The family as a space: multilingual repertoires, language practices and lived experiences

ABSTRACT

The field of family language policy has flourished in recent years addressing an ever-increasing breadth of transnational populations, family types, and linguistic configurations. Furthermore, diverse established and innovative methodological approaches have unlatched the door to enhanced understandings of family multilingualism. A focus on ethnographic approaches is in line with current trends in sociolinguistic enquiry, providing deep insight into multilingual families, as demonstrated by this thematic issue on ‘Exploring the multilingual family repertoire: Ethnographic approaches’, edited by Luk Van Mensel and Maartje De Meulder. An underlying current in the studies of this special issue is the notion of the family as a space, negotiated through the multilingual family repertoire – multilingual practices that embrace the speakers’ lived experiences. This concluding discussion analyzes the ways in which the four articles address the family as a multilingual space and highlights some of the more salient aspects that deserve further attention, looking beyond at new potential approaches to critically addressing family multilingualism.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingual families
• repertoire
• space
• ethnography
• family language policy
• practices

Setting the scene

The spotlight on multilingual families in research has intensified in recent years, in large part thanks to the foundational work of King, Fogle, and Logan-Terry (2008) who called for the study of family language policy. Originally emanating from language policy research, the field of family language policy (FLP) merges insights from research on child language acquisition, language socialization, and language maintenance and shift (for an overview, see Curdt-Christiansen 2018; Lanza and Lomeu Gomes 2020). Earlier studies aimed to ‘draw clear causal links across ideologies, practices, and outcomes’ (King 2016, 731), while more recent work also brings out issues of meaning-making, lived experiences, agency and identity constructions in multilingual transnational families (Zhu Hua and Li Wei 2016; King and Lanza 2019; Lanza and Curdt-Christiansen 2018; Smith-Christmas 2019). King (2016) outlined an historical approach to the field of FLP with the latest phase including a greater diversity of family types and languages and greater variety of research methods. Indeed, studies of families in the twenty-first century are zooming in on the diversity of modern families with new family forms (Golombok 2015) and with diversified family language policies, including innovative methodologies and new contexts (Purkarthofer 2019; Wright 2020; Wright and Higgins in press).

The field of FLP has followed developments in the transformation of sociolinguistic research on multilingualism, involving two broad processes of change, as outlined by Martin-Jones and Martin (2017): the one points to epistemological shifts to ethnographic and critical approaches while the other points to an increasing focus on the study of the social, cultural and linguistic changes brought about by contemporary globalization. These include transnational population flows, new communication technologies, and changes in the political and economic landscape. Transnational families, or ‘families that stretch across borders’, are in fact not new as underscored by Baldassar et al. (2014, 169). As they point out (2014, 174), ‘Rather, it is the scale of mobility that has been radically transformed as well as the revolution in travel and communication technologies’ that contribute to these social relationships stretched across time and place. Many multilingual families result from immigration and transnational movement; however, others may be from intercultural marriages and bonds. As noted in Lanza and Li Wei (2016, 653), ‘Some are recently established, others have existed for generations; globalization only serves to intensify the encounters of different traditions, values and languages of the various members of the family’.

The contributions to this special issue all contribute to cutting-edge research in this growing field, both theoretically and methodologically, through a focus on ethnographic approaches to the exploration of multilingual family repertoires that cover a host of named languages, both spoken and signed. As an ensemble, the articles embody the evolving transformations in sociolinguistic research on multilingualism. While the studies involve nuclear families, they effectively illustrate the complexities of family life and multilingual repertoires through the ethnographic methods and interactional analyses. An underlying current in the studies of this special issue is the notion of the family as a space, negotiated through the multilingual family repertoire – multilingual practices that embrace the speakers’ lived experiences.

The family as space and space in the family

In classic Fishmanian sociolinguistics, the family has been considered a private domain that sets parameters for, and thus constrains, how one uses and chooses language with family members (Fishman 1991). Implicit in this approach is the conception of the family as a set of relationships within the space of the home. In many studies of FLP, the family has typically referred to Western nuclear heteronormative two-parent families with children, all biologically related. The very notion of family, however, has been critically addressed in recent approaches to FLP (Lanza and Lomeu Gomes 2020; Palviainen 2020a; Wright 2020; Wright and Higgins in press). Nonetheless, each family is unique and complex in its own way and deserves critical attention in studies of FLP. A distinguishing feature of a multilingual family is how the family members engage in communication with one another, that is, through their diversified linguistic practices. While language policy encompasses language practices with practices having the potential to become bottom up policy, there is good reason to tease these two notions apart in the study of multilingual families (Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018). For example, whereas parents may claim to follow a One person – One language policy with their children, an examination of language practices may reveal that they actually engage the full breadth of their multilingual repertoire in family communication (cf. Lanza 1997/2004; Curdt-Christiansen 2016).

