally. Ideologies which align European languages and whiteness with superiority and intellectual ability, while Indigenous multilingualism is perceived as a “linguistic jumble” are a consequence of coloniality and the continuing colonial matrix of power (Mignolo 2007) in the present. In South Africa, as in most other postcolonial contexts, hierarchies of language and culture are crucial aspects of the colonial matrix of power (wa Thiongo 1986). Canagarajah (2008) draws attention to the importance of colonial history in Sri Lanka for understanding the current valorization of English over other linguistic resources. In many cases, this leads to the denigration of Tamil in the Sri Lankan diaspora where the use of Tamil in transnational families has declined significantly over a single generation. He quotes a grandfather explaining the relatively swift loss of heritage language among the Tamil diaspora in the West to be a consequence of learning, through the experience of British colonization, that only English would provide material benefits and access to elite education. Colonization has not only impacted on the valorization of English over local languages but also the normativity of monolingualism (Phillipson 1994; Garcia and Lin 2018). Garcia and Lin (2018) argue that colonization has shaped current understandings of multilingualism in significant ways. They contrast elite bi/multilingualism aligned with proficiency in European languages with the “indigenous multilingualism” characteristic of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific regions precolonially to the present. The multilingual origins of English itself were suppressed with English constructed as the language of the powerful and educated. The monolingual use of English was contrasted with what was constructed as “a linguistic jumble associated with confused, colonized people” (81) and local multilingualism was contrasted with “authoritative literate multilingualism” or “learned multilingualism” “established as the ability to especially read European languages from different nation states, and, of course, Latin and Greek” (81). The underlying ideology of orality as primitive and literacy as advanced constructed by Great Divide theories and debunked in literacy studies (Prinsloo and Baynham 2013) is also present in the construction of elite multilingualism aligned with written European languages. Related to this, Garcia and Lin (2018) draw our attention to the racialized nature of elite versus Indigenous multilingualisms. While “authoritative literate multilingualism” was “reserved for white elite Europeans,” low status “indigenous multilingualism” was associated with “brown and black populations” (81).

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A further language ideology inherited from colonization is the construction of named languages as autonomous, bounded objects. In Southern Africa, scholars such as Makoni (1998) and Makalela (2019) draw attention to the colonial invention of Indigenous languages as a product of missionary interventions. There is also continuity between the nine named Indigenous languages used by the apartheid state to impose ethnolinguistic identities on Black people in a divide and rule strategy, and the Indigenous languages that, alongside English and Afrikaans, are currently recognized as official languages in South Africa. Makalela (2019) points out that as in many other postcolonial contexts, the multilingual/heteroglossic and translingual language practices which predate colonialism in Southern Africa emphasize the fluidity and porous nature of language boundaries. Using the concept of ubuntu translanguaging, Makalela (2019) argues that in contexts of Indigenous multilingualism “languages are interwoven in a system of infinite dependent relations that recognise no boundaries between them” (238) and emphasizes that “one language is incomplete without the other” (240). However, the legacy of colonial language ideologies which position fluid languaging as inferior continue to devalue this Indigenous multilingualism (Garcia and Lin 2018). The colonial language ideologies which valorize English, monolingualism, and “authoritative literate multilingualism” play out in South Africa with significant consequences for FLP. We have the continuing exclusive privileging of a European language and script in postapartheid South Africa, where English is the home language of less than 10 percent while the majority of the population are multilingual in African languages. Multilingualism is racialized with White South Africans more likely to be bilingual in English and Afrikaans while Black South Africans more likely to be multilingual in African languages. Proficiency and literate practices in particular forms of “standard” English are often equated with being educated and with intelligence (Makoe and McKinney 2014). The dominant language ideology can be described as Anglonormativity: “the expectation that people will be and should be proficient in English and are deficient, even deviant, if they are not” (McKinney 2017: 80). Like multilingualism, Anglonormativity is also often racialized with varieties of English and the phonological features of “White South African English” valorized over Black South African English in which the phonology is influenced by Indigenous African languages (McKinney 2013). Anglonormativity ensures that from year four onwards the language of instruction in schools is limited to English (and in a small number of schools Afrikaans), regardless of children’s and teachers’ proficiency in the language. Higher education is also provided almost exclusively through English (with a small number of programs available in Afrikaans). In the previously White and well-resourced fee-collecting schools in the wealthier suburbs, schooling

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is provided exclusively in English (or Afrikaans) from preschool. Children admitted to these schools are thus expected to arrive at school proficient in English, regardless of their home background.

FAMILIES IN SOUTH AFRICA Some time ago, Siqwana-Ndulo (1998) pointed out that in family sociology, African family systems have been largely neglected. She critiqued as “Western” the perspective that a family refers to a “conjugal” pair and their children (biological or adopted) living in one household, while members beyond this unit are referred to as “extended” family. The notion of “extended family” reinforces a norm of “nuclear” family consisting of two parents and their children (415) and as such can be seen as a colonial construct. More than twenty years later, the term extended family is still used to refer to kin relationships beyond two parents and their children. Drawing on the findings of the World Family Map Project, Hall and Richter (2018) show that changing dynamics in families worldwide can also be seen in South Africa in the case of diverse household forms, decrease in marriage, and increase in femaleheaded households. However South African families (along with neighbouring Namibia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, and Lesotho) are identified as unusual in the World Family Map Project in that children are not likely to live in a two-parent home. The “nuclear” family is thus not the norm. Also unusual in relation to world family trends are “dual housing arrangements” where “families have two homes and members oscillate between cities and rural areas” (Hall and Richter 2018: 25) Such dual housing arrangements have a long history in South Africa linked to the migrant labor system during apartheid which separated men from their partners/wives and families, who remained in the rural areas while men worked as migrant laborers in the city. Many women also leave their children in the care of grandparents in rural areas, traveling to the city for work. Dual housing arrangements point to the reality of more than one home/physical space as the site for family language socialization and family language management strategies in South African families. Our own case study family is atypical locally in that the two young girls do live with their mother and father in a major city. However, as we will show, the children also move between the mother’s rural home, the father’s rural home, and their Cape Town home, all three of these being geographically distant from each other and linked to different language resources. In this regard of having multiple homes as sites of family language socialization, our case study is similar to Coetzee’s (2018) research on the language socialization of two infant boys born to adolescent mothers in the Western Cape, South Africa. While spending more time with their mothers, like the children in our study, the boys move between the mothers’ and fathers’ multigenerational homes.

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METHODOLOGY Our data is drawn from an ethnographic case study of an African family residing in an affluent suburb in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Taking an ethnographic approach is useful in describing the ways different social groups take and make meaning from the environment (Heath 1982: 74). Through ethnography, social patterns can be observed and interpreted more comprehensively. We undertook Linguistic Ethnography (LE) as both a methodological and interpretive approach. LE views language as communicative action that functions in social context in ongoing routines of people’s lives. It examines how people use language as well as the narratives presented about wider social constraints, structures and ideologies (Copland and Creese 2015: 27). Significantly, LE enables an analysis of how structures and ideologies at the seemingly “macro-level” are constructed and reproduced within “microinteractions.” Data was collected in two sites, the suburban family home and the younger daughter, six-year-old Viwe’s, school over the period of a month. Tools of data collection included audio-recorded interviews, naturally occurring conversations audio-recorded by the parents, language body portraits (Busch 2012) and a discussion around these which was also audio-recorded, as well as observations captured in field notes. All interviews were conducted by author Babalwayashe Molate whose heritage language is the same as Tata’s, and who shared the linguistic repertoire of the family. While the interview questions were prepared and even asked in English, family members were free to use any of the three family languages, which the interviewer comprehended fully. The interpretation and analysis of interviews was done in conjunction with insights gained from fieldnotes and observation of language and literacy practices of the family and of Viwe’s school days.

DATA ANALYSIS The case study centered on the younger daughter, Viwe’s, language experiences as she traversed the home and the school domains; the home as a multilingual space and the school as an Anglonormative space. Viwe attended the reception year (Grade R which is the year preceding formal schooling in Grade 1) of an English medium school in the suburb in which she lived. Her older sister Bontle (eleven years) attended a different English medium school also located in the same suburb. The parents reported deliberately placing their children in different schools based on the unique offering of each school to suit each child’s interests and needs; one is an inclusive school while the other follows a traditional approach with a keen focus on sports. The family currently resides in Cape Town. The parents originally moved to Cape Town for their university study and have stayed, moving to a previously White,

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TABLE 13.1  Ngxanga Family Language Resources Names

Reported home language

Language portraits repertoires

Spoken language during observations

Rural family home

Mother

Mma

Setswana

Father3

Tata

isiXhosa

Setswana, isiXhosa, English isiXhosa, Setswana, English

Setswana, isiXhosa, English isiXhosa, English

Focal Child (6)

Viwe

isiXhosa

isiXhosa, Setswana, English, Sign Language

English

Taung, North West province (Setswana) Engcobo, Eastern Cape province (isiXhosa) Maternal (Taung)

isiXhosa, Setswana, English

English, isiXhosa

Sibling (11)

Bontle

isiXhosa

Paternal (Engcobo) Maternal (Taung) Paternal (Engcobo)

middle-class suburb when their children were born. Table 13.1 above provides an overview of the family homes and named language resources reported and observed in the family. Although the family’s collective linguistic repertoire can be characterized as heteroglossic and trilingual, Viwe’s repertoire was observed to be dominated by English, as evidenced in her spoken language at home and school.

LANGUAGE REPERTOIRES AND “HOME LANGUAGE” As presented in Table 13.1, the Ngxangas are characterized as trilingual through the three named languages shown. We also present excerpts that evidence their heteroglossic language practices later in this chapter. But first, we take interest in understanding the family’s sense of language identity, a key component of FLP, amidst the stated multiple languages.4 In the Excerpt 13.1 below, the interviewer engages the parents on the subject through inquiring about the children’s language identity, considering that the parents are in a cross-ethnic marriage. We note that in the data excerpts included in this chapter only the resources of isiXhosa and English are used. In an attempt to represent the unified way in which participants use their linguistic resources, we have chosen not to differentiate named languages through fonts.

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Excerpt 13.1. What is your home language? Interviewer Mma Interviewer Mma Interviewer Mma Interviewer Mma Interviewer Tata Mma

Interviewer Mma

Tata Interviewer Tata Interviewer Tata Interviewer Tata

Interviewer

Uhm tell me what would you say uh your kids’ home language is uh if you had to tick a form? We’ve seen-// Well because of the way we were raised (hm) and the kids normally take the father’s side Okay Ja in that way sisiXhosa [Yes, in that way it is isiXhosa] So Xhosa because the surname is alsooo?// Whoa even if the surname was something else, but it’s… ja [yes] Okay Ja [yes] //(indistinct)// //(indistinct)// Yijonge apha baby [come search for it here baby] (turning away to speak to Tata about something he was looking for), but uhm if in all honesty, they speak English more than any other language (hm) ja but obviously efomini sizothi sithetha isiXhosa thina apha kulo mzi [ja but obviously in the form5 we will say we speak isiXhosa here in this house] Okay, why do you, why do you say isiXhosa? Because we are only given one choice and they know Xhosa more than uhm isiTswana (hm) because if it was Tswana more than isiXhosa so then I would say Tswananyana there (hm) maybe but then heh! (laughs) because of like I said the way we were raised I think it’s actually it’s actually funny because// I think I think for me to answer that question I don’t even think about it sisiXhosa [it is isiXhosa] Okay? So so so it doesn’t mean if ilanguage awuyithethi [you don’t speak a language]// Ayoyakho [it’s not yours]// If I was born in Kenya or wherever neh (hm) or I went there and now isiXhosa andisasazi [I don’t know isiXhosa] (hm) at all (hm) my home language still remains (hm) what home is (hm) Okay? So// So so now it comes back to that context abethetha ngayo uba uh uh uh it’s almost linked to nationality if if if uhm uh.,, if your father is Irish you’ll always be Irish so if utata wakho ngumXhosa uzosoloko ungumXhosa therefore nehome language yakho izakuba sisiXhosa [so if your father is Xhosa you will always be Xhosa and your home language will be isiXhosa] Nokuba awusithethi [Even if you don’t speak it]

From the onset, the way that the researcher’s question is framed exposes both her use of the monolingual ideology of single home language and her discomfort with this ideology when she qualifies her question with the add-on: “if you had to tick a form.” This shows her critique of her own question as an artificial one. Firstly, to enquire about one’s language identity in singular, “your kids’ home

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language” is to assume that there is only one language that the said people identify with. The question is premised on a monoglossic ideology, which we have argued aligns with a colonial idealization of language. In an attempt to get a direct answer, the second part of her question, “uh if you had to tick a form?”, further compels the interviewee to conceptualize home language identity as a single named language, an ideology that Mma is likely accustomed to, having completed school enrolment forms for Bontle and Viwe. This is the norm across schools and is shaped by the provincial department’s requirement that schools report on the home language (singular) of their students. The way the researcher has asked the question about filling a form shows her cognizance that this question is less about actual language practices and more about people being forced to produce an answer in completing bureaucratic processes like formfilling. Interestingly, Mma finds no difficulty in offering a response initially, which might be attributed to this practice she has been socialized into. Repeatedly, she refers to the “way” she was raised and how that “way” dictates that isiXhosa as their father’s language becomes the children’s home language, affording no status or power to the mother’s heritage language, Setswana. Seemingly, this “way” that Mma is talking about, as a culture that she has been socialized into, not only assigns monolingual identity but shows the patriarchal norm in language identity. More confident in his response than Mma, Tata sees the matter of home language identity as settled; that the child’s “mother tongue” is isiXhosa, despite his spouse’s heritage language being Setswana. While the parents admit that English clearly dominates Viwe’s language use, Tata maintains that language competency in a said language does not determine one’s linguistic identity. That is, the fact that their children, particularly Viwe, are seemingly more fluent in English than one of their heritage languages does not disqualify them from claiming isiXhosa home language identity. In Rampton’s (1990) terms, Viwe can claim both affiliation and inheritance in relation to isiXhosa. Tata’s example of the Kenyan and Irish father supports this. Also, in his example about the Irish dad, he reiterates Mma’s earlier sentiments about being socialized into a paternal heritage identity, hence his confident declaration of their children’s home language being isiXhosa. This is akin to Singaporean families in Wee’s (2002: 285) study where linguistic ownership is based on the father’s ethnicity. While ethnicity as a marker of language identity can be attributed to the apartheid construction of ethnicity (Nongogo 2007:3), families’ loyalties and affiliation to their heritage languages cannot be ignored. Thus, in an African context and with the predominance of families showing heteroglossia like the Ngxangas, there are opportunities to expand and reimagine the notion of home language, or “mother tongue.” A “bi/multilingual” identity could be the new “mother tongue” (as also posited by Laszznyak 1996, cited in Erdei 2010: 6) in families where language identity reflects not ethnicity but current language repertoires (including colonial languages) and where

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languages are acquired simultaneously. And, this is particularly relevant in urban Black families who send their children to former White schools and as a result are assigned an English home language identity through the school’s de facto policy. We would argue that in families like the Ngxangas, in practice, English is part of their language identity—thus, a multilingual identity.

