Naturalism and ideological work: how is family language policy renegotiated as both parents and children learn a threatened minority language?

Abstract

Parents who enroll their children to be educated through a threatened minority language frequently do not speak that language themselves and classes in the language are sometimes offered to parents in the expectation that this will help them to support their children's education and to use the minority language in the home. Providing language-learning opportunities for parents with children in minority-language education is understood as good practice in language revitalization, but there is little research on the efficacy of this practice. I will present data from narrative, life-history interviews with mothers who have learned Scottish Gaelic to some level and who have children who attend Gaelic-medium education, and I will discuss the difficulties they encounter in establishing new norms of language use in the family and the strategies they use to effect a new language policy in the home. I will show how these mothers work to establish a new norm of Gaelic use in the family in opposition to a common background ideology that understands language as a natural object, and therefore, that it is wrong and bad parenting to ‘force’ a language on a child.

Keywords:

• family language policy
• language ideologies
• immersion education
• adult language learners
• Scottish Gaelic

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Liz NicIlleathainn for reading and commenting on the draft of this paper. I would like to also thank Iain Mac an Tàilleir for helpful discussions of the implications of Ó hIfearnáin's recent research that influenced the arguments in this paper. An early version of this paper was read at the 13th International Conference on Language and Social Psychology, 21 June 2012, Leeuwarden, Fryslân, The Netherlands, and data from this research was also presented at a Soillse Seminar at the University of Edinburgh, 27 February 2013, and I would like to thank the audience members at these presentations for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. In 2010, the lead Gaelic-language development body in Scotland, Bòrd na Gàidhlig, published an interim policy and strategy document, Ginealach ùr na Gàidhlig, in which they identified ‘support for parents’ as the first of five priority action areas, supported by the specific action: ‘Development and promotion of immersion programs as a route to functional fluency for parents, with ongoing mentoring from fluent speakers,’ and evaluated by the key performance indicators: ‘200 additional parents using Gaelic in the home and in the community [and] 25% of parents of GM [Gaelic-Medium] pupils learning Gaelic in order to support their children’, with both targets to be delivered by 31–3-2011 (Bòrd na Gàidhlig 2010, 3 and 9).

2. These two interviews are shared with a corpus of 17 interviews with heritage learners of Gaelic (see Armstrong 2013; Smith-Christmas and Armstrong 2013). These two specific heritage learners acquired some passive proficiency as children, but very limited productive proficiency, and started learning Gaelic as adults at a beginner level.