A Kind of Success Story: Family Language Policy in Three Different Sociopolitical Contexts

ABSTRACT

This article scrutinizes the concept of “success” in family language policy (henceforth FLP). Situated in three large-scale ethnographic projects, we center on the lived experiences of a parent in three families negotiating a pro-minority language FLP. These parents’ experiences are embedded in different sociopolitical contexts: an immigrant context (Turkish in the Netherlands); an autochthonous minority language context (Gaelic in Scotland); and an officially bilingual state (Swedish in Finland). As two of the parents are “new” speakers of the minority language, our analysis centers in part on how “legitimacy” poses both challenges and opportunities to their successful pro-minority language FLP. We conclude by advocating for a more holistic and family-based approach to gauging the “success” of individual FLPs, rather than relying on the child’s linguistic output as the main means of determining whether or not an FLP is “successful.”

KEYWORDS:

• Family language policy
• language maintenance
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research described in this paper was supported by a grant from the Academy of Finland, Research Council for Culture and Society [grant number 266850] and a grant from the Irish Research Council [grant number GOIPD/2016/644].