ENTANGLEMENT OF SCHOOL AND FLP As previous studies of FLP have shown, at the core of language socialization are language ideologies—the beliefs, values, and cultural frames people have about language, which continually circulate in society and inform language use (Makoe and McKinney 2014: 659). Language ideologies are reflected in the family’s language management strategies (Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018: 124), that is, the explicit and/or implicit language strategies in a household, that can be observed through language practices and interviews. In the Excerpt 13.2 below, the researcher sought to understand and have the parents reflect on their decision to move to an area where only English medium schools are available. We pay attention to how the parents distinguish between language for educational purposes and language and identity as well as how language socialization and maintenance of “heritage” languages is designed across multiple family homes and spaces. Excerpt 13.2. Choosing English medium schooling Mma

Interviewer Mma Interviewer Mma

Interviewer Mma Interviewer Mma Tata Mma

For us I don’t think there is any problem cos that’s why we’re trying to we knew that moving here was gonna be was gonna be or exposed them to that I mean (hm) the schools are different and all that (hm) so so I don’t think it’s a concern// The language of the school Ja The fact that it’s English medium school And again we feel that it’s up to us to expose them to what we want so that’s why we took the initiative that uhm every year they either in Taung actually they go to both in a year on both sides so eh uhm June or December they are in Taung or Engcobo, so uh I think it’s the parents’ responsibility to expose the kids to what they want Whatever language? Ja ja // They want them to learn okay fair enough So uhm again I think it makes it easier for them to also socialise with other kids as well who speak different languages (hm-h) so English is just there for them to be able to interact with others and// And and it’s a language of learning which if the schools are teaching in English all the concepts (hm) it is also important to that they in that environment or that they don’t struggle with learning because// Like we did (laughs)

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Mma Tata

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(laughs) about that that eh, cos I think you might have mentioned Ndim [It’s me] Or was it you okay I struggled with English I realised// So then you say so they won’t have those issues they’ll be focusing on content you said Yes Ja Yes yes, so so I think that’s that’s what was important in terms of the choice of school knowing that uh they get the language as early as possible (hm-h) and then and then uh and then at least the learning side will go on (hm-h) it’s just that their identity of who they are now, in order for them to know other languages (hm-h) It’s our responsibility Then then we know that there are not gonna get that at school (hm) like a lot of things that the kids are not gonna learn at school that we have to teach them at home//

ENGLISH FOR LEARNING Mma begins by defending their choice of English medium schools and proceeds to elaborate on how she sees English as being an advantage deliberately chosen for their children. Her emphatic use of the words, “I don’t think there is any problem” and repeated in “I don’t think it’s a concern,” in a single turn indicates the confidence she has in their choice of school. She expresses full consciousness of what language encounter their children would have moving to their current English-speaking residential area. Mma mentions the advantage that English brings in making it easier to socialize with other children who speak different languages. Mma thus sees English as the “lingua franca,” a common language that enables people who do not share the same home language/s to communicate. Tata extends the rationale for their choice of English medium school by pointing out that English “is a language of learning” because schools are teaching “all the concepts in English.” He shows his awareness of the fact that even for children who begin learning in an African language in the early years (Grades 1–3), the medium of instruction will become English through which they have to master all concepts. He emphasizes the need to ensure that the children “don’t struggle” learning concepts in English. The parents’ language histories appear to be central to their valorizing of English. Mma follows on Tata’s statement that the children shouldn’t struggle with English in her comment “like we did” and goes on to describe that she “struggled with English.” In a different discussion, both parents also refer to the challenges they experienced in encountering a monolingual English environment at university,

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having completed their own schooling in multilingual sites. Mma retells of how she battled in an English-medium university: Saying few words nje [just] but it was a a struggle … schoolwork was lagging behind because now I needed to learn English first before I can be able to study what’s in the books … I got totally lost and I was like okay this is rough (mhhh) so I failed my first year. Similarly, although Tata felt supported by his secondary school teacher’s isiXhosa-English translingual teaching strategy, he also believes that it worked to his detriment later on when he encountered his English monolingual tertiary institution, then ke ngoku [now] it’s only now like I say in Pretoria6 I started having to now if I wanted to ask for anything now, now I must speak English which is like even though I have passed matric7 but I’ve never spoken the language at all. Tata and Mma’s concerns are similar to that reported in a Singaporean multilingual family in Curdt-Christiansen’s (2016) research where a father explains the increased use of English at home with their child (to the exclusion of Mandarin and Hokkien) “because we didn’t want him to grow up speaking bad English like us” (701). In another Singaporean family, two young aunts who were both university students emphasized the need for the child to speak English at home rather than Malay because of “the ever-demanding education system in Singapore” (2016: 703). The legacy of colonialism in both Singapore and South Africa ensures that English is perceived as the only language of learning; as Tata says, through their choice of an English medium school “at least the learning side will go on.” Ignoring any possible relationship between identity and learning, Tata explains that while ‘learning’ is taken care of through English, it’s the children’s “identity of who they are now” that is neglected at school.

AFRICAN LANGUAGES FOR IDENTITY Both Mma and Tata express their desire for the children to learn their heritage languages. They also clearly expressed their shared view that the children’s learning of their heritage languages, Setswana and isiXhosa, is their responsibility as parents. Mma states, “It’s the parent’s responsibility … to expose the kids to what they want” and later repeats, “It’s our responsibility” while Tata emphasizes, “They not gonna get that [African languages] at school … we have to teach them at home.” Because the parents recognize English as

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FIGURE 13.1:  Language socialization spaces

valuable based on their own schooling language histories while also seeing the importance of their African languages as an identity marker, they resort to a language policy that creates a binary: African languages as the responsibility of the parents while the school is apportioned responsibility for English. Both parents emphasize two language strategies. One is their choice of an English medium suburban school fulfilling the need for English exposure; and the other being the strategy of sending the children to their hometowns, ensuring that their children get exposed to their African home languages. Mma explains their language management strategy of taking their children to their respective maternal (Setswana speaking in Taung) and paternal (isiXhosa speaking eNgcobo) hometowns during the school holidays with the children spending extended time in both spaces every year: “That’s why we took the initiative that uhm every year they either in Taung actually they go to both in a year on both sides so eh uhm June or December they are in Taung or Engcobo.” As illustrated in Figure 13.1, this expands the sites of family language socialization across three households in different geographical areas with distinct language ecologies. The hierarchical relationship among the three languages in the Ngxanga family is likely to shift across the three different family homes. From our observations as well as what the parents report, in their suburban home in close physical proximity to the school, the use of English is dominant, especially by

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Viwe, the youngest child. In another interview, her parents comment on how Viwe resists their language planning by refusing to respond in the language in which she is addressed. But they also tell of moments where Viwe willingly participates in learning African language. Excerpt 13.3 begins with a retelling of such a moment where Tata deliberately teaches his children about color names in isiXhosa but misses some colors. Excerpt 13.3. But she tries now Tata Interviewer Tata Mma Interviewer Tata Interviewer Tata Interviewer Tata Interviewer Mma Tata Interviewer Mma Interviewer Tata Interviewer Mma

Hm so if for example we did colours and then there’s a colour we didn’t do and she’s like okay what is this colour? then that’s// Iqale kanjalo [That is how it started] Ja but but it’s a deliberate effort (hm) or sometimes say today sithetha [we speak] isiXhosa (hm) (laughs) Who’s the first one to break it between the// L’umncinci [the younger one] L’umncinci [the younger one] (laughs), okay But uyazama [she tries] now cos she ebekade erefus-a [used to refuse] //completely// //Completely// To participate Oh You speak to her in either language she’ll respond in English Uyabona ngokuya bebesiya eNgcobo, ubuye ebalisa ngezitory ngesiXhosa [You see when they went to eNgcobo, she came back telling about stories in isiXhosa] Oh I think it’s the pressure as well cos the others can speak the language and she realises that// Cousins Hm Okay okay // Hm//

Apart from the heritage language maintenance strategy of sending the children to their family homes for language immersion experiences in Taung and eNgcobo, Tata explains they have attempted to make deliberate use of isiXhosa at home at times: “sometimes say today sithetha [we speak] isiXhosa.” While the parents make an effort in the teaching of their African languages, this excerpt reflects that Viwe is an active participant of her language socialization. By asking for a translation of a color term from English to isiXhosa, Viwe is showing an interest in the language, even though she speaks predominantly English and is likely to be the first one to “break the rules” of not speaking the designated language that the family has decided on. Both Mkhize (2016: 45) and Reynolds (2013: 2) attest to children being agentic in opportunities to

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learn but also to resist a language. Tata is quick to recognize the benefits of sending the children to their families in eNgcobo and Taung: “But uyazama [she tries] now cos she ebekade erefus-a [used to refuse] completely … Uyabona ngokuya bebesiya eNgcobo, ubuye ebalisa ngezitory ngesiXhosa [You see when they went to Engcobo, she came back telling about stories in isiXhosa].” Mma shares the same sentiments, and also believes that the company of cousins who more frequently speak Setswana and isiXhosa respectively affords Viwe the necessary pressure to acquire and learn the languages. Unlike the Ngxanga children’s urban language experience, their cousins in the respective rural homes live in communities where isiXhosa or Setswana are used more frequently. Thus, we would argue that the parents’ effort to explicitly teach them African languages and immersing them in African languages via sending them to their rural homes seems to be effective despite the prevailing English dominance in their children’s repertoires. Viwe’s parents report that they leave language support for English to the school. However, this contrasts with their actual language and literacy practices at home which show that they do actively support Viwe’s English development. For example, they buy English storybooks, watch English television programs together, and enable her to speak in English at home relatively unpoliced. In contrast, Mma’s explanation of the children visiting with both isiXhosa and Sestwana speaking families in the school holidays shows her consciousness of this as a deliberate strategy. Mma and Tata thus do not seem to recognize their input in enabling the children’s English language development. What is apparent here is that the development of both English and African languages form part of the Ngxanga family’s language policy. They recognize the need for language maintenance (Cekaite and Kheirkhah 2015: 320) due to their English dominant environment, but also acknowledge their current environment as necessitating a partial language shift towards English. Listening to Mma and Tata’s fluid translanguging using the resources of English and isiXhosa, especially in Excerpts 13.1 and 13.3, it is likely that what is represented as a decision to “thetha isiXhosa (speak isiXhosa)” at certain times will not be restricted to monolingual languaging in isiXhosa. It is thus also important to note that the way that named languages are spoken about across the interviews is at odds with the actual translanguaging practices of Tata and Mma. Monoglossic colonial language ideologies continue to shape the way in which language use is spoken about, even as they are at odds with everyday languaging or language practices.

CONCLUSION The data presented and analyzed in this chapter show the complexity of language practices and language choices in a multilingual middle-class African family

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living in a previously White suburb more than twenty years after apartheid. While apartheid legislation ensured a degree of language separation, at least in the rural homelands, postapartheid opportunities for mobility has increased multilingualism among African language speakers. The girls growing up in this family have a very different language socialization experience from that of their parents. Colonial and apartheid language ideologies continue to shape the positioning of languages and the FLP choices that the parents make for their children. English is unambiguously aligned with education and the language of schooling, while African languages are positioned as significant only for purposes of identity (affiliation and inheritance) (Garcia and Lin 2018). The school is absolved of any responsibility to provide for learning of Indigenous African languages and, at least in Tata’s expressed view, identity is not seen as involved in learning. Our case study expands the focus of FLP research in a number of ways. Firstly, the “family” in our study, and thus the sites of family language socialization, include parents, children, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins across maternal and paternal households; a common feature of South African families (Hall and Richter 2018: Siqwana-Ndulo 1998). Secondly, the legacy of colonialism and apartheid has ensured that the Indigenous African languages of the majority have been minoritized while a former colonial language (English, spoken as “home language” by less than 10 percent of the population) has been entrenched as the language of education and of status. The effect of monolingual English medium in middle-class schools such as that attended by the Ngxanga children is that they have far less exposure to African languages than their parents did, and than their family living in rural areas where unofficial school language practices involve translanguaging across English and African languages. In contrast to the previously White suburb where the Ngxanga’s live, African language practices are normative in rural Engcobo and Taung. In the absence of opportunities to learn and use their heritage languages of Setswana and isiXhosa with peers/children in their schools and suburb, Mma and Tata describe a deliberate strategy to socialize their children together with their cousins and young people in their respective rural homesteads. We argue for more research of FLP in contexts of complex Indigenous multilingualism like this one. Finally, theories of de/coloniality have not been widely used in FLP, despite the continuing impact of colonial language ideologies in postcolonial contexts. We have shown how colonial language ideologies (Garcia and Lin 2018; McKinney 2017) also shape the ways in which named languages are talked about and constructed in research interviews. Rather than monolingual use of named languages, the language practices of Mma and Tata in interviews show the fluidity of their heteroglossic repertoires with frequent translanguaging across and blending of the resources of isiXhosa, Setswana and English.

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Despite the fluidity with which Mma and Tata use language, and the observed “home language” as being a fusion of English, isiXhosa, and Setswana, the monolingual notion of a single home language prevails in Mma and Tata’s reporting of the Ngxanga home language as isiXhosa. The gap between espoused language ideologies and the family’s heteroglossic practices is not only fascinating but also shows the continuing impact of dominant monoglossic ideologies of language as a consequence of coloniality. The language practices and experience of this family show that the expectation for a multilingual to have a single language identity is both narrow and unrealistic. If the power that “culture” has afforded patriarchy in language identity is hypothetically stripped away, and the colonial monoglossic language ideology imposed on multilinguals temporarily suspended, what meaning would the notion of home language/“mother-tongue” identity assume? The notion of home language/ mother tongue is clearly not appropriate for this family whose linguistic repertoire can be viewed as fluid.

