Family Language Policy

Children's Perspectives

Sonia Wilson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030524371
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores the question of family language policy in multilingual households. Presenting six case studies which focus on the experiences of parents and children in French-English bilingual contexts, the author draws conclusions about the impact of parental language management on the family as a whole which can be applied totransnational families from other linguistic backgrounds. While many parental guides on bilingual childrearing have been published in recent years, little attention has been paid to the possible impact of such language strategies on the experiences and interrelationships of bilingual family members. This book is unique in focusing in depth on the psychology and experiences of the child, and it will be of interest to readers in fields as diverse as sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, sociology of youth and family, and child psychology.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. WilsonFamily Language Policyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52437-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Heritage Speakers, FLP and Emotional Challenges

Sonia Wilson¹

(1)

Milton Keynes, UK

Sonia Wilson

Abstract

This chapter presents the sociolinguistic context in which members of the multilingual family interact and establish language patterns. It describes and analyses the concept of Family Language Policy (FLP) and examines the traditional focus of FLP research on children’s bilingual proficiency development through particular parental strategies. Finally, this chapter highlights the possible impact of FLP on children’s experiences of growing up bilingually.

Keywords

Child bilingualismFamily Language PolicyHeritage speakers

End Abstract

Transnationalism, Intermarriage and Multilingual Families

An important by-product of transnationalism is the creation of language-contact situations at society level but also within the intimate context of family. An additional layer of complexity linked to geographical mobility appears when individuals from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds form a relationship and establish a transcultural family. In this book, I use the terms interlingual and linguistically exogamous families interchangeably to describe families in which parents have different native languages (Guardado 2017).

If migrant partners with a common language and cultural background also face the challenge of raising children in the host country while maintaining the minority language, family language planning within interlingual families seems all the more intricate (Okita 2002). Choosing a home language may certainly be less problematic for linguistically endogamous couples whereas competing languages may affect the language policies of interlingual families. When both parents are transnationals from two different countries, decisions regarding which languages to speak to the family may be highly political since they may influence the children’s relationships with each parent’s extended family. In cases where one of the partners is a native speaker of the host country’s language, there is an apparent imbalance due to the predominance of the society language in the family’s environment. The latter configuration is examined in the present study in which each family includes a French parent, as the minority language speaker, and a British parent, as the majority language speaker.

Research on FLP among linguistically exogamous families has highlighted the role of mothers in such family settings (Okita 2002). Although maternal and paternal roles in childrearing activities have evolved over the years, women have remained the main caregivers. Traditional gender dynamics may explain why most FLP research on interlingual families concerns couples composed of a minority-language speaking mother and a majority-language father in the host country. In many instances, this can be explained by the fact that mothers are more likely than fathers to give up full-time employment in order to provide childcare (Lyon 1996). As a result, and as Guardado (2017: 5) points out, “one of the parents is often positioned in an unfavourable position in the relationship, be it as non-native speaker, migrant, female, economically dependent, or other positionings based on national and cultural background, or all of the above”. While gendered power relations within transnational families is beyond the scope of this study, it is essential to take keep in mind the dynamics produced by the majority and minority-language parents’ roles. It is also important to note that, as most of the research in FLP, the case studies presented in this book concern a traditional nuclear family structure and may not be representative of other family settings such as same sex unions or adoptive families .

Family Language Policy (FLP): Concept and Field of Research

In the last decade, the concept of FLP has attracted significant interest from psycholinguists and sociolinguists and, as a result, it has developed into a field of research in its own right (Fogle and King 2013). FLP has been defined as the explicit and implicit planning of language and literacy practices within the home and between family members (King et al. 2008). Whilst the notion of FLP was only recently formalised through Spolsky’s (2004) 3-component model (language practice, management and ideology), the idea of shaping children’s language practice through parental management can be traced back to the early 1900s. French linguist Grammont’s (1902) book titled Observation sur le langage des enfants (Observations of children’s language), introduced the concept of one person; one language (OPOL) as an effective strategy to manage bilingual acquisition. Soon after, Ronjat (1913) implemented Grammont’s recommendations and recorded his son’s acquisition of German and French over a four-year period. Similarly, Leopold’s (1994) documented his daughter Hildegard’s acquisition of English and German through a language diary (1939–1949). While these early studies marked the first step towards examining childhood bilingualism within the context of family, no other significant research immediately followed Leopold’s longitudinal investigation of language development within bilingual families. In the 1980s, a revival of interest in childhood bilingualism led a few researchers to further investigate childhood bilingualism within the home context by following Grammont’s OPOL approach (Saunders 1982; Döpke 1998; Lanza 1997) rather than exploring alternative language practices existing within multilingual families. It was only in 2003 that the notion of FLP was first mentioned in Luykx’s (2003) study of the language practices of Aymara-Spanish families in Bolivia:

