The promise and resilience of multilingualism: language ideologies and practices of Polish-speaking migrants in the UK post the Brexit vote

ABSTRACT

This article aims to examine how sociopolitical changes impact language ideology and linguistic practices within transnational multilingual families with a particular focus on families with ties to Poland in post-EU-referendum Britain. Drawing on the survey and ethnographic interview data collected as part of the ESRC-funded Family Language Policy project between 2017 and 2019, we found that the public attitude towards Polish and Polish speakers have changed significantly following the Brexit vote. While general lack of security and disappointment were reported by most families, the first-hand experiences of discrimination and violence were reported particularly among those in socioeconomically underprivileged positions. Despite these changes and differences, however, Polish speakers and families continue to hold onto the promise of multilingualism, carrying on with their language use and learning practices. These findings demonstrate the multilingual reality and resilience in family language policy and practices at the time of crisis and have wider implications for understanding influential factors underlying family language policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Family language policy
• multilingual reality
• Polish in the UK
• migrants
• language ideologies
• language maintenance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In general, (Kozminska and Zhu forthcoming a) shows that despite large absolute numbers of those participating in Polish organisations’ activities in the physical world, the majority of ‘Polish’ population does not regularly participate in such activities, which has an impact on language use in public offline diasporic contexts.

2 All quotes are anonymous and all names are pseudonyms. When both Polish and English texts are included, the first text represents the participants’ original contributions. The underscore indicates the word carrying the nuclear accent which usually falls on the last word in the IP. All contributions come from two- or multi-party speech events. When only English is presented, it is in its original form. The English translations in italics follow standard orthography.

3 This is not true for F3 who home-school their children in Polish.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council ("Family Language Policy: A Multi-level Investigation of Multilingual Practices in Transnational Families”, ES/N019105/1).