Building on Gumperz’ (1964) classic approach to linguistic repertoires, current sociolinguistics has reconceptualized the very nature of language and linguistic competence in order to take into account dynamic mobile speech communities, as opposed to the stable communities in Gumperz’ work (Busch 2012, 2017). Work on repertoires has engaged innovative methods such as language portraits that bring to bear bodily and emotional dimensions of speakers’ embodied multilingual repertoires, in reference to both spoken and signed languages (Kusters and De Meulder 2019; Purkarthofer 2019). Addressing multilingual repertoires as practice can capture the actual ways in which speakers engage in translanguaging, which ‘reconceptualizes language as a multilingual, multisemiotic, multisensory, and multimodal resource for sense – and meaning-making’ (Li Wei 2018, 22). This is well illustrated in Van Mensel’s (2018, 2020) notion of a multilingual ‘familylect’ through which a family’s language policy evolves through everyday interactions. Families construct themselves, their family identity, through many ways and language plays an important role in this construction. In other words, who is considered ‘family’ is negotiated through language practices. The very dynamic and complex nature of ‘stretched’ families brings in the necessity to envisage the family as a space, social in nature, as opposed to a domain. The family can be conceptualized as a space, not constrained by geography or physical presence, in which meaning and relationships are negotiated through linguistic and semiotic resources, that is, the multilingual repertoire. This is an implicit recurrent theme in the contributions to this special issue.

The notion of space as developed by Lefebvre (1991), Massey (2005), and others has had an important impact on the social sciences and humanities, and has gained ground in current applied linguistic research and theorizing. Space is conceived as dynamic and continually negotiated among various social actors with different discursive power, material constraints, and spatial practices. Rather than being fixed entities, social units or structures are conceived as dynamic and emergent in social interaction. The family is a socially constructed concept (cf. Wilson and Tonner 2020 on the social construction of family in family businesses). From the field of family sociology, Halatcheva-Trapp, Montanari, and Schlinzig (2019, 2) point out that ‘While the ‘spatial turn’ within the social sciences has already nurtured a broad discussion of the relation between society and space, little attention has so far been paid to the question of what we can learn about families when exploring space in its different facets’.

Theories of the construction of social space are highly relevant for research on family language policy and practices, which defies the conception of the family as a private domain. For example, media discourses have thrust immigrant families into the public arena and some politicians have even proposed that these families speak the societal language in the home. In so doing, they meddle in the families’ FLP and construct the family as a public space in which heretofore private matters can be openly commented upon and discussed (Lanza 2020a). Multilingual transnational families today may actually find themselves at the crossroads between private and public discourses (Purkarthofer, Lanza, and Berg 2021). On the other hand, some parents may negotiate family space as public space through ‘sharenting’ (Blum-Ross and Livingstone 2017), or sharing parenting experiences online through blogs and vlogs of FLP (Lanza 2020b). We are reminded of the social embedding of family language policies by Mirvahedi (2020, 405) who notes, ‘language ideologies, practices, and management in a family do not take place in a social vacuum; rather, they interact with the sociopolitical, historical, and economic realities in which families find themselves’. As highlighted in Lanza and Lomeu Gomes (2020, 165), ‘the family can be conceptualized as a space along the private – public continuum of arenas of social life’.

With a focus on practice, we view ‘language as an activity rather than a structure, as something we do rather than a system we draw on’ (Pennycook 2010, 2). Speakers may negotiate a translanguaging space, ‘a space that is created by and for Translanguaging practices, and a space where language users break down the ideologically laden dichotomies between the macro and the micro, the societal and the individual, and the social and the psychological through interaction’ (Li Wei 2018, 23). Ethnography provides a finely tuned lens onto lived experiences with which to examine multilingual repertoires in family language practices and how they are used in negotiating space and creating family ties (Lomeu Gomes 2020). All four contributions to this special issue effectively highlight the value of ethnographic approaches in combination with other methods to unpack the multilingual families’ dynamic policies and practices to finely reveal their lived experiences through their multilingual repertoires. Furthermore, the researchers demonstrate a high degree of reflexivity in their rich descriptions of the data and their methods.