NOTES 1 Calculating the size of the middle class is a complex and contested task. The ANC statement in January 2018 reported the Black middle class as 6 million people. The total population in 2018 was estimated at just under 58 million people. 2 Participant names are Pseudonyms. 3 Parents mainly speak isiXhosa and English to each other; they speak a combination of their respective heritage languages and English to their children. 4 In addition to the researchers’ observations, knowledge about the Ngxanga languages was gathered using an information sheet which they completed at the beginning of data collection and later confirmed in interviews and a language portrait activity during the fieldwork period. 5 Referring to Viwe’s school enrolment form where they are asked to fill-in her home language. 6 Pretoria is a major city in the Gauteng province where Tata was unsuccessful in his first year of university before moving to another university in Cape Town. 7 Matric—also known as Grade 12, the final year of school.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Beyond Success and Failure: Intergenerational Language Transmission from within Indigenous Families in Southern Chile MARCO ESPINOZA AND GILLIAN WIGGLESWORTH

INTRODUCTION A view of minority language intergenerational transmission (ILT) outcomes in bilingual families as success and failure is still prevalent in some Family Language Policy (FLP) research, where success equals language maintenance and failure language shift. In line with “recent calls … to question the notion of success in FLP” (Wilson 2020: 175), we engage critically with this type of expert rhetorics (Hill 2002) and its particular logic of expectations especially in relation to Indigenous languages and families (Meek 2011). Thus, besides including families, languages, and contexts so far under researched in FLP, in this chapter we also attempt at diversifying our framing of ILT outcomes beyond family-external norms of success (maintenance) and failure (shift) (Zhu and Li 2016; Hiratsuka and Pennycook 2020; King and Lanza 2019; Lomeu Gomes 2020; Macalister and Mirvahedi 2017; Wilson 2020).

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The families in this study are three Indigenous Chedungun-Spanish bilingual families living in a Pewenche1 community in south Chile. Few FLP studies (Forrest 2017; Gandulfo 2018; Luykx 2003; Pérez Báez 2013; Sichra 2016) have paid attention to Indigenous families in Southern bilingual contexts such as the ones discussed here. Rather, the focus of FLP has shifted in tandem with the new “transnational” and “superdiverse” realities of certain urban centers of the Global North. However, for the Mapuche/Pewenche in Chile, translocality (resulting from the forced permanent and temporal migration from Wallmapu—the Mapuche territories) has been a constant, and by no means new, phenomenon (Antileo 2012; 2014; Bengoa 1996) in some instances lived as diaspora (Antileo 2014) and transnationality (Cienfuegos 2018). The fact that these communities can no longer be seen as necessarily bounded in place and time has blurred urban-rural divisions, added heterogeneity to their sociolinguistic experiences, and impacted the ways in which their linguistic resources are being (re)imagined and (re)shaped (Wittig and Olate 2016). Moving beyond success/failure in these families requires avoiding reductionist views of the Mapuche/Pewenche experience and incorporating current theoretical developments in FLP. This can help us acknowledge and rescue the agency of parents who, in their asymmetrical and unstable contexts, imagine and shape their children’s linguistic repertoires as the family experience their bilingualism and languages in their own way through different spaces and in different times.

SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN FLP ILT research generally views success as minority language maintenance or the development of balanced bilingualism. Passive bilingualism, incomplete acquisition, no acquisition, and mixing are perceived as failure, or stages in language shift, endangerment, and loss (e.g., de Houwer 2007; Evans 1996; Forrest 2017). Some FLP research2, which importantly features ILT and the search for parental strategies to achieve children’s bilingual proficiency as central concerns, has been similarly framed. This results in a normative view in which, as already stressed (Lomeu Gomes 2018; Macalister and Mirvahedi 2017; Zhu and Li 2016), bilingualism is seen as inherently good, universally positive, and the desired outcome to be pursued by all families. When family language policies, implicit or explicit, do not lead to bilingualism and maintenance, they are described as laissez-faire, unstructured, unreflected, inconsistent, or unsuccessful (e.g., Chatzidaki and Maligkoudi 2013; Curdt-Christiansen 2016; Doyle 2013; Oriyama 2016). These judgements are problematic. First, they overlook the emphasis of FLP on the perspective of family members themselves as local agents of language planning with their own goals and may fail to reflect what families see as

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successful ILT (Macalister and Mirvahedi 2017; Velázquez 2009). Second, an overemphasis on solely linguistic notions of success/failure in the here and now of families may end up extracting them from their personally lived social, historical, and political contexts (Davis 2017; Forsman 2016). This may paradoxically lead to a discussion of family policies that de-emphasises the contexts and pressures to which they respond and the fact that families move, intentionally (re)shaping their linguistic repertoires as they encounter different language ideologies and language regimes in social spaces not always under their control. Finally, approaching bilingual families with “the danger of language shift” (Revis 2016: 6) in mind and framing FLP outcomes as success/failure may affect families negatively (Kopeliovich 2013) and promote damage-centered approaches (Tuck 2009) by singularly defining them in terms of what they are losing or have lost (and should have maintained, despite structural constraints), and ignoring the agency, intricacies, complexity, self-determination, and contradictions of families’ lived lives. This is particularly relevant in Indigenous families and individuals who are often reduced to their roles as speakers of Indigenous languages and are expected to conform to particular constructions of indigeneity (Leonard 2011; 2018; Meek 2011; Muehlmann 2012). In these cases, an excessive emphasis is placed on language shift and loss (Grinevald and Bert 2011), a loss felt as disappointment by linguists (Kulick 2019), with terminology “oriented toward a clinical diagnosis … with a touch of doom” (Grinevald and Bert 2011: 61). Fishman, in fact, saw language shift as a sad topic, a disease in need of a cure, where disruption of ILT was akin to hemorrhages in the home (Fishman 1988). The language ideological load of the term language shift in these accounts—languages as bounded and autonomous codes, de-emphasis of language practices and human agency, and essentialization of identities (Jaffe 2007: 51–2)—is obscured. The current conceptual complexity of FLP can help us circumnavigate this discourse of success/failure in FLP.

FLP: PRACTICES, IDEOLOGIES, MANAGEMENT, AND MORE Family language policies have traditionally been seen as encompassing language practices, management efforts, and language beliefs and attitudes in the home (King et al. 2008; Spolsky 2004). As language policies, they certainly revolve around desired sociolinguistic states, but recent FLP research has provided a more complex picture. These language policies must be seen as socioculturally situated micro language policies where family members act as local agents developing contextualized responses to immediate, and not so immediate, real and

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perceived language needs (e.g., King and Lanza 2019; Van Mensel 2016) as well as negotiating and making sense of their local language practices and bilingual experiences and selves in a number of meaningful spaces (e.g., Lomeu Gomes 2020; Purkarthofer 2019; Wilson 2020). Accordingly, it has been shown that these policies are rationalized and influenced by parents’ biographies, their lived language experiences (emotions, social encounters, language biographies) and abilities, their parental ethnotheories (how they view their children’s cognitive, emotional, and educational abilities and needs), and the way they chronotopically imagine and organize their linguistic resources in terms of the social relations they currently experience and foresee for the family, and especially for their children, in different spaces and at different times in their lives (Catedral and Djuraeva 2018; Fogle 2013a; 2013b; Kendrick and Namazzi 2017; Purkarthofer 2017; Purkarthofer and Steien 2019; Smith-Christmas et al. 2019, among others). This understanding of FLPs captures not only language learning and use in the family but also sociolinguistic continuity and change by overcoming a focus on the here-and-now (Purkarthofer and Steien 2019), as well as the idea that language learning depends on contextualized biographical trajectories (Zavala and Brañez 2017), and calls for a more complex reconceptualization of ILT as part of children’s developing linguistic repertoire.

ILT AS THE PARENTAL SHAPING OF LINGUISTIC REPERTOIRES Approaches to ILT tend to liken language to an object handed down “ ‘naturally’ (reflexively, locally and without interruption over time)” (Dobrin and Berson 2011: 195). This reinforces monoglossic ideologies and overlooks the social construction and reproduction of language, the agency and mobility of speakers, and the heteroglossic realities of bilingual contexts (Dobrin and Berson 2011; Himmelman 2008; Kopeliovich 2010; Pennycook 2006). Here, we see ILT in connection with parental decisions regarding whether the Indigenous language will continue to be part of the children’s linguistic repertoire—and to what extent—as it is in their parents’ repertoires, or whether preference will be given to learning and using the majority language. ILT deals, then, with the parental shaping of the linguistic repertoires of children, where languages are seen as sets of resources that relate in dynamic and complex ways with the parents’ views of their children’s sociolinguistic trajectories, developing biographies, and roles in different social spaces. This framing of ILT also favors a speaker-centered approach that connects families’ actual lives—past, present, and future—with patterns of language learning and incorporates a continuum of biographically situated linguistic repertoire outcomes, from complete active competence in the minority language to only appreciating its symbolic value,

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without necessarily implying clear cut images of languages (Blommaert and Backus 2012; Busch 2012; Purkarthofer 2017). We also emphasize the role of parents because, as the minority language is in their linguistic repertoire, they possess positive and/or negative lived language experiences (Pérez-Leroux et al. 2011; Purkarthofer 2017; 2019; Purkarthofer and Bordal Steien 2019) which may also influence their transmission decisions even before the child is born (King and Fogle 2006; Purkarthofer 2017; Schwartz 2008). These decisions may open or close spaces for the negotiation of children’s agency.

COMMUNITY AND FOCAL FAMILIES The three families in this study live in one of the many Pewenche communities in the south-central Chilean Andes. The population in this community is around six hundred, spread across about 160 houses considerably distant from one another. There is one semi-boarding primary school (years one to eight), a rural clinic, a police station, and around twelve evangelical churches. Few nonPewenche Chileans reside there. Intra-ethnic marriages and virilocal patterns for land distribution3 are still the norm. Chedungun in this community is widely learned and spoken by people of all ages (Henríquez 2014; 2015). Spanish is required in domains other than the family when interacting with Spanish-monolingual speakers. Spanish is also present in houses through satellite television, the internet (since mid-2017), and the study materials children bring home from school. Mobility patterns in this community also involve entering spaces where the language regimes call for Spanish (e.g., going to the city to buy supplies, seasonal work picking fruit, leaving the community to study or resettle in an urban center). The parents in all three families were born and raised in the community and grew up speaking Chedungun. They encountered Spanish upon entering school. The fathers of the three families carry out the traditional activity of animal breeding in the community, leaving their houses early in the morning and returning in the afternoon; mothers’ activities usually keep them at home and closer to their children. To emphasize this, we identify families using the mothers’ pseudonyms. All the children have been raised in the community and attend(ed) the school there where they socialize(d) with the other Pewenche children from the same or nearby communities. All are/were exposed for most of the day to Spanish with teachers. Chedungun is a subject, taught two hours a week from years one to eight. Upon finishing school in Grade 8, children must leave the community to continue their studies in other cities, mainly in boarding schools where only Spanish is spoken. Two families (Andrea’s and Marcela’s) belong to an evangelical church where Spanish is used.

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TABLE 14.1  Family Profiles Family

Members

Age (at the onset of fieldwork)

Andrea

Andrea (mother) Tristán (Andrea’s husband) Jennifer (daughter) Mateo (son) Marcela (mother) Carlos (Marcela’s husband) Juana (oldest daughter) Elisa (middle daughter) Antonio (youngest son) Eliana (mother) Cristian (Eliana’s husband) Jessica (daughter) Marcelo (son) Anita (daughter) Leandro (Jessica’s son / Eliana and Cristian’s grandson)

50 53 26 7 29 34 11 9 6 42 40 23 16 5 2

Marcela

Eliana

During fieldwork, it was observed that families rarely visited their neighbors and that children from the different households hardly ever played together. These observations reinforce the idea of Mapuche autonomy (Course 2011) and the family as an independent unit, stressing its central role in the configuration of intergenerational linguistic repertoires. Table 14.1 summarizes the family profiles identified by mothers’ pseudonyms.4 These families represent typical current family arrangements in the community which are similar to typical nuclear nonindigenous Chilean families.

DATA COLLECTION Data were collected in each family during fieldwork carried out by the first author, between November 2015 and March 2016 and from September to November 2016. Five recordings per family were made (ranging from 30 minutes to 2 hours) to capture intra- and intergenerational interactions. The first and last recordings in each family are at least nine months apart. These recordings provide interactional evidence for measuring ILT (Lewis 2008; Spolsky 2007) and analyzing language practices and management (CurdtChristiansen 2013; Hu and Ren 2017). Near the end of the second field trip, one in-depth semi-structured interview (Brinkmann 2013) was conducted in Spanish with the mothers of the three families (in one case a daughter was present and in another the husband).5 These interviews were intended to capture parents’ language beliefs and attitudes

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that might influence their language policies but also their lived language experiences. They also reported on the development of their children’s and their own linguistic repertoires in different places and times.

DETERMINING ILT IN INTERGENERATIONAL INTERACTIONS The speech recorded in each family was transcribed to determine ILT levels in practice, or the actual use of the Indigenous language. The speakers’ turns in each family were assigned to Chedungun, Spanish, or bilingual speech.6 These three labels resemble emic categories: Chedungun and Spanish are differentiated in the community (Spanish is called wigkadungun, the language of the wigka or Chilean) and the use of both languages in speech is referred to as champurria.7 As in this section we aim at illustrating typical intergenerational language use, a simple convention indicates the use of Spanish and Chedungun in the speech of family members: Spanish in bold, Chedungun unmarked, with italics for English translations (in bold when translation is from Spanish, and unmarked when translation is from Chedungun).8 Before showing representative instances of the intergenerational interactions between children and mothers (fathers appeared only marginally in the recordings), a brief mention of the other types of interactions in the families is necessary (Fishman 1991; Lewis 2008): in the three families, the parent generation are active speakers of Chedungun which clearly predominates; Spanish is marginal. Sibling-sibling interactions in one family (Eliana’s) proceeded in the same ways as parent-parent interactions, whereas in the other two families, siblings interacted in Spanish.9 Intergenerational mother-child/ren interactions in each family were as follows, beginning with Andrea’s family. When Andrea interacts with her daughter, Jennifer, as in Excerpt 14.1 below, the sequences are similar to those between parents in all families. In this extract they are talking about asking a neighbor to do some shopping for them. (All extracts in this section are part of longer sequences.) Excerpt 14.1 (J=Jennifer (26); A=Andrea (50)) J [name] lle wüle amutualu [name] guante gillabalabiñ tati küme guante pipelay ga [name] will leave tomorrow [name] she is taking the glove I’ll buy a good glove didn’t she say A May Yes J tati banteke püralu ga those with this measure A “may” eypibimika?