While these efforts [minority language schools] are laudable [. . .], it is the gradual displacement of Aymara by Spanish in functions that have traditionally been the former’s stronghold (i.e. the domestic ones) that may prove definitive for the future survival of the language. For this reason, it is necessary to expand our current conception of ‘language policy’ to include not only the sphere of official state actions, but also decisions made at the community and family level. Such decisions are often implicit and unconscious, but they are no less crucial to determining the speed and direction of language shift. In this regard we may refer to family language policy as an important area for both research and activism. (Luykx 2003: 39)

Luykx identified the home domain as a major factor, if not the most essential, in minority language maintenance and shift. If the term language policy has traditionally been reserved for political decisions affecting the use and status of one or more languages within a society (King et al. 2008; Nicoladis and Montanari 2016), Luykx (2003), and later Spolsky (2004), argue that the concept can be expanded to individual families. Whilst language policy, at a macro level, is concerned with language use in public spaces and the impact of policies on language shift, FLP research deals with parental language ideologies and decisions within multilingual families and how they shape children’s language use and acquisition. Spolsky defines FLP through three components:

language practices – the habitual pattern of selecting among the varieties that make up its linguistic repertoire; its language beliefs or ideology – the beliefs about language and language use; and any specific efforts to modify or influence that practice by any kind of language intervention, planning or management. (Spolsky 2004: 5)

According to Spolsky’s model, language practice refers to how families use language in their daily interactions, that is the choice of one particular language in a given situation as well as translanguaging practices.

The second component, ideology, makes reference to parents’ beliefs about language and language use. Although the notion of ideology is often interpreted as false belief (Piller 2002), I use the terms ideology and belief interchangeably to simply refer to the parents’ stance and without providing any judgement of the truth value of their beliefs. Language ideologies have often been studied with a view to understanding the influence of macro-political decisions on parental beliefs regarding the social status of the minority language and the value of bilingualism (Curdt-Christiansen 2016; Zhang and Slaughter-Defoe 2009; Baker and Wayne 2017). Another aspect of language ideology concerns parental beliefs about multilingualism and raising children bilingually (De Houwer 1998; Pérez Báez 2013). Although Spolsky’s (2004) original definition of the term language ideology referred to explicit parental beliefs, some researchers have highlighted the need to expand the concept and include the implicit ideologies that may shape parental decisions (Okita 2002; King and Fogle 2006; Curdt-Christiansen 2009). FLP research has traditionally focused on so-called elite bilinguals—that is, middle class families with a prestige Western European language as the minority language (Aronoff 2017)—who tend to carefully consider whether and how to raise their children bilingually (Piller 2001). However, for families from a less privileged background, bilingualism is not always “a planned affair” (Grosjean 1982). It is therefore important to recognise the implicit and unplanned language decisions and ideologies influencing an FLP, and which arguably exist in every family, regardless of its socio-economic situation. King and Fogle (2006) provided valuable insight into covert beliefs that may shape parental language planning and demonstrated that some parents’ decision to raise their children bilingually could be influenced by their perception of what constitutes being “a good parent”. Such beliefs might not always be overtly expressed, and parents themselves may not be necessarily aware of some of the ideologies motivating their family practices. Moreover, parents’ language ideologies may also be shaped by their personal sense of identity and the image that they aspire to project within their social circle (Baker and Wayne 2017).

The third component of Spolsky’s FLP model is language...