Ethnographic approaches to understanding the family as a multilingual space

The linguistic repertoire has been interpreted as a spatial practice (cf. Canagarajah 2018). Pennycook (2018, 453–454) notes in his description of sellers in an open market in Asia that ‘ … linguistic resources intersect with the spatial organization of other repertoires … that bring a range of other semiotic practices into play’. He proposes to examine repertoires ‘from individual and social to spatial and distributed’ (450). While the focus on space prevails, Kramsch (2018, 108), however, offers ‘a word of caution against the current engagement with space and the concomitant neglect of time and history’ (cf. also Busch 2017). This is important in considering families as a space. As Hirsch and Lee (2018) point out in their systematic literature review of studies of FLP, there is a need to trace transnational families’ policies and practices across time. Lanza and Lomeu Gomes (2020, 164) argue that ‘The family can be conceptualized as a dynamic temporal body and FLP should be analyzed accordingly’. Family space is continually negotiated as are spaces within the family, as the contributions to this special issue illustrate so well. For example, in Said’s study, the Arabic-speaking parent in the UK was concerned about her child spending time in digital spaces; however, once she realized the affordances this space gave for ensuring the maintenance of the heritage language (HL), she actively brought this digital space into the heart of the family, encouraging the child to attend to YouTube channels in Arabic. As Said stresses, with strategic parental support and the agency of the children in the family in how they choose to react to technology for HL learning, ‘technology can transform the home into a hub where the learning and maintenance of the HL is advocated in multiple unprecedented ways’ (1). The complexities of the multilingual repertoire are especially demonstrated in the case of the use of Arabic in a non-Arabic speaking country such as the UK, as in Said’s study. Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic are traditionally used in more formal situations and in writing, while colloquial varieties of Arabic have been for spontaneous interactions in the home. However, as Bassiouney (2020) illustrates, developments in technology and online linguistic practices have resulted in the use of colloquial forms in writing, according them legitimacy, and also resulting in greater exposure to Arabic dialects across the Arab world and hence support for the HL. New communication technologies present transnational families with opportunities for enhancing multilingual repertoires that earlier generations could have only dreamed of (Palviainen 2020b). In the family studied by Said, the distantly located grandmother was incorporated into daily interaction and socialization through Skype, as witnessed in dinner sequences, illustrating very well the notion of family as a negotiated space that disregards co-location. This is reminiscent of King-O’Riain’s (2014) study of Italian grandparents remaining on Skype while their grandchildren in Ireland were watching television, asking them to translate what was said. Their practice provided not only support for the heritage language but also emotional support for all concerned.

In Smith-Christmas’ study, the Polish family in Ireland implicitly created what the author refers to as a ‘third neutral space’/ ‘a third linguistic space’ involving the use of Irish, which would neutralize power dimensions that otherwise existed in the family concerning the competence of English and Polish. Interestingly, the notion of a third space figures prominently in postcolonial discourse as articulated by Homi Bhabha (1994). Bhabha posits hybridity as central in this discourse and argues for a form of in-between space, or third space, where individuals and cultures meet and negotiate identities that are fluid and transformed beyond established categorizations of culture and identity. The concept of ‘third space’ is actively used in the study of intercultural communication (cf. Zhou and Pilcher 2019). Li Wei (2018, 23–24) approaches the notion of a translanguaging space with the vision of Thirdspace as articulated by the postmodern urban theorist Soja (1996). He (Li Wei 2018, 24) states, ‘A Translanguaging Space acts as a Thirdspace which does not merely encompass a mixture or hybridity of first and second languages; instead it invigorates languaging with new possibilities … ’. Smith-Christmas deftly illustrates the polysemy that is inherent in the power/solidarity negotiations in the third space in the family, involving the use of Irish revealing the fluidity of linguistic expertise. While the children in the family were more proficient in English and the parents in Polish, Irish provided a space in which power dimensions could be mitigated. Smith-Christmas (13) points out that her ‘choice to refer to Polish, Irish and English as ‘languages’ rather than ‘linguistic resources’ or approaching the data from a translanguaging perspective’ is due to the fact that the family members themselves saw them as discrete languages. The family thus engaged their multilingual repertoire in their various negotiations of family spaces, with the third space opening up for fluidity in regards to power and solidarity among the girls and their parents. What this analysis highlights is the importance of examining practices at the micro-level, that is, in social interactions. The ethnographic approach of the four contributions to the volume successfully anchor their analyses in the mundane conversations of families as they are engaged in ‘doing family’.

