Navigating partially shared linguistic repertoires: attempts to understand centre and periphery in the scope of family language policy

ABSTRACT

The aim of the paper is to understand how German speakers living in Norway with their families navigate partially shared repertoires. Using the notion of legitimate peripheral participation, I aim to analyse how family members work towards shared repertoires in the family or account for only partially shared linguistic and cultural repertoires within the family and wider social contexts. This speaker-centred research draws on interviews and multimodal activities. Language experiences, ideologies and narratives are analysed to understand subject positioning and negotiations among the family members (and the researcher). Findings indicate that speakers distinguish social spaces that are governed by the family language policy and others that are perceived as more peripheral, albeit relevant to interact with friends and relatives. Apart from the immediate experiences of family members, national contexts and references are used in the interviews and creative tasks to construct the family’s position in a transnational space. Within this special issue, this paper relates to the use of complex semiotic resources that families use to construct and maintain family language policies, especially in light of the subjects’ positions vis-à-vis ideological and societal discourses.

KEYWORDS:

• Family language policy
• linguistic repertoire
• Norway
• German
• language biographies
• multimodal and creative methods

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the families who accepted me into their homes and with whom I spent enjoyable and insightful moments. I also thank the editors for their patience and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The colours can be seen in the online version of this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme [project number 223265, FriPro MultiFam 240725].