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“yes” you told her, right? “may” eypibiñ, “gilla[y]‌an [mü]ten”, pi. “yes” I told her “I’ll buy” she said

A different picture emerges when Andrea interacts with her youngest son, Mateo. The extract below is an interesting example of the observer’s paradox and highlights the importance of extended observation and recordings to unveil the actual language practices in bilingual families. Despite Andrea’s use of all her linguistic repertoire, in this extract (and others in the recordings), Mateo does not actually understand the language (an analysis of his sequences in all the recordings shows that he always initiates in Spanish with all family members interacting only in Spanish with them. His father and sister always addressed him in Spanish. This, supplemented with observations of family interactions, helped us conclude that he is monolingual in Spanish.). Excerpt 14.2. (M=Mateo (7); A=Andrea (50)) M cómo tenis las galletas de soda? how do you have the soda cracker? A chem? what? M esa galleta10 that cracker A quiere comer ikabe müten tao you want to eat just eat son M mh? Mh? A ika müten just eat M que dijiste? what did you say? A ika müten just eat M picante? [here Mateo produces a similar sounding word in Spanish in an attempt to guess what his mother is saying] spicy? A ibe tati galleta eat the cracker M ah [realizing that his mother is saying something about the cracker] Ah

Marcela’s family. Marcela uses all her linguistic repertoire when interacting with her children. However, even though the children only use Spanish to respond, they have passive knowledge of Chedungun making intergenerational communication possible (as Excerpts 14.3 through 14.5 show).

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Excerpt 14.3. (M=Marcela (29); J=Juana (11)) M Wüle amu[a]‌ymi escuela mu ka Juana beytachi ruka mu kam müleaymi, eperaleaymi? tomorrow you are going to the school Juana or are you going to stay home waiting? J no yo voy a ir no I am going M Bey chum[e]‌aymi? then what are you going to do? J voy a ir a ver mami yo no voy a ir I am going to go and look mum I am not going to go

Excerpt 14.4. (M=Marcela (29); E=Elisa (9)) M te dio hambre mi guagua? Are you hungry my baby? E Sí Yes [Juana calling from outside: Elisa!] M “ian inche korü comía” pia[bi]mi “I am going to eat soup food” tell her E voy a comer comida dijo mi mami! I am going to eat food my mum said!

Excerpt 14.5. (M=Marcela (29); A=Antonio (6)) M chumpiam ta Elisa? what is Elisa doing? A se está riendo she is laughing

Eliana’s family. Eliana’s interactions with all her children reveal that all generations in this family are active speakers of Chedungun, which does not exclude the use of Spanish (indicated in bold). In the extract below, the family are talking about visiting a relative in another community. Excerpt 14.6. (E=Eliana (42); J=Jessica (23); M=Marcelo (16); A=Anita (5)) E Marcelo Anita amuaymi kay inche ka amuli? Marcelo Anita will also when I go?

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may pelongaqle amu[a]‌n yes if it is clear I will go amu[a]‌ymi inche amuli kay? will you go when I go? […] pemeal tam[i]‌ñeñe to go see your aunt peme[a]‌y tami ñeñe [name] will you go see your stepmother [name] [name] tañ ñeñe? [name] my stepmother? [name] ka [name] and ah ahora entiendo ah now I get it

These excerpts reflect typical language use by mothers and children in each family constituting instances of “ ‘orderly’ social behaviour” (Rothman and Niño-Murcia 2008: 306). Together with the patterns briefly described for the other interactions, these interactions conform firmly established unique familylects (Van Mensel 2018) where monolingualism is not the norm (similar practices in other Mapuche families in Sepúlveda [1984] and Hermosilla [1998]). That these intergenerational language choices are the established norm in these families and occur as if “nothing worthy of notice has happened” (Gafaranga 2000: 345) explains why no management strategies in practice were identified in the recordings or observed in each family.

BEYOND SUCCESS (MAINTENANCE) AND FAILURE (SHIFT) For some, these interactions would suggest language shift for Marcela’s and, especially, Andrea’s families. Eliana’s family would be an example of successful ILT and language maintenance. The meaning effects (Blommaert 2015) of these micro family practices, however, cannot be interpreted as only representing these broader macro-sociolinguistic processes (Hiratsuka and Pennycook 2020; Lomeu Gomes 2020). The parents in the interviews, and as constantly observed, held positive attitudes toward Chedungun. Thus, the perceived intrinsic value of the language does not explain why not all intergenerational language practices favored the Indigenous language. The interviews reveal a picture where parents’ language experiences, including racism and discrimination in some instances, do play a role in their policies (Pérez-Leroux et al. 2011; Purkarthofer 2017; 2019), but where also a chronotopic imagination of their children as particular social

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types associated with accepted and valued language norms (Blommaert 2015; Catedral and Djiuraeva 2018), together with their own ideas of what is good for children and their well-being (Fogle 2013b; Wilson 2020) contribute to their assessment of whether the “language provides a linguistic horizon beyond the local community” (Forsman 2016: 390). This positions them as agents (cf. Forman 2016) who strategically and functionally use their languages to shape in unique ways the linguistic repertoires of their children, in line with what they see as meaningful spaces for the (non)use of Chedungun (Wittig and Hernández 2020) beyond their control, connecting the micro and the macro and where mobility and education are central in their children’s biographies. In two families, chronotopic moral images (Catedral and Djiuraeva 2018) are invoked to account for current language policies. These are prototypical social types that are imagined in relation to particular times, spaces, and languages and are made relevant by speakers to explain their choices. Andrea refers to the experiences of Pablo (the oldest son now living in the Chilean capital) and how his greater knowledge of Chedungun than Spanish was a source of discrimination outside the community. Andrea explained that because of Pablo’s experiences she decided to raise Mateo in Spanish. For her, a continuation of a Chedungun-centered language policy at home, as had been the case with her other children, would have been detrimental to Mateo’s well-being (cf. Wilson 2020). It is worth noting that Jennifer did not have the same negative experiences (and Pablo’s bad experiences were not transferred onto her) and she was raised in Chedungun: even within the same family, life experiences can mark the transmission history of family members and their bilingualism differently. Marcela also supports her decisions by referring to the negative image she associates with monolingual Chedungun speakers in the past and outside the community, especially when she refers to her sister, who attended school when there was a monolingual Chedungun educational program in place, and the communication problems she faced when she left the community to continue studying. Another case, which combines an evaluation of current and future patterns of language use, is that of her husband’s brother’s children: they love that they speak Chedungun but also foresee problems when they will have to interact with non-Pewenche people and study outside the community. In Eliana’s case, her experiences contributed to the development of both attitudes and beliefs that reinforce the continuation of Chedungun with positive images associated with the language. Eliana did not report any episodes of discrimination toward herself or any of her children outside the community or in their biographies. Nevertheless, in this family they are all aware of the language regimes in spaces inside and outside the community (as is also the case with Andrea and Marcela). Their own model of bilingualism reserves Chedungun for intrafamilial communication, while accepting Spanish as the

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language of the school and outside the community. Eliana is also the Chedungun teacher at the school, and the language has important symbolic value for her as an educational authority in the community; she is aware of the implications of this with regard to how the other parents see her. She has also experienced the economic value her knowledge of the language has: thanks to this she has a job. For this family, Chedungun has been experienced differently from Andrea’s and Marcela’s family. External pressure, racism, and discrimination combine with what parents believe is good for the development of their children, leading to language policies concerned with their well-being and that incorporate mobility (Fogle 2013b; cf. Wilson 2020) and education. In Andrea’s family, all the adults are invested in the future they envision for Mateo and they want him to advance in life. This envisioned better future is located outside the community and necessarily involves Spanish. For this family, Spanish has greater instrumental value for Mateo’s future, which, they hope, will include university studies. Marcela and her husband also prioritize their children’s education: “I would like it for them to study,” Marcela says—and this, they know, involves learning and using Spanish, and leaving the community. Marcela and her husband know that their children understand Chedungun and are confident that in the future they will relearn the language. For now, their use of Spanish is important to further their education. The importance of education, and therefore Spanish, is also central to Eliana. For example, when Anita was little, she always accompanied Eliana to work at the school. By the time she entered school, Anita was already bilingual and could read and write in Spanish, according to Eliana. This is a huge difference from other children. Eliana knows Anita is very advanced for her age and takes pride in that, and this advantage specifically relates to literacy in Spanish. Marcelo, their son, is now a law student. All the families are acutely aware of the way their languages connect with different spaces and their language regimes, and of the way mobility affects the relative importance of languages. In the case of Marcela, when discussing the possibility of having a Chedungun-only education program in the school (rather than the couple of hours a week), they were against the idea. As the father explained, “[If] here [the children] speak Chedungun only and finish school and then leave for [the city] … and there are no Mapuche children there, who is [my child] going to talk to? … if she cannot answer in Spanish what is she going to say?” Marcela summarizes this aspect clearly: “Chedungun is not spoken everywhere … here one speaks all [in Chedungun] but [that is not the case] in the city … in the city it’s not going to be the same.” In this family, an important realization in terms of language use, learning, and beliefs took place when they moved temporarily out of the community to the nearest city. According to Marcela, “[Juana, the oldest daughter] did know

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how to speak Chedungun and I liked it a lot … but when we went [to the city] everything was lost … as they went to school, they started to speak [Spanish] and now they are learning to speak Chedungun again.” In that new context, Spanish necessarily triggered a change in their language policies to the point where these parents accept the passive bilingualism of their children. In Andrea’s case, Mateo’s linguistic repertoire was decided before he was born, and the family has acted accordingly. It was the realization that life for Mateo was going to be harder if he learned Chedungun only (in the future, outside the community, to advance in life) due to discrimination, but also because Mateo’s imagined future revolves around monolingual spaces in Spanish. In their present interactions, the past (as experienced by other family members) but also the future (specifically for Mateo) come together (Blommaert 2015). Even in the case of Eliana, mobility and education also drive the learning of Spanish. For example, she explained that she taught Spanish to her oldest daughter “so she does well in the future … when she has to study or work out [of the community].” Viewing the community as a meaningful space that favors the use of Chedungun, in opposition to spaces outside the community that do not, is not an uncommon assessment of Mapuche individuals (Wittig and Hernández 2020). All these parents in the interviews revealed their own agency in shaping the linguistic repertoires of their children. Even though Marcela first interprets the changes in language learning and use when they moved to the city as something that just happened (“everything was lost”), or where the children’s decisions played a role (“they started to speak [Spanish]”), later in the interview she described herself as actively involved: “and there [in the city] we taught [Spanish] to the children.” Eliana has also clearly played a role in the languages her children know and use. She explained that Marcelo spoke Chedungun when he was little but “then, when he was around five, I started to teach him Spanish so he could communicate with the teacher at school, but he was a Chedungun speaker already.” In the case of Anita and Leandro, she explained that she teaches “the two languages to children [at home].” Perhaps the clearest example is Andrea: after evaluating what had been the case with her oldest son, she clearly remembers deciding that “if I have another child [Mateo], I won’t teach him more in Chedungun, I will teach him Spanish.” We would like to close with Eliana’s perspectives on the ways bilingualism and ILT have been experienced in this community. At the researcher’s suggestion that in some cases preference for Spanish may mean language loss, Eliana counters: Because of the discrimination, I think, [parents] teach more Spanish to their child[ren], because here [in the community] there is no problem speaking

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Chedungun, but in the city one has to learn to speak Spanish to buy things or speak with other people … that’s why I think … people sometimes teach more Spanish to their child[ren] but it’s not that the language is lost, it [the teaching of Spanish] is for them [the children] to learn both languages at the same time. Here, Eliana invokes other historicities to account for the language practices in families as local enactments of historically and functionally loaded linguistic resources, and where space and time blend to produce specific kinds of speakers and differentiated meanings and values for languages (Blommaert 2015). She also stresses that what participants in these events do (parents and children) and their reasons may not coincide with what a potential (specialist) audience may take from that (“it’s not that the language is lost”) (Blommaert 2015).

CONCLUSION In Indigenous contexts, unequal power relations are certainly felt more strongly when it comes to language choices (Hinton et al. 2018), but the familylects and language beliefs reported here “cannot be reduced to a colonization of consciousness [in which these families] come to see their own speech practices as inferior” (Dobrin and Berson 2011: 198). As Mapuche intellectual, Enrique Antileo (2014) argues, the sociocultural changes experienced by the Mapuche must not be simply interpreted as awigkamiento (transforming into Chileans). The sociolinguistic study of these contemporary Indigenous families must acknowledge their specificities (Davis 2017; Forsman 2016) and the existence of complex patterns of socio-spatial, economic, and educational mobility (Gissi 2010) as well as the “complexities resulting from new interethnic dynamics between Mapuche society and Chilean society as a whole” (Wittig and Hernández 2020: 75). Not doing so amounts, paradoxically, to a decontextualized discussion of their local communicative realities (Forsman 2016; Leonard 2011) and a unidimensional interpretation that constitutes a retrospective justification of colonial structures (Makoni and Pennycook 2005), where these families are essentialized and imagined as static and bounded in place and time, where language changes are only the result of individuals yielding to external pressures and not using the “right type of language” (Zavala and Brañez 2017), rather than strategically appropriating linguistic resources relevant for their life’s goals, even if those goals take them to unexpected places (Leonard 2011) with language regimes that hinder the continuation of Chedungun in the younger generations. It is important for communities engaged in language revitalization to define their own goals and standards of success (from simply developing positive attitudes, having the language in signs, having a child produce an Indigenous

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word, to developing new fluent speakers), without outside experts telling them what to do (Hinton et al. 2018; Leonard 2011; Meek 2011). Given this, it then makes sense to accept families’ own language policy goals, even if they do not consider continuing the active use of their Indigenous language by their children (see Hinton 2002). In these cases, we should not force them, especially when that is not the case, as in the families in this study, to inhabit a place of loss, brokenness, or sadness. Doing without externally imposed normative evaluations must not be taken as promoting a laissez affaire attitude toward Indigenous languages. As Forsman (2016: 390) has put it, although in a different context, Admitting this does not mean that we accept that societies must inherently be unequal with some hegemonic discourses or cultures more worth maintaining than others. Instead, regardless of our personal ideological stances, we must accept that individuals act in response to their everyday reality, and the actions they take must thus be assessed within the framework of that reality. Language maintenance, ILT, and the separation of named languages still matter to some communities and families (Jenks 2020; O’Rourke and Nandi 2019; Valdés 2017). Understanding them, and language shift, remains crucially important to unveil societal linguistic hierarchies and to inform language policies that can better support communities’ language maintenance and revitalization efforts. However, this cannot be achieved without seriously incorporating the views, practices, and intricacies of the lives of these families and communities— not all of them language activists—and the challenges they pose. What the language practices and ideas in these families tell us about the future of Chedungun is hard to determine. These are only three families displaying unique familylects in one of the many Pewenche and Mapuche communities and families in Chile. Maybe Marcela and her husband are right when saying that their children “are not going to forget Chedungun … they are going to speak [again].” Or perhaps, as Eliana put it, “Chedungun is not going to be lost because it did not happen already, we have been speaking for centuries!” Or maybe the critical juncture triggered following the 2019 popular uprising in Chile, including the writing of a new constitution with the participation of Indigenous representatives in the constituent assembly, will restructure the language regimes in Chile with policies and material changes that will favor the continuation and use of Indigenous languages. This chapter, besides including families scarcely present in FLP literature, has also attempted at critically engaging with “epistemological models that aim at universality when analyzing localized language practices of multilingual families” (Lomeu Gomes 2020: 17). Diversity of researcher gaze is also

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central for furthering FLP. By disentangling FLP from generic assessments of success and failure with their simplifying effects (Meek 2011), the field can develop a more inclusive approach that incorporates families’ own language goals (Macalister and Mirvahedi 2017), contribute to understanding how multilingualism is intergenerationally experienced (King and Lanza 2019; Lomeu Gomes 2020; Zhu Hua and Li Wei 2016) and how systemic oppression and human agency interact (Tuck 2009) in the family, as well as add depth and complexity to our understanding of ILT as more than an indicator of language vitality, maintenance, and shift.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work would not have been possible without the generous help of the three participant families we sincerely thank for their time and contributions to this study. We would also like to acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council for funding through Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Languages, CE140100041.

