{"title":"Family language policy in retrospect: Narratives of success and failure in an Indian-Iranian transnational family.","authors":"Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi, Mona Hosseini","doi":"10.1007/s10993-023-09649-4","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this study, we investigate family language policy in a transnational family through a collaborative autoethnography. Following the theoretical underpinnings of family language policy (Spolsky in J Multiling Multicult Dev 31:3-11, 2012), we present parental language beliefs, management, and practices in retrospect to shine a light on the long-term impact of the family's language policy on their daughter's linguistic development in heritage languages (i.e., Persian and Hindi) and English. The components of the family language policy in this cross-cultural transnational family are sketched in the second author's narratives of her experiences of multilingual childrearing and heritage language maintenance. We engage with, and critique, recent family language scholarship that apply postmodernist lens to examine families' translingual use of languages at home to get by their daily life, showing how having failed to set boundaries between the home/heritage languages and English over the past nine years has resulted in their child's predominant proficiency in English. We argue that such failure has its roots in parents' own past lived, and future imagined, experiences, as well as language ideologies that are polycentric and scaled, the consequences of which concern emotional, linguistic, cultural and social frictions across generations. Drawing on the narratives of success and failure in the family, we call for critical adoption of translingual frameworks in examining family language policy paying careful attention to the long-term impact of such practices at home on children's linguistic development.</p>","PeriodicalId":46781,"journal":{"name":"Language Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9932410/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language Policy","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-023-09649-4","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2023/2/16 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In this study, we investigate family language policy in a transnational family through a collaborative autoethnography. Following the theoretical underpinnings of family language policy (Spolsky in J Multiling Multicult Dev 31:3-11, 2012), we present parental language beliefs, management, and practices in retrospect to shine a light on the long-term impact of the family's language policy on their daughter's linguistic development in heritage languages (i.e., Persian and Hindi) and English. The components of the family language policy in this cross-cultural transnational family are sketched in the second author's narratives of her experiences of multilingual childrearing and heritage language maintenance. We engage with, and critique, recent family language scholarship that apply postmodernist lens to examine families' translingual use of languages at home to get by their daily life, showing how having failed to set boundaries between the home/heritage languages and English over the past nine years has resulted in their child's predominant proficiency in English. We argue that such failure has its roots in parents' own past lived, and future imagined, experiences, as well as language ideologies that are polycentric and scaled, the consequences of which concern emotional, linguistic, cultural and social frictions across generations. Drawing on the narratives of success and failure in the family, we call for critical adoption of translingual frameworks in examining family language policy paying careful attention to the long-term impact of such practices at home on children's linguistic development.
在本研究中,我们通过合作式自述调查了一个跨国家庭的家庭语言政策。根据家庭语言政策的理论基础(Spolsky in J Multiling Multicult Dev 31:3-11, 2012),我们回顾了父母的语言信仰、管理和实践,以揭示家庭语言政策对其女儿在遗产语言(即波斯语和印地语)和英语方面的语言发展的长期影响。第二位作者在讲述自己多语言育儿和遗产语言维护的经历时,勾勒出了这个跨文化跨国家庭语言政策的组成部分。我们参与并批评了最近的家庭语言学术研究,这些研究运用后现代主义的视角来审视家庭在家中为日常生活而跨语言使用的情况,展示了在过去的九年中,由于未能在家庭/传统语言和英语之间划定界限,是如何导致他们的孩子主要精通英语的。我们认为,这种失败的根源在于父母自身过去的生活经历和未来的想象,以及多中心和规模化的语言意识形态,其后果涉及跨代的情感、语言、文化和社会摩擦。借鉴家庭中成功与失败的叙事,我们呼吁在研究家庭语言政策时批判性地采用跨语言框架,认真关注家庭中的这种做法对儿童语言发展的长期影响。
期刊介绍:
Language Policy is highly relevant to scholars, students, specialists and policy-makers working in the fields of applied linguistics, language policy, sociolinguistics, and language teaching and learning. The journal aims to contribute to the field by publishing high-quality studies that build a sound theoretical understanding of the field of language policy and cover a range of cases, situations and regions worldwide.
A distinguishing feature of this journal is its focus on various dimensions of language educational policy. Language education policy includes decisions about which languages are to be used as a medium of instruction and/or taught in schools, as well as analysis of these policies within their social, ethnic, religious, political, cultural and economic contexts.
The journal aims to continue its tradition of bringing together solid scholarship on language policy and language education policy from around the world but also to expand its direction into new areas. The editors are very interested in papers that explore language policy not only at national levels but also at the institutional levels of schools, workplaces, families, health services, media and other entities. In particular, we welcome theoretical and empirical papers with sound qualitative or quantitative bases that critically explore how language policies are developed at local and regional levels, as well as on how they are enacted, contested and negotiated by the targets of that policy themselves. We seek papers on the above topics as they are researched and informed through interdisciplinary work within related fields such as education, anthropology, politics, linguistics, economics, law, history, ecology, and geography. We particularly are interested in papers from lesser-covered parts of the world of Africa and Asia.
Specifically we encourage papers in the following areas:
Detailed accounts of promoting and managing language (education) policy (who, what, why, and how) in local, institutional, national and global contexts.
Research papers on the development, implementation and effects of language policies, including implications for minority and majority languages, endangered languages, lingua francas and linguistic human rights;
Accounts of language policy development and implementation by governments and governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations and business enterprises, with a critical perspective (not only descriptive).
Accounts of attempts made by ethnic, religious and minority groups to establish, resist, or modify language policies (language policies ''from below'');
Theoretically and empirically informed papers addressing the enactment of language policy in public spaces, cyberspace and the broader language ecology (e.g., linguistic landscapes, sociocultural and ethnographic perspectives on language policy);
Review pieces of theory or research that contribute broadly to our understanding of language policy, including of how individual interests and practices interact with policy.
We also welcome proposals for special guest-edited thematic issues on any of the topics above, and short commentaries on topical issues in language policy or reactions to papers published in the journal.