The construction of a safe space for family languages was the original interest of Purkarthofer in her study of German speakers living in Norway (Purkarthofer 2019). In her contribution to this special issue, she hones in on the family members’ lived experiences of language through highly innovative multimodal methods in order to understand subject positioning and negotiations among these family members in regards to FLPs and practices. She draws on the notion of ‘communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991), which applied to families may be defined as a social unit that has its ‘own ways of speaking, acting and believing’ (Lanza 2007, 47), emphasizing practices and how individuals gradually become members of the community. In this respect, it is particularly interesting to investigate ‘partially shared linguistic repertoires’ (Wenger 1998), which can contribute to understanding both the center and periphery in the scope of FLP. Through her study, Purkarthofer shows ‘how speakers distinguish social spaces that are governed by the FLP and others that are perceived as more peripheral’ (2). As she points out concerning the families she studied, the lived experiences of languages may lead to family members having different perspectives on speaking German and Norwegian, with future prospects potentially rendering certain practices more peripheral. Through the creative task, the parents revealed different social spaces as relevant for their FLP, some more central with others more peripheral, and spaces where peripheral participation was possible, including encounters with the researcher in which (partially) shared linguistic repertoires may be a precondition for research. Purkarthofer’s study reveals the complexities of multilingual families’ repertoires and how they are involved in the negotiation of the family as a space across various social actors.

The potential of creating a community of practice across multilingual families on a joint holiday is an intriguing question that may be raised in light of Kusters, De Meulder and Napier’s contribution to the special issue. Indeed, the family as a private space becomes renegotiated in regards to FLP, at least in part, as a common space among the four families in their study as they engage in a ‘4FLP process’. Kusters, De Meulder and Napier highlight the high degree of complexity involved in FLPs – both practices and decision-making strategies – when four deaf-hearing European families embark on a twelve-day holiday in India, during which all four families were together for seven days. Four of the parents are deaf while all of the seven children (between 2 and 11) are hearing. Each of the families, prior to the holiday, use more than one language in the home – at least one signed language and one spoken. They resided in the UK and had friendship ties prior to the holiday. Altogether the families represent six signed languages, including IS (International Sign), and three spoken languages, including English. Although the families are nuclear ones, the article brings new light to FLP research through its inquiry into both intra- and inter-family dynamics in an intensive period when everyone is together. Most intriguing is the juxtaposition of both signed and spoken languages during the holiday when multilingual and bimodal interactions were the norm. The negotiation of the families’ communal space, or what we may call a temporary family community of practice, involved various aspects of the members’ multilingual repertoires: mixing, switching and learning languages; language brokering; and both speaking and signing, with signing as the only modality that all members could access. Parents aimed to steer their children in the direction of the desired modality for the situation, entering what they termed ‘a slippery slope’, at times trying signspeaking, and usually ending up in a dual-lingual interaction. The children exercised their agency influencing the 4FLP on the holiday; instead of choosing a modality that was more inclusive, their choice was more pragmatic, based on who they were talking to. During the holiday, negotiations of FLP led at times to tensions over the use of speech and/or sign. The children were especially agentive in influencing the 4FLP, inadvertently constructing spaces of inclusion and exclusion.

Looking forward

The contributions to this special issue bring the study of multilingual families forward in many interesting ways through the ethnographic and interactional approaches taken in their study of multilingual repertoires in family language policies and practices. In the following, I highlight some of the more salient aspects that deserve further attention and also look beyond at new potential approaches to critically addressing family multilingualism.