NOTES 1 Pewenche, people of the pewen (monkey puzzle tree). The Pewenche live in Chile’s southern Andean foothills and highlands, and are one subgroup of the Mapuche, the largest Indigenous group in Chile (around 10 percent of the total population of the country). The Pewenche call their language Chedungun (but also refer to it as Mapudungun). 2 Contrary to what is assumed in English-reading academia, FLP had already been described by French author Deprez in 1996: “Cette politique linguistique familiale se concrétise dans les choix de langues et dans les pratiques langagières au quotidien, ainsi que dans les discours explicites qui sont tenus à leur propos, notamment par les parents” (35–6). The notion of politique linguistique familiale had already been mentioned in 1991 by Deprez-de Heredia and Varro. Also, in the 1990s Evans (1996) was referring to family policies in regard to the transmission of Spanish among Mexican Americans in the United States. 3 When a woman in the community marries, she moves to live in a plot of land near the husband’s parents and provided by them. 4 These are nonindigenous pseudonyms because the families did not use Mapuche first names. Their surnames were all Mapuche. 5 Children were not interviewed as that would have required some time alone with them and, as became evident during fieldwork, families tend to be sensitive about some of the information they share. 6 Transcription and coding were done with the aid of three Chedungun-Spanish bilingual speakers.

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7 They identify two types of champurria: heavily Spanish-influenced Chedungun and heavily Chedungun-influenced Spanish. Attitudes toward champurria differ. Champurria is also used to refer to the children of mixed marriages. 8 In all examples, we present free translations aimed at conveying the meaning of the turns. 9 Because the language is highly vital in this community, it is common for children, even if they only know Spanish, to understand and use some words in Chedungun. 10 As already mentioned, chem is one of the common words in Chedungun children can easily understand.

REFERENCES Antileo, E. (2012), “Migración mapuche y continuidad colonial,” in Ta iñ fijke xipa rakizuameluwün. Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país Mapuche, 193– 214, Santiago: Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche. Antileo, E. (2014), “Lecturas en torno a la migración mapuche. Apuntes para la discusión sobre la diáspora, la nación y el colonialismo,” El poder de la cultura. Espacios y discursos en América Latina, 261–87. Bengoa, J. (1996), “Población, familia y migración mapuche. Los impactos de la modernización en la sociedad mapuche. 1982–1995,” Revista Pentukun, 6: 9–28. Blommaert, J. (2015), “Chronotopes, Scales, and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 44: 105–16. Blommaert, J., and Backus, A. (2012), “Superdiverse Repertoires and the Individual,” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, 24: 1‒32. Brinkmann, S. (2013), Qualitative Interviewing, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Busch, B. (2012), “The Linguistic Repertoire Revisited,” Applied linguistics, 33(5): 503–23. Catedral, L., and Djuraeva, M. (2018), “Language Ideologies and (Im)moral Images of Personhood in Multilingual Family Language Planning,” Language Policy, 17(4): 501–22. Chatzidaki, A., and Maligkoudi, C. (2013), “Family Language Policies among Albanian Immigrants in Greece,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(6): 675–89. Cienfuegos, J. (2018), Familias transnacionales desde el sur: testimonios de la globalización en Chile, Chile: Ediciones Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. Course, M. (2011), Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2013), “Family Language Policy: Sociopolitical Reality versus Linguistic Continuity,” Language Policy, 12(1): 1–6. Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2016), “Conflicting Language Ideologies and Contradictory Language Practices in Singaporean Multilingual Families,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(7): 694–709. Davis, J. (2017), “Resisting Rhetorics of Language Endangerment: Reclamation through Indigenous Language Survivance,” Language Documentation and Description, 14: 37–58. de Houwer, A. (2007), “Parental Language Input Patterns and Children’s Bilingual Use,” Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(3): 411–24.

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Deprez, C. (1996), “Une politique linguistique familiale: le rôle des femmes,” Education et societies plurilingues, 1: 35–42. Deprez-de Heredia, C., and Varro, G. (1991), “Le bilinguisme dans les familles,” Enfance, 44(4): 297–304. Dobrin, L. M., and Berson, J. (2011), “Speakers and Language Documentation,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, ed. P. Austin and J. Sallabank, 187–211, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doyle, C. (2013), “To Make the Root Stronger: Language Policies and Experiences of Successful Multilingual Intermarried Families with Adolescent Children in Tallinn,” in Successful Family Language Policy, ed. M. Schwartz and A. Verschik, 145–75, the Netherlands: Springer. Evans, C. (1996), “Ethnolinguistic Vitality, Prejudice, and Family Language Transmission,” Bilingual Research Journal, 20(2): 177–207. Fishman, J. (1988), Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, J. (1991), Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Fogle, L. (2013a), “Family Language Policy from the Children’s Point of View: Bilingualism in Place and Time,” in Successful Family Language Policy, ed. M. Schwartz and A. Verschik, 177–200, the Netherlands: Springer. Fogle, L. (2013b), “Parental Ethnotheories and Family Language Policy in Transnational Adoptive Families,” Language Policy, 12(1): 83–102. Forsman, L. (2016), “Language Shift from a Nonspeaker Perspective: Themes in the Accounts of Linguistic Practices of First-Generation Non-Swedish Speakers in Gammalsvenskby, Ukraine,” Language in Society, 45(3): 375–96. Forrest, W. (2017), “The Intergenerational Transmission of Australian Indigenous Languages: Why Language Maintenance Programmes Should Be Family-Focused,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(2): 303–23. Gafaranga, J. (2000), “Medium Repair vs. Other-Language Repair: Telling the Medium of a Bilingual Conversation,” International Journal of Bilingualism, 4(3): 327–50. Gandulfo, C. (2018), “La ‘prohibición interpelada’. Transmisión intergeneracional del guaraní en un grupo familiar de cuatro generaciones en Corrientes, Argentina,” Estudios Paraguayos, 36(1): 121–42. Gissi, N. (2010), “Migración y fronteras identitarias: los mapuche en los márgenes de la metrópoli santiaguina,” Revista Lider, 12(17) : 19–36. Grinevald, C., and Bert, M. (2011), “Speakers and Communities,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, ed. P. Austin and J. Sallabank, 45–65, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henríquez, M. (2014), “Estado del Mapudungun en comunidades pewenches y lafkenches de la region del Bio Bio: el caso de los escolares,” RLA. Revista de lingüística teórica y aplicada, 52(2): 13–40. Henríquez, M. (2015), “Ámbitos de uso del Mapudungun en comunidades Pewenches y Lafkenches de la región del Bío-Bío,” Literatura y lingüística, 31: 185–204. Hermosilla, J. (1998), “Presencia de la lengua mapuche en la interpretación conversacional del Niño,” Lenguas y Literatura Mapuche, (8): 169–77. Hill, J. H. (2002), “ ‘Expert Rhetorics’ in Advocacy for Endangered Languages: Who Is Listening, and What Do They Hear?,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 12(2): 119–33.

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Himmelman, N. (2008), “Reproduction and Preservation of Linguistic Knowledge: Linguistics’ Response to Language Endangerment,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 39: 337–50. Hinton, L. (2002), “Commentary: Internal and External Language Advocacy,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 12(2): 150–56. Hinton, L., Huss, L., and Roche, G. (eds.) (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization, New York: Routledge. Hiratsuka, A., and Pennycook, A. (2020), “Translingual Family Repertoires: ‘no, Morci is itaiitai panzita, amor,’ ” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 41(9), 749–63. Hu, G., and Ren, L. (2017), “Language Ideologies, Social Capital, and Interaction Strategies,” in Family Language Policies in a Multilingual World: Opportunities, Challenges, and Consequences, ed. J. Macalister and S. H. Mirvahedi, 195–216, New York: Routledge. Jaffe, A. (2007), “Minority Language Movements,” in Bilingualism: A Social Approach, ed. M. Heller, 50–70, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jenks, C. (2020), “Family Language Policy, Translingualism, and Linguistic Boundaries,” World Englishes, 39(2): 312–20. Kendrick, M., and Namazzi, E. (2017), “Family Language Practices as Emergent Policies in Child-Headed Households in Rural Uganda,” in Family Language Policies in a Multilingual World: Opportunities, Challenges, and Consequences. ed. J. Macalister and S. H. Mirvahedi, 56–73, New York: Routledge. King, K., and L. Fogle (2006), ‘Bilingual parenting as good parenting: Parents’ perspectives on family language policy for additive bilingualism’, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(6): 695–712. King, K., Fogle, L., and Logan-Terry, A. (2008), “Family Language Policy,” Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(5): 907–22. King, K., and Lanza, E. (2019), “Ideology, Agency, and Imagination in Multilingual Families: An Introduction,” International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3): 717–23. Kopeliovich, S. (2010), “Family Language Policy: A Case Study of a Russian-Hebrew Bilingual Family: Toward a Theoretical Framework,” Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 4(3): 162–78. Kopeliovich, S. (2013), “Happylingual: A Family Project for Enhancing and Balancing Multilingual Development,” in Successful Family Language Policy, ed. M. Schwartz and A. Verschik, 249–75, the Netherlands: Springer. Kulick, D. (2019), A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea, Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. Leonard, W. (2011), “Challenging ‘extinction’ through Modern Miami Language Practices,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 35(2): 135–60. Leonard, W. (2018), “Reflections on (De)colonialism in Language Documentation,” Language Documentation and Description, 15: 55–65. Lewis, M. P. (2008), “Evaluating Endangerment: Proposed Metadata and Implementation,” in Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties, ed. K. Kendall, N. Schilling-Estes, L. Fogle, J. Lou and B. Soukup, 35–49, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Lomeu Gomes, R. (2018), “Family Language Policy Ten Years On: A Critical Approach to Family Multilingualism,” Multilingual Margins, 5(2): 54–76. Lomeu Gomes, R. (2020), “Talking Multilingual Families into Being: Language Practices and Ideologies of a Brazilian-Norwegian Family in Norway,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2020.1788037.

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Luykx, A. (2003), “Weaving Languages Together,” in Family Language Policy and Gender Socialization in Bilingual Aymara Households, ed. R. Bayley and S. Schecter, 25–43, Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Macalister, J., and Mirvahedi, S. (2017), “Beginnings,” in Family Language Policies in a Multilingual World: Opportunities, Challenges, and Consequences, ed. J. Macalister and S. H. Mirvahedi, 1–10, New York: Routledge. Makoni, S., and Pennycook, A. (2005), “Disinventing and (Re)constituting Languages,” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal, 2(3), 137–56. Meek, B. (2011), “Failing American Indian Languages,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 35(2): 43–60. Muehlmann, S. (2012), “Von Humboldt’s Parrot and the Countdown of Last Speakers in the Colorado Delta,” Language & Communication, 32(2): 160–8. O’Rourke, B., and Nandi, A. (2019), “New Speaker Parents as Grassroots Policy Makers in Contemporary Galicia: Ideologies, Management and Practices,” Language Policy, 18(4): 493–511. Oriyama, K. (2016), “Community of Practice and Family Language Policy: Maintaining Heritage Japanese in Sydney—Ten Years Later,” International Multilingual Research Journal, 10(4): 289–307. Pennycook, A. (2006), “Postmodernism in Language Policy,” in An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, ed. T.Ricento, 60–76, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pérez Báez, G. (2013), “Family Language Policy, Transnationalism, and the Diaspora Community of San Lucas Quiaviní of Oaxaca, Mexico,” Language Policy, 12(1): 27–45 Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Cuza, A., and Thomas, D. (2011), “Input and Parental Attitudes: A Look at Spanish–English Bilingual Development in Toronto,” in Bilingual Youth: Spanish in English-Speaking Societies, ed. K. Potowski, 149–76, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Purkarthofer, J. (2017), “Building Expectations: Imagining Family Language Policy and Heteroglossic Social Spaces,” International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3): 724–39. Purkarthofer, J. (2019), “Using Mobile Phones: Recording as a Social and Spatial Practice in Multilingualism and Family Research’, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/ Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 20(1): art. 20. Purkarthofer, J., and Steien, G. B. (2019), “ ‘Prétendre comme si on connaît pas une autre langue que le swahili’: Multilingual Parents in Norway on Change and Continuity in Their Family Language Policies,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 255: 109–31. Revis, M. (2016), “A Bourdieusian Perspective on Child Agency in Family Language Policy,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, doi:10.1080/ 13670050.2016.1239691.. Rothman, J., and M. Niño-Murcia, M. (2008), “Multilingualism and Identity: All in the Family,” in Bilingualism and identity: Spanish at the crossroads with other languages, ed. M. Niño-Murcia and J. Rothman, 301–29, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schwartz, M. (2008), “Exploring the Relationship between Family Language Policy and Heritage Language Knowledge among Second Generation Russian–Jewish Immigrants in Israel,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 29(5): 400–18. Sepúlveda, G. (1984), “Vitalidad etnolingüística de la lengua araucana,” CUHSO 1(1): 223–38. Sichra, I. (2016), “Políticas lingüísticas en familias indígenas: cuando la realidad supera la Imaginación,” UniverSOS: revista de lenguas indígenas y universos culturales, 13: 135–51.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Foundational Questions: Examining the Implications of Diverse Families, Modalities, Speakers, and Contexts for Our Understandings of Family, Language, and Policy AUROLYN LUYKX

INTRODUCTION The dizzying diversity of family types, communicative modalities, and linguistic repertoires showcased in this collection reveals how FLP has been shaped by three recent trends: the expansion of civil rights for colonized and indigenous peoples, women, sexual minorities, and the differently-abled; the transnational and hypermobile nature of work; and the massification of real-time digital

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communication. Each of these present new opportunities and challenges to families pursuing specific FLP goals, compelling us to transcend simplistic models that portray minority languages collapsing under an onslaught of globalization. Clearly, there is considerable overlap between the volume’s thematic sections of diverse families, diverse modalities, and diverse speakers and contexts; new family types are made up of new kinds and combinations of speakers, from which emerge new contexts and new modalities of linguistic interaction (and research). The sections reflect differences of emphasis, more than strictly of subject matter, and some chapters could easily fit into multiple sections. Therefore, rather than mirroring the organization of the volume itself, this concluding chapter will examine how these studies expand our notions of family, language, and policy, all of which remain points of contention within nation-states, communities, and households.

