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ABSTRACT
Drawing on data from a longitudinal linguistic ethnographic study of a trilingual (English, Japanese, Spanish) family in Australia, this paper suggests that rather than looking at their language use in terms of family language policy, better insights can be gained by exploring the translingual family repertoire. This repertoire is a central apparatus in the operation of this family, part of what holds the family together, both as an everyday means of communication and as an ideal of family integration. It is a set of resources that different members of the family can draw on in their everyday interactions. Looking at everyday interactions in the family, and the ways these are related both to this repertoire and to surrounding objects and space, this paper suggests that the focus of language use in the family is not on heritage language maintenance or any other kind of language policy, but rather on getting by translingually, on doing family life with the aid of a repertoire of diverse resources. This has important implications for how we think about multilingual families within the wider social domain.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank the members of the family for their willingness and patience during the research process. Thanks also to Emi Otsuji for her advice and critical feedback on an earlier version of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 This ‘researchable contexts’ gloss points to the ways that multilingual diversities have fallen under a recent research gaze but are in other ways far less new than some accounts of superdiversity allow.
2 The children’s names have been changed. The grandmother and father have been de-identified. The mother, a co-author of this paper, retains her name.