Inherent in all of the studies in this issue is the conception of the family as a space, negotiated through the multilingual family repertoire – multilingual practices that embrace the speakers’ lived experiences, as discussed above (cf. Van Mensel 2018). The ethnographic approaches taken, including the creative methodologies employed, provide us with insights into the complexities involved in the decision-making and engaging of multilingual and semiotic resources in constructing, negotiating and doing ‘family’. Mirvahedi (2021) makes a renewed call to employ interactional sociolinguistics to the study of multilingual families within a FLP framework, an approach that has its roots in Döpke (1992), Lanza (1997/2004) and Gafaranga (2010). All four studies in this issue highlight interactions in the family, among family members as well as in ethnographic interviews engaging family members. Careful micro-analyses of conversation embedded in ethnography, including ‘collaborative auto-ethnography’ among the families on holiday, can provide valuable insights into how speakers orient towards their lived experiences through their multilingual repertoires. Also, as witnessed in these studies, multilingual repertoires may be shared or partially shared, and the degree to which they are activated can lead to inclusion or exclusion, issues that also deserve more attention in studies of transnational families.

Of particular interest in looking forward is child agency, an issue that has received increasing attention in studies of multilingual families, particularly in light of language maintenance and shift (Gafaranga 2010; Revis 2019). Children’s agency is vital in language socialization and more general in parent – child relations, and careful analyses of family interactions reveal ‘the dynamic and relational nature of child agency and how it is both shaped by as well as shapes interactional practices over time and space’ (Smith-Christmas 2021). In this regard, child agency and especially agency in sibling interactions deserves more attention, as Kheirkhah and Cekaite (2017) pointed out in their study of Iranian families in Sweden, and as several of the contributions to this issue illustrate.

Digital platforms have transformed language practices in multilingual transnational families and provided new dimensions for investigating family language policies and practices (cf. Lanza & Lexander 2019; Martín-Bylund and Stenliden 2020). This will without doubt be an important way forward in the study of multilingual families, yet it will present challenges. Palviainen and Kędra (2021: 95) hold ‘that in order to understand contemporary digital multilingual families, one must be very ambitious: the goal must be to encompass the full ecology of non-mediated as well as mediated communication in a family network’. In essence, this involves tracing the negotiation of family space across various media. The Covid-19 pandemic emphasized the need for digital communication during times of physical distancing and online practices will surely only continue to be important for families.

More work should be done on multilingual families with signed languages and those with both signed and spoken languages. The complexity of bimodal communication among families with different multilingual repertoires was clearly brought out in the four families on holiday. The practice of signspeaking is of special interest in light of translanguaging spaces and creating opportunities for inclusion. The advantages, challenges and pitfalls with this practice are clearly evident, yet it can play an important role in a family’s multilingual repertoire.

The creation and adoption of innovative methods has pushed the field forward, and will continue to do so, as exemplified in this special issue. The embodiment of the multilingual repertoire through the silhouette language portrait (Busch 2012) has been a highly successful method for eliciting emotions speakers associate with their languages, in addition to ideologies. Affect is an important dimension that deserves further inquiry and speakers often have many stories to tell that shed light on their stance towards their languages and practices. Both parents and caregivers as well as children have many narratives of personal experience related to their family language policies and practices. While narrative analysis is a developed field of inquiry, FLP research has not drawn sufficiently upon this resource. Such narratives involving multilingual families offer interesting platforms for investigating language ideologies and the negotiation of agency (De Fina 2003; Lanza 2012). As argued in Lanza (2020b), multilingual parents’ blogs and vlogs can be analyzed as narratives of family language policy, in which we witness how the family can be negotiated as a public space where writers offer advice based on their own experiences.

Finally, issues of power and solidarity are pervasive throughout the studies and will truly continue to be important in the study of family language policies and practices. The pandemic has further exposed the deep inequalities that are rampant in society and sociolinguistics has embraced an increasingly critical stance to how discursive reproductions of gender, race/ethnicity and class are hierarchized. Lomeu Gomes (2018, 51) proposed ‘a decolonial approach to family multilingualism’ in order to advance the study of FLP theoretically and address such social categorizations (cf. Lomeu Gomes and Lanza in press).

The field of FLP has to date delivered important and exciting findings involving a multitude of both established and innovative research methods, often in combination with ethnographic approaches to the research, as so well illustrated in this special issue. Epistemological shifts to ethnographic and critical approaches have marked a transformation in the contemporary sociolinguistics of multilingualism, as pointed out by Martin-Jones and Martin (2017). Ethnographic approaches will truly continue to provide us with valuable understandings of how multilinguals construct and navigate family space and what it means for them to engage in doing family.

Acknowledgements

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

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Norges Forskningsråd [Grant Number 223265].