Making sense of family language policy: Japanese-English bilingual children's creative and strategic translingual practices

ABSTRACT

Recent developments in multilingualism research urge us to move beyond seeing bilingualism as ‘double monolingualism’ and towards translanguaging, which conceptualises language as a bundle of socially constructed linguistic resources that individuals can deploy to make sense of their multilingual world.

Despite this theoretical development, the monolingualist ideology remains strong in child language acquisition and bilingual education. The One Parent One Language policy (OPOL) which I examine in detail in this paper is one of the most commonly practiced family language policies; it requires parents to constantly monitor their language practices at home based on the assumption that language is a fixed, countable, and complete system.

Part of a broader ethnographic research with Japanese-English multilingual families in the UK, this article focuses on a single-family case study, through which it aims to critically examine the way in which OPOL is negotiated and exercised in situated language practices in the family home. Focusing particularly on language interactions between two pre- and early-school age children and their mother, the paper shows how the strategic and creative employment of linguistic resources by children undermines monolingualist dogmas that OPOL is reliant on. The paper thus makes a significant contribution to the empirical study of translanguaging.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging
• translingual practices
• language as resource
• linguistic repertoire
• family language policy
• heteroglossia

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to K family, Kumiko, Kyoka, Ken and Kevin for allowing me to conduct fieldwork at private spare of their family home. Their thoughts and experiences were all very stimulating and I enjoyed being a part of their family activity. I also acknowledge the helpful comments from the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Chisato Danjo is a Lecturer in the School of Languages and Linguistics at York St John University. Her research interests are in the area of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and educational linguistics, especially on the topics of multilingualism, language policy and practice, family language planning and maintenance, and language issues relating to culture and identity.

Notes

1 More recent studies on code-switching have looked at not only ‘linguistic forms’ but contextual elements in language-in-use.

2 These names are pseudonym – I kept the names as they appeared in the broader project (K family). The age shown in this paper was at the time of April 2012.

3 The BCCWJ corpus indicates 528 frequencies of アイスクリーム(aisukurimu), and 0 appearances of アイスクリームズ(aisukurimuzu).

4 In my experience of observing this family, Ken often called his mother as okasan, mama or mami in Japanese, and mum or mummy in English. The BCCWJ corpus shows 7517 frequencies of お母さん・おかあさん (okasan); 5606 frequencies of ママ (mama); 94 frequencies of マミー (mami). Although ‘mamu’ hit 438 frequencies, those were not referring to ‘mother’ (I have checked the first 50 in the random list), but instead to parts of other words (such as the word, makishimamu [maximum]). Therefore, mamu can be considered an irregular case.

5 The BCCWJ corpus indicates 3164 frequencies of ケーキ (keki), and only 14 forケーク(keiku). It also shows 186 frequencies of カスタード (kasutado).

6 エアープレイン (eapureinu) has 0 instances, while トラウザズ(torauzazu) makes only 6 appearances in the BCCWJ corpus.

7 –chan is normally ‘used in addressing children – especially female – and in some intimate relationships’ (Matsuda 2002, 45).

8 –kun is usually used ‘in addressing someone of lower status or male children’ (Matsuda 2002, 45).