RETHINKING FAMILY Many of the families portrayed in these studies would not even have existed a generation ago. Around the world, state policies that discouraged or prohibited same-sex spouses/parents, interracial families, divorced families, mixed Deaf/ Hearing families, international adoptions, and mixed-status immigrant families have fallen (or, in some cases, hardened) before a global wave of demand for the primacy of individual choice as the driver of family formation (see Stone 2004). Certainly, anthropologists and travelers have long found laughable politicians’ claims that “marriage” has everywhere and always referred to the union of one man and one woman; part of the pleasure of this collection is that it not only destigmatizes, but normalizes a much wider array of family types, broadening the semantic field of that always ideologically charged term, “family.” In comparison, past research that took only “traditional” families into account seems akin to a botany textbook examining only the flowers growing in the researcher’s backyard. Even “traditional” family forms must contend with the shifting forces of modernization and globalization. An example is the inversion of linguistic prestige between older and younger generations, as children are often the first in their families to develop fluency in prestigious language varieties. Many of the present studies show children as active agents of language socialization—not only their own, but that of siblings, parents, and grandparents. This fact, so obvious now, seemed to me a revelation when I first observed it in indigenous families in Bolivia whose young children were entering school (Luykx 2003; 2005). Earlier, oversimplified notions of “language acquisition” (or intergenerational mother tongue transmission [IGMTT], after Fishman 1991) falter before the reality of children actively affirming, resisting, and negotiating the linguistic parameters

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and pressures asserted by their parents and grandparents. In addition, parents’ language choices often prioritize the pragmatic and emotional aspects of their interactions with their children over explicit FLP goals. Whether in support of their children’s L2 development, or just to keep children content and engaged, parents will often defer to children’s code-switching choices, so that these end up determining what language predominates in parent-child conversations. As Fogle (2013) has observed, multilingual parents must balance the desire to raise their children multilingually with the need to spontaneously express affection and develop emotional bonds. Even these brief ethnographic snapshots of these families suggest that, in the coming years, the focal children will be managing their linguistic repertoires in ways beyond their parents’ comprehension or control. In these pages we meet several transnational families whose living arrangements and communicative practices are shaped by parents’ occupational choices and/or their educational aspirations for their children. In addition, international adoption is a growing source of intra-familial linguistic diversity. Many experts now recommend that adoptive parents acknowledge and support the cultural, national, and linguistic identity of the birth family; New Zealand even requires it (Nofal and Seals, this volume). This means that adoptees’ heritage languages—even when previously abandoned by the birth parents—may find a place within the new family. Nofal and Seals’s example of an adoptive father proactively learning the heritage language (Hindi) of his adopted daughter is arguably atypical but reveals the relative privilege of “elite transnational” families with access to a wide range of language-learning resources. The samesex adoptive parents profiled by Kozminska and Hua even traveled to Africa with their children, whose birth fathers were African. In their day-to-day life in the UK, these immigrant fathers try to maintain and transmit the heritage language they share with their adopted children (Polish), despite the specter of traumatic associations for the children (not to mention the parents, who explicitly identified as “citizens of the world” rather than of Poland). In several chapters, we see adoptive parents actively encouraging children to embrace linguistic and cultural elements of their birth parents’ national identity, while children grudgingly accept or adamantly resist these efforts as threatening to their sense of family or peer belonging. All of these cases (as well as the chapter by Wright) show children negotiating the national and linguistic identities represented by their birth parents, their adoptive parents, and their country of residence. On the flip side of elite transnational family life, we find the (often paradoxical) effects of coloniality, understood as “the multiple and entangled power relations of superiority and inferiority established under colonialism that continue to produce unequal relations of power globally and locally” (McKinney and Molate, this volume). This is especially notable among

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Higgins’s subjects: Hawaiian language and culture activists consciously pushing back against “detraditionalization.” These FLP-conscious parents construct the meaning of ‘ohana as a family of choice, based not on “blood” but rather on a shared cultural and linguistic vision that is not always embraced by their biological relatives. In this case, rather than the family creating its FLP, it is the FLP, in the form of “a shared worldview, a shared practice, a shared kuleana,”1that creates the ‘ohana, understood as “the people that we value and spend our time with.” More connected to the idea of lāhui (the Hawaiian nation) than to the normative American nuclear family, “the term ʻohana itself has been used in more public ways as a name for people who have a shared social purpose” (Higgins, this volume); in contrast, the word “family” more often implies a set of Anglonormative biological relationships unlinked from traditional Hawaiian culture. Thus, the families portrayed in this volume are also “diverse” in another way: while many of the studies focus on new family forms, others reveal family forms of considerable historical depth, long obscured in the research literature by colonial ideologies and research traditions: not only the Hawaiian concept of ‘ohana but also the dual household arrangements typical of South African families, where language socialization occurs across multiple, geographically separated households (McKinney and Molate, this volume). In fact, as these authors remind us, the norm of the nuclear family was overbroad (and infused with coloniality) well before the appearance of this century’s “new family formations.” Of course, not all new family formations are unambiguous manifestations of individual freedom. Several of these chapters (Nofal and Seals, Wright, Palviainen, Said, De Meulder et al.) involve young professional parents traversing wealthy countries, together or separately, constructing FLP with affordances and resources that are out of reach for most of the world’s migrants. In contrast, the immigrant wives described by Sohn (this volume) seem more akin to trafficking victims, recruited into state-arranged marriages with rural Korean farmers who prove less wealthy (and less kind) than the wives (from Japan, China, Vietnam, and Kyrgyzstan) might have hoped. These women’s individual responses to the state’s appropriation of their linguistic labor range from enthusiasm to despondence. Whatever personal aspirations they may have had seem largely subsumed by their role as literal “human resources” for the Korean nation as it jostles for position within a multilinguistic global capitalism. Nevertheless, the FLPs enacted by these dumahwa (“multicultural”) mothers are not mere reflections of the state’s priorities. One sees her young children’s interests as more or less aligned with those of the host government, yet holds open the possibility that her children may eventually settle in Japan, taking their government-subsidized linguistic capital with them. Another, from the PRC, mostly rejected her state-assigned role as a source of marketable language input

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for her children and “suggested that her children were bound for monolingual social lives and identities in Korea.” Given the inadequate support offered by Korea’s Multicultural Family Support Centers (and the virtual absence of the fathers from these accounts), it seems likely that blame will fall on the mothers when some of these children fail to develop into the fluent bilingual workers desired by the Korean government. In contrast, the kirogi2 mothers (Lee, this volume), whose FLP also derives from the South Korean government’s desire to build a competitive, multilingual workforce, seem to enjoy the relative freedom their transnational status brings, even as they labor under the rigors of single parenthood, far from their home country. Like those late-twentieth-century rural Bolivians who moved to the city so that their children could continue their schooling (Luykx 2003; 2005), these women have uprooted themselves from their familiar cultural setting and assumed the challenges of long-distance marriage in pursuit of FLP goals. Here we see an uneasy juncture between state and family language policy, as the South Korean government assumes that children will naturally acquire (along with English) their mothers’ L1—not as “emerging heritage languages that might better tie them to the community and create a sense of belonging,” but as linguistic capital in the service of the national economy. Like the dumahwa mothers back in Korea, they too suffer from a lack of institutional and community support. In very different ways, both the dumahwa and the kirogi families exemplify the burdens borne by mothers onto whom the state has devolved the responsibility for forming a multilingual workforce. As Mirvahedi et al. (this volume) observe, choices ostensibly made at the household level are inevitably connected to forces in the public sphere. Of course, what constitutes “the household” is itself called into question by the existence of families whose members do not reside under the same roof. In transnational households, “the home becomes a relational concept rather than connected with a fixed physical or geographical place” (Palviainen, this volume). Not surprisingly, such arrangements require additional labor to maintain familial bonds across great distances, and that labor most often seems to fall on the mother. Palviainen, Sohn, and Lee all highlight the gendered distribution of communicative labor required to maintain children’s connection with the distant parent; note that custodial parent Kati in Palviainen’s study even follows her young daughter around with the iPad as she plays with her father on the screen. As Kati herself acknowledges, this role entails extra work but also grants her power as mediator of the father–daughter relationship. This is just one of many ways in which the relational dynamics of the family system are restructured in situations of transnational residence. All of these reworkings of the notion of “family” shine a welcome light on the new family forms born of globalization, as well as older ones whose continued relevance had been obscured by coloniality. Wright (this volume), however,

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comes at the concept of family from a different angle, which, though rooted in methodology, has important theoretical implications. While the interactionist approach to family studies is not in itself new (see LaRossa and Reitzes 2004), there is an elegant irony in its application to that most archetypically structural3 of topics, kinship terminology. Her examination of intra-familial kinship discourse illustrates how kinship is lived and constructed moment-to-moment, especially in contexts where kin relationships are ambiguous, contested, or transplanted to novel settings. Wright’s assertion that “doing family language policy is part of doing family” can easily serve as a unifying axiom that runs through all the studies presented here.

RETHINKING LANGUAGE The emergence of new family formations in recent decades is obvious even to the layperson, but is there anything in these studies that expands our theoretical notions of language itself? Half a century ago, the chapter by De Meulder, Napier, and Kusters might have qualified, in its implicit affirmation that signed languages are in fact true languages. Happily, that proposition is no longer controversial among linguists; nonetheless, operationalizing it in our research programs has crucial implications for methodology. This study of three families whose combined repertoires includes nearly a dozen spoken or signed languages requires not only a polyglot (polysign?) research team but also multitiered data analysis tools such as ELAN, capable of representing multiple communicative modalities simultaneously. (Would that Ray Birdwhistell had lived to see it!) Given the challenges inherent in collecting and analyzing such data, it should not surprise us that mixed Deaf/Hearing families have been underrepresented in the research. (Notably, this is also among those rare studies highlighting the importance of sign languages as heritage languages for hearing individuals.) Autoethnography—or, at the very least, including members of the studied community on the research team—is a fruitful method for engaging these rich, multilayered interactions and also eases both the impact of researchers’ presence on “natural” family interaction and ethical concerns about filming children. The act of turning the analytical lens on the researchers’ own families and communicative practices is especially welcome, given the regularity with which we social scientists build our careers on observations of other people’s domestic lives—often more intrusively than we (or they) might wish.4 The presence of multiple modalities of communication is conspicuous even among the hearing families in this collection. The transnational families portrayed herein typically use an array of digital communication tools in their daily lives, to maintain contact between children and distant parents (Palviainen, Lee), to access television programs in various languages (Mirvahedi, Rajabi, and Aghaei), or to check pronunciations or definitions in order to provide better L2

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input to their children (also Lee). Of course, multiple (non-digital) modalities are the rule in most family interactions, even if they have not always been the focus of FLP research. The study by Abdullahi and Wei captures the multimodal communicative strategies of a three-generation Somali immigrant household in London, where gesture, gaze, and body language serve to disambiguate utterances between UK-raised children and monolingual Somali grandparents. Complications accumulate as bilingual members of the household broker interactions between English and Somali, while other family members try to broker their relatives’ attempts at brokering! As Kozminska and Hua (this volume) observe, “in all families, linguistic signs co-occur with other embodied phenomena”; aspects such as gesture, gaze, and facial expression are not simply a supplement to language but are themselves fundamental elements of communication. These studies raise the bar for future discourse analyses to pay more systematic attention to gestural and other visual modalities. Similarly, several studies in this collection make a strong case that “the classic definitions of FLP… should be expanded to include digital practices” (Palviainen, this volume). Aside from the multimodality evident in so many of these cases, equally notable is the predominance of translanguaging (Garcia and Wei, 2014), both as a theoretical framework adopted by researchers and as a communicative practice acknowledged by parents (Kozminska and Hua; McKinny and Molate; Wright, this volume). In these families, translanguaging is not a marginal phenomenon; rather, it is central to intra-family interaction. As Kozminska and Hua observe, “It is through the translanguage practices that the family achieves bonding.” Having dedicated a fair amount of my own research and teaching5 to the critical examination of purist language ideologies (often among speakers who disparaged code-mixing even as they engaged in it), I found these families’ unperturbed embrace of this nearuniversal phenomenon refreshing. In other chapters, we encounter transnational families whose linguistic repertoires reflect not only the parents’ heritage language(s) and the dominant languages of their current countries of residence but also the multiple speech communities through which they have passed on their diverse expatriate journeys. The broad repertoire employed by the families in De Meulder, Napier, and Kuster (this volume) have already been noted; additionally, some of the Somali migrant families studied by Abdullahi and Wei speak not only Somali and English but also Norwegian (and, to a lesser degree, French and Arabic). In the small transnational family that is the subject of Palviainen’s study, the divorced parents (Finnish and Dutch) use English with each other, and all three languages (to differing degrees) with their daughter. Said’s subjects (this volume) speak several different varieties of vernacular Arabic, while also making use of English, Swahili, French, Italian, and German.

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The sheer number of languages present in these households reveals the degree to which much prior research on (individuals’) L2 acquisition and (societal) language shift did not escape the underlying normativity of monoglossic language ideologies—for example, in the assumption that most children have a single “mother tongue.” The term itself suggests a monolingual family experience as well as a gendered division of communicative labor. As Mirvahedi and Molate note with regard to their focal family, the Ngxangas, “it could be argued that translanguaging across Setswana, isiXhosa and English is ‘the’ home language … the expectation for any multilingual to have a single language identity is both narrow and unrealistic.”

