Family Language Policy: A Case Study of a Russian-Hebrew Bilingual Family: Toward a Theoretical Framework

Abstract

This article presents an in-depth, small-scale qualitative study of a Hebrew-Russian bilingual family with 8 children, and compares the parents' perspective on the family language policy with their children's evaluation of it. Spolsky's (2004, 2009) model of language policy enables tracing the development of the parents' language ideology and management, and unveils discrepancies between the parents' conscious efforts to transmit the heritage language and the actual language practice in the family. The study also refers to a structural contact-linguistic analysis (Myers-Scotton, 2002) of the child-parent bilingual discourse and its implications for family language policy. In the practical aspect, the results of the case study may be instructive to minority parents committed to maintenance of a heritage language in their families.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is based on selected chapters from the doctoral dissertation, “Reversing Language Shift in the Immigrant Family,” supervised by Professor Spolsky and Dr. Amara. I acknowledge the generous sponsorship of the Pratt Foundation, which supported my research in the Doctoral Fellowships of Excellence Program, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, from 2001 to 2005. I am grateful to Professor Elana Shohamy for fruitful discussions concerning language policy.

Notes

¹See interview excerpts 4, 9, 10, 11, and 16.

²A detailed structural analysis of contact Hebrew-Russian varieties is beyond the scope of this article (see Kopeliovich, 2009).