RETHINKING POLICY It was a conversation with the inestimable Elsie Rockwell that, twenty years ago, first switched on a light bulb in my mind about the word policy. Back then (and still today, outside of FLP circles) we were accustomed to hearing and using that word in reference to the rules and practices imposed by institutions (whether governmental, civic, or private) and implemented/interpreted/operationalized/ mediated/resisted by human subjects all down the line, in banks, immigration offices, workplaces, schools, and the halls of power. All of those settings involve decisions—explicit or implicit, consensual or imposed—intended to shape the behavior of groups of people. Stark power differences between the makers and the targets of policy are more often the rule than the exception, though one can imagine (and even observe) policy-making in more egalitarian settings where consensus is the meta-policy (i.e., the established set of parameters for how policy is to be made). Reviewing these defining attributes of “policy,” which of them is not just as easily applied to a family? Families are human groups in which rules (or at least limits and expectations) are established to govern members’ behavior. Such rules are generally established by the most authoritative members of the group: the parents, in the case of nuclear families. In some societies it may be the grandparents, or the mother’s brother, or the single parent, or the senior members of the lineage, but it is seldom the minor children. Once we recognize that a family is a group of people defined by an established set of rights and responsibilities vis-a-vis the other members, and nearly always characterized by differential power relations, the concept of policy appears clearly relevant to the domain of intra-familial interaction. However, FLP differs from “policy” as more traditionally conceived in at least one key aspect: in the domestic sphere, children often have much more leeway to mediate, resist, and reshape the policies imposed upon them than do customers in the bank, workers in the factory, or citizens in the public square.6 Children’s agency in the realm of FLP—often criticized

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but seldom contained by their elders—is closely tied to modernization and globalization, inasmuch as rapid culture change causes children to grow up under a different set of societal demands and opportunities than did their parents. Furthermore, the novel skills and dispositions that modern children acquire are almost always more socially prestigious than those of the elder generation. As children become the familial experts in the language(s) and communicative modalities (particular print and digital) on the cutting edge of social change, their power within the family system grows, while older family members find that their “traditional” skills and knowledge are increasingly viewed as obsolete or stigmatized. Official settings have explicit rules identifying the final arbiters of policy statements, in the event of conflicting interpretations. In the countries represented in this volume, such decisions usually fall to the courts, at least in the realm of public policy. (In corporate settings, the HR department often plays this role.) In contrast, familial groups seldom lay out their FLP or the procedures for negotiating it with such precision; and so, we see families in which members have differing perceptions of what the FLP is or should be. These conflicting perceptions typically remain submerged in the daily hustle and bustle of family life, and may seldom be explicitly addressed (unless some researcher happens to ask). The existence of policy implies the existence of politics—indeed, some language varieties use the same word to refer to both concepts—and politics implies the exercise of power. While few if any of these studies explicitly address questions of differential or contested power within families, such questions lurk beneath the surface of many of the analyzed interactions. Indeed, the growing scholarly attention to children’s agency within FLP constitutes an acknowledgment that children too have some power within the family, even if large areas of their lives are dictated by their elders. The chapter by Espinoza and Wigglesworth highlights the need to theorize more deeply the relationship between FLP and other policy domains, and to distinguish the aims of different parties to that relationship. Both policymakers and language activists tend to perceive their mission as one of recruiting minority language speakers to their cause, and researchers have too often assumed that their own definitions of success or failure align neatly with those of minority speech communities. Clearly, both policymakers and researchers would do well to take the priorities of speakers more seriously and to subject their own language ideologies to the same scrutiny as those of their subjects (see Luykx 2004). However, the authors’ call to “disentangle FLP research from notions of success and failure” should not, in my view, mean disconnecting research from political goals. Even if our broader aim is more usefully conceived as supporting the agency of minority speech communities, rather than simply promoting minority language maintenance, agency and action do not arise in

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a vacuum; they are inevitably shaped by the weight of history, coloniality, and ongoing ethnic discrimination. In fact, many parents clearly do think of their children’s linguistic repertoires in terms of a success-failure continuum; they make substantial sacrifices in hopes of securing a determined outcome and express negative evaluations of circumstances that hinder that outcome and of individuals whose linguistic ideologies and practices contrast with their own (see Higgins, this volume). To decenter scholarly criteria of success or failure, giving more weight to families’ own cost-benefit analyses of the production and allocation of linguistic resources in their family, is certainly a welcome move. But to dispense with all evaluative criteria is also to dispense with subjects’ own evaluations of their linguistic behavior, as well as the element of intention, which certainly must be key to any analysis of policy. Without that element of intention, we would certainly not be seeing the unprecedented level of indigenous representation in the constituent assembly that is currently working to reshape the political framework of Chilean society. It is also worth remembering that FLP studies emerged in large part from RLS research and activism around languages that are being displaced at alarming speed (Fishman 1991). It should not surprise us that many minority language speakers view language shift with something akin to indifference (being more concerned with the urgent business of survival), or even welcome it as bringing new economic opportunities for themselves and their families. Few parents would express displeasure at their children’s acquisition of coveted linguistic resources. But these situations are everywhere suffused with coloniality; the colonial legacy of monolingual normativity (compounded by overt hostility and racism toward minority languages) has all too often meant that the colonial language is acquired, not in addition to but at the expense of the heritage language. Espinoza and Wigglesworth quote Chegundun speaker Eliana— “it’s not that the [indigenous] language is lost”—in the sense that acquiring fluency in Spanish does not necessarily imply the abandonment of Chegundun. Nonetheless, that is the most typical outcome, even if it is not what parents intend. Furthermore, some parents obviously DO intend it, in hopes of shielding their children from the very discrimination that Eliana references. While I am sympathetic to the authors’ exhortation to view “damagecentered approaches” with a more critical eye, and to avoid forcing families “to inhabit a place of loss, brokenness, or sadness,” that is not the same as uncritically accepting families’ own language policy goals as manifestations of power and agency. Language shift is in fact a result of “damage,” in the form of colonial exploitation, racism, war, and genocide; healthy communities do not willingly abandon their languages. Espinoza and Wigglesworth’s assertion that “family members act as local agents developing contextualized responses to immediate, and not so immediate, real and perceived language needs” is undeniable; and yet, the accumulated consequences of those responses go well

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beyond the context of those immediate needs, with impacts that will be felt beyond the level of the individual family and the current generation. The chapter by Said highlights married couples’ disparate understandings of their own FLP; the Arab fathers appear more inclined toward authoritative pronouncements, even while mothers’ more sustained and intimate interactions with the children make them the day-to-day arbiters of FLP. Mirvahedi et al. (this volume) note that parents’ beliefs about the significance and functions of different languages within their family life do not always align with their own language practices. In such a circumstance, what constitutes the FLP— the stated beliefs or the actual practice? The authors cite Spolsky and others to the effect that language use is considered the “real” language policy of the family (presumably relegating those beliefs that are not consistently manifested in practice to the realm of language ideology). It is true that family members’ agency in such matters “is informed in interaction and response to structural affordances and constraints outside the home,” which parents are aware of but may be unable or unwilling to resist. (Note the Turkmen parents’ comments on their children’s preference for Turkish-language TV programs.) Is this lack of alignment between word and deed, between stated aspiration and eventual outcome, not a “failure” in some sense? Examining this question from another angle, we may note the contrast between Kozminska and Hua’s observation that affective bonds between their subjects are constructed through translanguaging, and Abdullahi and Wei’s observation that the disparate repertoires in multigenerational Somali immigrant households limit the ability for family members to connect on a deeper level. Emotive language, the sharing of ideas and even storytelling becomes extremely difficult without the presence of a language broker or multiple language brokers. The real effects of this [are] difficult to measure, as the strain put on these relationships can impact every area of the lives of the individuals, from loss of connections with extended family to the broken transmission of familial history and identity. While younger generations may view language shift as either natural or difficult but crucial to their own the self-actualization, “what is lost in these interactions is the ability to connect emotionally and form bonds through meaningful and nuanced discussion” (Abdullahi and Wei)—particularly with regard to grandparents, who are often marginalized from important aspects of family life in the new country. Surely this loss of connection can be considered a failure of FLP, even if the ultimate causes lie outside the family. In the preceding chapters, we see parents contemplating their children’s linguistic futures (and their own linguistic practices) in precisely such evaluative

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terms. In the research literature, scholarly definitions of success and failure have too often superseded those of research subjects. I fully agree that the meanings of “success” and “failure” with regard to ILT are complex and contested (see Luykx 2011, as well as other chapters in that volume) and that families’ own understandings of those terms merit at least as much consideration in our analyses and interventions as those of linguists or language advocates. But interrogating those meanings is not the same as doing away with them. The very existence of FLP suggests that families hope to bring particular language goals to fruition. Otherwise, family members’ FLP pronouncements amount to little more than the momentary performance of identity, with few or no implications for their children’s linguistic futures. Given that large-scale social inequities continue to threaten the survival of over half the world’s languages, not to mention the fundamental civil rights and very lives of their speakers (Nettle and Romaine 2000; Crystal 2014), calls to relinquish our attachment to notions of success and failure strike me as illadvised. Under such dire circumstances, language policies cannot be viewed as morally neutral, and researchers cannot adopt a stance of indifference regarding their effectiveness. Short-term FLP “successes” at the household level often result in long-term “failure” at the societal level; and that failure often comes in the form of alienation and heartbreak for members of the communities that we study, as well as deep loss for the world of scholarship and science.

CONCLUSION The best collections of scholarly work not only summarize cutting-edge research in the field; they suggest new directions for future researchers to explore. This volume suggests many such paths for future exploration, but a particular aspect that I would hope to see addressed in future FLP research is the racialized contrast between “elite” and “indigenous” multilingualisms (McKinney and Molate). There are hints in these studies of how states, communities, and families “do race” in the course of “doing family” and “doing language.” Sohn mentions ethnic animus as hindering dumawha mothers’ access to local linguistic resources in Korea, and McKinney and Molate note how the changing dynamics of racial segregation have shaped FLP among South Africa’s Black middle class, but the chapters showcasing elite multilingualism say very little about race. Kozminska and Hua emphasize the shared Polish heritage of the adoptive parents and their adopted children, but only briefly mention the mixed-race (Polish-African) heritage of the latter. Nofal and Seals focus on the negotiation of national identities within an adoptive family, but mention only in passing that their study concerns a transracial adoption. Does it not seem likely that adoptive daughter Muromaha’s resistance to performing Hindi language in front of guests, to befriending the other “new girl” in her class, and to her

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parents’ affirmations of her Indian identity are rooted not only in the perceived threat to her sense of family belonging but also in her developing awareness of racial difference and stigma within her adoptive community? Whenever researchers (or speakers) identify “Anglonormativity” as a dominant language ideology in a given setting, it is usually safe to assume that both the linguistic and the racialized meanings of the term apply. Aside from race and ethnicity, the theme of gender is central to several of these studies, and relevant to many others whose authors opted not to highlight it. We have already noted the gendered distribution of communicative labor in many of these families, some of which are characterized by the physical absence of fathers; in fact, Kozminska and Hua’s chapter is the only one without a central mother figure. As advances in reproductive technologies and LGBTQ rights combine with global trends in labor migration, displacement, and pandemic illness, perhaps more FLP researchers will focus on two-father and single-father families, as well as foster families and others in which no parent is present. Finally, speaking as an anthropologist, the opportunity to engage these topics with scholars from other disciplines has been a rich and stimulating one. So often, the most exciting and influential research is that which transcends disciplinary boundaries; as such, these studies constitute a general challenge to communicate our findings and formulations to a broader audience. Correspondingly, it is my hope that not only applied linguists but also anthropologists, qualitative sociologists, critical race theorists, and other scholars of public and private policy will take note of FLP as a fruitful terrain for future exploration.

NOTES 1 Glossed as “reciprocal responsibility.” 2 Korean mothers raising their children the United States or the UK to foster their acquisition of English; the term literally means “wild goose.” 3 Claude Levi-Straus’s seminal 1947 work, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship) is one of the pillars of structuralist thought in anthropology. 4 The authors’ three-family network of Deaf and Hearing researchers/research subjects is also unusual in the number of graduate degrees its members hold, and their level of social privilege relative to most Deaf families; note how Napier and her husband provide childcare staff with a video recording of the signs used by their ten-monthold (hearing but preverbal) daughter, so that they might respond more effectively to the child’s wishes. 5 The University of Texas-El Paso, which was my academic home from 2005 to 2020, sits on the Texas-Mexico border, and most UTEP students are bilingual. While translanguaging is a regular part of their family and peer interactions, it is

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typically excluded from academic contexts; students report that, even at home, their mixed speech is frequently criticized by older relatives. Thus, in my courses in sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, I took pains not only to analyze but also to model translanguaging. At the end of nearly every semester, a few students would approach me to comment on the revelatory experience of hearing “Spanglish” used in an academic setting. 6 Interestingly, Wikipedia has no page dedicated to FLP, and its “Language Policy” entry nowhere contains the word “family.” Common definitions of “family policy” vary from country to country but generally refer to governmental policies targeting families, rather those constructed at the level of the family itself. The earliest scholarly reference to FLP that I can find, prior to Luykx (2003) (and 2005, which is the published version of a conference presentation from 2003), is the French publication cited in Espinoza and Wigglesworth (this volume): Deprez, C. (1996), “Une politique linguistique familiale: le rôle des femmes,” Education et societies plurilingues, 1: 35–42.

REFERENCES Crystal, D. (2014), Language Death, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fishman, J. A. (1991), Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Fogle, L. (2013), “Parental Ethnotheories and Family Language Policy in Transnational Adoptive Families,” Language Policy, 12(1): 83–102. García, O., and Wei, L. (2014), Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan LaRossa, R., and Reitzes, D. (2004), “Symbolic Interactionism and Family Studies,” in Sourcebook of Family Theories and Methods: A Conceptual Approach, ed. P. Boss, W. Doherty, R. LaRossa, W. Schumm, and S. Steinmetz, 135–62, New York: Springer. Luykx, A. (2011), “Paradoxes of Quechua Language Revitalization in Bolivia: Back and Forth along the Success-Failure Continuum,” in Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, Vol. II: The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts, ed. J. Fishman and O. García, 137–50, New York: Oxford University Press. Luykx, A. (2005), “Children as Socializing Agents: Family Language Policy in Situations of Language Shift,” in ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. J. Cohen, K. McAlister, K. Rolstad, and J. MacSwan, , 1407–14, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Luykx, A. (2004), “The Future of Quechua and the Quechua of the Future: Language Ideologies and Language Planning in Bolivia,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 167: 147–58. Luykx, A. (2003), “Weaving Languages Together: Family Language Policy and Gender Socialization in Bilingual Aymara Households,” in Language Socialization in Bilingual and Multilingual Societies, ed. R. Bayley and S. Schecter, 25–43, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Nettle, D., and Romaine, S. (2000), Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages, New York: Oxford University Press. Stone, L. (2004), “Introduction: Contemporary Directions in Kinship,” in Kinship and Family, ed. L. Stone and R. Parkin, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

INDEX

adoption 34–5 Acts (New Zealand) 34–5 in Britain 61, 65 and culture keeping practices 61, 64–5 international 300–1 LGBTQ+ 62, 64 transnational 26–30, 60, 65–9 transracial 59–60, 68 adoptive family 26–30, 33–7, 41–2, 49–50 adoptive talk 60 affect 58, 69–74 after-school program 244–5 Afrikaans 258, 261–2 agency 3, 16, 23–26, 29–30, 34, 36, 40, 59, 133, 195, 201, 206, 218–9, 238, 278–281, 289, 292 children’s 3, 16, 56, 184, 305, 306–9 Anglonormativity 262, 311 annotating 173 Arabic 107 classic 214 formal 214, 231 FuSHa 225–6 informal 231 and Islam 215–7 language schools 214–7, 221 Modern Standard 221, 231 Qur’anic 214 spoken 214, 225, 231 artefacts 150–1

attitudes 279, 282, 286, 290 autoethnography 169, 184, 304 beliefs 282, 287, 290, 309 belonging 33–4, 37, 40, 42, 49–50 bilingual 282, 284, 287 coach 245, 246, 255 damunhwa mothers 245–6, 253–4 development 207, 254 education 255 families 281, 282, 283, 288 identity 245, 248, 249, 250, 252, 254, 255 programs in South Korea 245 teacher 249, 253, 254 bilingualism 86, 90–1, 94, 166, 214, 241, 259, 278, 287, 289, 293 government’s view on 242 Ministry of Education’s (Korea) view on 240 as a resource 245 Bolivia 300, 303 British Sign Language (see BSL) BSL 167, 168, 172, 175, 179, 180, 183 capital linguistic 302, 303 champurria 283, 293 Chedungun 278, 281, 283–291 China (see People’s Republic of China)

314Index

Chinese (language) 57, 145, 147, 248 chronotope 238–39, 242–3, 245, 247 Civil Rights 299, 310 co-parenting 59, 125, 128–9, 138 code-mixing 159–60, 305 code-switching 301 coloniality 257–61, 263, 274 community language school 36, 64 community profiling 147 connected presence 123 conversation analysis 146–7 conversational interaction 36 coproduced data collection 125–7 corrective feedback 46, 48 cultural identity 49, 60, 114, 195, 198 cultural invasion 202 culture keeping 42, 45, 61 Cyrillic alphabet 29 damunhwa (multicultural) 7, 237–245 family 241, 243–4 mothers 245–6 mothers’ first language (L1) 241, 242, 245–8, 250, 253–4 Multicultural Family Support Centers 241, 303 and neoliberal ideology 237 deaf 165–9, 171, 173, 176 babies 166 deaf-hearing families 166, 173, 184, 311 n.4 family 168, 178–9, 181 grandparents 176, 179–80 parents 167–8, 176–7, 179 Deaf Studies 169 detraditionalization 104, 302 diaries 176, 184, 220 diaspora 57, 69, 251, 260 digital communication 6, 56, 304 digital family 123, 128 digitally mediated communication 6 in family language policy 133 and family language practices 124–5, 131 discourse 8, 16, 18–20, 23, 29, 30, 33, 37, 39, 49, 65, 67–8 84, 86, 109, 125, 192, 240, 291 Discourses (see discourse) Discourse strategies 194

discrimination 68, 192, 286–9, 308 dominant language 195, 198–200, 244, 261, 305, 311 The Douglas Fir Group (DFG) 86 drawings 176, 181, 183–4 dual housing arrangements 262 Dutch 123–4, 128, 132–35, 138, 167–8, 172, 175, 177, 182, 183, 185 education migration 81–2 educational settings 204–5 ELAN 63, 170–76, 184, 304 elite multilingualism 260, 310 emotional streaming 130 emotional/affective aspects of communication 96–7, 126, 129–31, 138, 146, 180–84, 195, 280 English 17, 19, 20–22, 36, 38, 45, 48, 56, 60, 64, 73, 82–3 92, 98, 125–6, 134–7, 140, 172–9, 182–6, 187, 194, 220–25, 228, 244 as a transnational language 247 enregisterment 109, 119 ethics in linguistic research 308–9 ethnic language 195, 203, 206, 208 ethnographic 18, 57, 87, 98, 146, 149, 263 case study 124, 238 principles 243 ethnolinguistic 191–2, 206–07, 258, 261 ethnotheories 216, 228–31 face 23–5, 46, 49 face-threatening act 23–5 FaceTime application 6, 87, 95, 97, 123, 133 call routine 124–27, 136–39 multimodal affordances 134, 140 family adoptive (see adoptive family) and assumption of heterosexuality 58 digital (see digital family) dispersed 95, 124 and doing family, doing parenting 16, 30, 124, 130–31, 304 expanding definitions of 1, 3 hypermobile 124, 128–9, 138, 299 LGBTQ+ (see LGBTQ+ family) as a neoliberal agent 238, 242 nonnormative 15, 18, 30

Index

nuclear 4, 5, 15, 29, 103, 106, 118, 161, 176, 262, 302 as self-organizing 218 single-parent 18–30, 55, 59, 137, 215 sojourning 8, 215, 221, 223 as a system 213, 218–29 and systems theory 214, 218 translocal 125, 129, 278 transnational 5–6, 8, 15, 27, 36, 55, 57, 60, 74, 82, 84, 94, 99, 128–9, 130, 147–8, 246–8, 278, 282, 301 twenty-first century 4, 15 two-parent 55, 215, 221, 262 types 3–6 family interaction 87, 143, 148 family language ecology 48 family language policy (FLP) 33–4, 38, 84–6, 98–9, 131–32, 146, 169, 180, 198, 205, 214, 239, 281, 282, 283, 295–6 and chronotope 242–3 and identity development 244 Korean 246 management 242–3 and neoliberal ideologies 246 and schooling 267, 289 state-led 244–6, 245, 254 and strategic investment 242 family language practices 33–4,64, 83, 124, 131 familylects 286, 290 fatherhood 56, 58, 60, 74–5 fathers 29, 95–8 single 18–30 fieldnotes 63, 176–7, 263 Finnish 123, 132–39, 305 Fishman, Joshua 4, 103, 145–6, 199, 279, 300, 308 Flemish Sign Language (see VGT) gaze 66, 74, 148, 157, 173, 291, 305 gender 7–9, 104, 156, 192, 195, 201 and masculinities 56–59, 65–9 gesture 6, 63, 69, 71, 74, 148, 150–2, 156, 173 globalization 81–2, 239, 300, 307 grandparents 103–4, 108, 131, 143–4, 147, 160–1, 167–8, 175–6, 180–1, 262, 273, 300, 313

315

Hague Convention 35 hand gestures (see gesture) Hangeul 243 Hawaiʻi 105–9, 117–9 Hawaiian (language) 106–7, 10, 119 Hearing 166–9, 177, 180–3, 188 children 168–9 parents 169 research assistants 172, 175 heritage 4, 33, 42, 85–6, 103, 124, 131, 146, 194–6 heritage language (see also minority language) 33, 42, 47–8, 85, 194–6, 199, 201–2, 205–6, 214, 241–2, 249–51, 259–260, 263, 266–7, 269, 271, 273 heterogeneity 278 heteronormative 4, 56, 58–9, 74–5 higher education 245, 261 Hindi 36–7, 45–50, 301, 310 homework 91–3, 95–6, 229–30 ʻohana 105–6, 109–10 identity 15, 17, 21–2, 27, 114, 117, 124, 131, 144, 161, 195–6, 198, 206, 216–7, 244, 247–8, 250, 264–70, 301, 306, 309–10 acts of 35–6, 39, 47, 49 cultural 37, 49–50 construction 35, 37–8, 40, 42 linguistic 45–7, 50 local 42 national 37 negative identity practice 44, 47 negotiation 33, 36–7, 39, 42 positive identity practice 47 statement 36, 41 indexicality 40, 46, 49 India 40–1, 49 Indian 36–42, 44, 46–50 Indian Sign Language (see ISL) Indigenous multilingualism 7, 9, 257– 61, 310 information and communication technology (ICT) 128–9, 131 interactional sociolinguistics 37, 220 intergenerational 6, 281, 286–8, 290, 296 continuity 198–9, 206 gendered project 242

316Index

language transmission (ILT) 7–8, 250, 277–80, 283, 286, 289, 291–2 mother tongue transmission (IGMTT) 300 international marriage(s) (in South Korea) 239–40, 244 International Sign 167, 172 interviews 3, 147, 166, 195–6, 272–3 semi-structured 180 as social practice 243 Iranian society 202, 205 ISL 167–8, 172, 178, 183 Japan 240–2, 244–6 Japanese 245, 246, 249, 250 Japanese-Korean 246 Japanese-only policy 245 language teacher 245 language user 246 marriage migrants 244 kinship 3, 4, 9, 15–30, 104–5, 115, 128, 244 kinship terms 3, 16–20, 23–4, 26, 29–30, 304 kinterm (see kinship terms) Kirogi 5, 81–6, 98–100 Korean 6–7, 17, 57, 252 culture and language 248 Korean-Chinese 239, 240, 250 Korean-here-now 250 Korean-only FLP 242 socialization 248 labor, linguistic 302 gendered division of 306, 311 language attitude 36 language beliefs 195, 275, 282, 290 language biographies 6, 167, 177–80, 184, 280 language broker(ing) 144–150, 162, 165 child 149 intra-family 159–162 language choice 34, 48, 84–86, 131, 177, 180, 200–1, 213, 257–8, 272, 286, 290, 301 language ideologies 2, 7–8, 55, 57, 62, 83–6, 90–1, 99, 118, 165, 192,

194–5, 197, 205, 214, 216, 231, 258–61, 267–74, 279, 305–7 and monolingual normativity in family life 58 and parental language 199, 209 language learning 1–2, 6, 18, 65, 83, 85–6, 94, 99, 117–9, 192, 198, 214, 221, 226, 246–9, 280, 289, 301 language maintenance 1, 6–7, 36, 47, 55, 57, 61, 65, 75, 96, 103, 109, 144–5, 194–196, 198–9, 202, 205–7, 214, 216, 217, 219, 229, 257, 271–2, 277–8, 286, 291, 307 language management 84 digitally mediated 124 parental strategies for 132, 138 language portraits 180–4, 264 language revitalization 9, 103, 109, 259, 290 language shift 143–5, 162, 194–5, 199 200, 258, 272, 277–9, 291, 306–9 language socialization 4, 16, 18–9, 55, 59, 98, 194, 203, 215, 219, 242, 257–8, 262, 267, 270–1, 273, 300, 302 legitimate speaker 46 lexical items 49 LGBTQ+ adoption (see adoption) family rights 62 parenting styles 58 rights in Poland 62, 67 linguistic chronotope 243, 247 ethnography 263 nationalism 243 security 48 linguistic proximity 193, 203, 207 literacy 48, 197, 206–7, 263, 272 lived language experiences 280–3 LMLS 146 Mandarin 241 as an extracurricular activity 247–52 after-school program 245 as a second language (in South Korea) 245 not-yet-but-future 244–9 Māori 35 Mapuche 278, 282, 288–92

Index

Marrying off Single Farmers Project 239–40 mediated discourse analysis (see nexus analysis) mediated presence 125, 129–32 membership 38, 40–2, 44, 47, 50 meta-discourse 34, 36–7, 42, 45, 49–50 minority language 47, 145, 192–5, 202, 205–7, 217, 277, 281, 300, 307–8 mitigation 42, 46 mobility 81 modalitites 6, 132, 168, 172, 176, 180, 299–300, 304–307 modernization 300, 307 modes (see multimodality) monolingual 30, 58, 60, 94, 144, 215, 284, 287, 289, 303 family language policy (FLP) 241 reductionism 206 socialization 247 society 247 monolingualism 251, 260–1, 286, 303 motherhood 58, 215–6, 226–8 mothers in FLP 92–4, 262, 281, 286, 302 multi-sited family 82 multilingual cities 196, 208 families 84–6, 124–6 family language policy 237 socialization 243, 245, 247, 249 multilingualism 2, 6–9, 15, 18, 56, 68, 74, 237, 241, 250, 257–61 multimodality 144, 146, 162, 305 embodied 151–2 narrative 19–20, 23, 26, 69, 89, 109, 110, 143, 150 methods 177–80 nationality 36–7, 246 neoliberal agent 238 discourse 242 condition 250 governmentality 238 ideology(ies) 242, 251 framing 241 shift 241 subject 238, 250

317

neoliberalism 238, 243 new speakers 5, 107 New Zealand 33–7, 40–2, 44, 49–50 nexus analysis 125–6, 132 nexus of practice 125–6 and discourses in place 132 and historical body 132 and interaction order 132 One Parent One Language Policy (OPOL) 241, 245, 249–51, 254 othering 37–40, 44, 47, 49 Pākēha (New Zealand European) 35 parenthood 56 passive bilingualism 278, 289 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 62, 93, 239, 242, 244, 247, 248 Persian speakers 7, 191–4, 204 Pewenche 278, 281, 291 phatic communication 130, 138 positioning 37–40, 42–4, 47–8, 50, 109, 110, 114, 116 post-familial family 104, 118 power dynamics within families 304 prestige, linguistic 300 pronunciation 45–7 purposive sampling 87 race 58–9, 61–2, 68, 258, 310–1 racism 68, 286, 288, 308 regional dialect 48 rejection 37, 39–40, 42–4, 47, 49–50 religion 192, 214–7, 227–9, 231 repertoires 1, 3, 8, 9, 16, 56, 109, 176, 180, 264–7, 272–3, 278–82 research assistants 169, 171–2, 175 resistance 5, 39–40, 44, 84, 93, 201–2, 230 Russian 19–22, 26–30 scaffolding 131, 137 school 244–7, 287–9 sensory asymmetries 176 sexuality (see LGBTQ+) shared living 130, 138 sign languages 166–76, 304 signspeaking 172–3, 17–7, 179 Skype 125, 128–31 Slavic 21–2

318Index

social work 125, 131, 137 behavioral 131 coordination 131 presentation 131, 134 sociolinguistic 275, 279–80, 286, 290 Spanish 281–90 stance 16–18, 30 state policy and practice 238 state-led language policy 240, 250 stigma 307, 311 strategies 278, 286 structuralism 309, 311, n.3 study abroad 98, 246, 248, 250 success 277–9, 286, 290, 292 success-failure continuum 308–12 television 304, 311 territory-bounded language and identity 247 timespace 238–9, 243 condition 239, 247 and family language policy (FLP) 243 frame 245 themes 243 touch 59, 60, 74, 173, 181 trajectory 247 transconnective space 129, 138 translanguaging 6, 26, 56, 174, 176, 261, 272–3, 305–6, 311 n.5

and embodied phenomena 59, 69–74 multisensory 59, 69–74 Ubuntu 261 translocality 278 transnational 250, 252, 278, 299, 301, 304 context 57, 90, 246–8 experience 85, 245, 248 family (see family, transnational) identities 242, 250 language 247 network 246 trauma, associated with a given language 301 Turkmen language 191–4, 196–208 Turkmen-medium schools 205 Turkmen-Persian bilingual families 191, 194, 197 turns 147, 149, 152 VGT 167, 168, 172, 175, 177, 178 video recordings 127, 147, 170–2, 175, 177, 184 video-calling 127–8 Vietnam 240–1, 244 Vietnamese 241 voice 173, 176, 179 Wallmapu 278 WEIRD societies 1–2