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Building expectations: Imagining family languages policy and heteroglossic social
spaces
Judith Purkarthofer, judith.purkarthofer@iln.uio.no
Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan, University of Oslo
Abstract
Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions:
The article examines the language expectations of three couples with different language
backgrounds – each expecting their first child. The study addresses three related
questions: In what ways are linguistic resources imagined by the future parents? What
social spaces and relations do they envision themselves and their child moving in, and
how is this relevant for their family language policy?
Design/Methodology/Approach:
Situated within an ethnographic framework, speaker-centered qualitative methods
(language portraits, biographic narratives) are combined with analysis of multimodal
tasks to analyze the parents' construction of spaces of interaction, drawing on Lefebvre’s
triadic concept of the production of space (1991).
Data and Analysis:
Co-constructed narratives of the three couples were elicited: starting with individual
language biographies, the couples then constructed their family’s future in the form of
visual representations of the spaces that they are about to inhabit. Recordings and
pictures of the constructions were analyzed jointly to understand how parents assign
relevancy to their language resources, social spaces and family language policies.
Findings/Conclusions:
The analysis shows how the parents construct the child as a multilingual self in her/his
own right, subject to a biography that will develop, and who is influenced but not
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controlled by the parents. The multimodal data provide a window into the negotiation of
language policy between the future parents.
Originality:
The innovative character of this paper comes from its combination of speaker-centered
biographical methods with the interactive construction of three-dimensional future
family spaces. Methodologically, this contribution renders theories of the construction
of social space relevant for research on family language policy and practices.
Significance/Implications:
While the study deals with the very specific situation of approaching parenthood, the
findings, together with its original methodology and analytical framework, shed light on
the construction of family language policy as an on-going process, starting before birth.
Key words
speaker-centered approach, family language policy, language biographies, social spaces,
parental expectations
1 Introduction
Family Language Policy (FLP) examines language planning and language choice
among family members. This article centers on the development of FLP and the
motivations and aspirations of parents before their first child is born. Parents are,
beyond their perceived role as caregivers, embedded in public discourses on languages,
and they are active participants in superdiverse environments within their local
community and in contexts of transnational migration (cf. Crippen & Brew, 2007;
Dagenais & Berron, 2001; Dong, 2012; Roubeni, De Haene, Keatley, Shah &
Rasmussen, 2015). Their perception of societal beliefs, as well as their biographic
experience and abilities, play a part in their decisions to expose children to all or parts of
their linguistic repertoire. As King and Fogle (2006, p. 699) show, these processes are
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evident among multilingual parents but also among parents who grew up monolingual
but decide to introduce a second language to their child.
Situated within an ethnographic framework, this research draws on speaker-centered
qualitative methods (language portraits, biographic narratives, see Busch, 2006). This
paper examines the negotiation of language ideologies among individuals and groups of
speakers, and analyzes social space to gain a broader understanding of how language
regimes are realized and perceived in practice. Within the framework of FLP, the
concepts and methodology of speaker-centered approaches can be used to further
understand families’ choices, motivations and the planning and implementation of FLP.
In this article, the focus is on the construction of the child's agency concerning language
use, even before the child’s birth. Thus, the analysis targets how parents co-construct
their unborn child as an actor in their imagined FLP. In the following section, the
theoretical connections between speakers' biographical language experiences, language
ideologies and language regimes are discussed and the importance of social space for
this study is explained. Subsequently, the methodological approach is presented, along
with information on participants and data collection. An explanation is provided for how
and why language portraits and LEGO® building blocks can be productively used to
encourage parents talk about their expectations and motivations. Data from both
activities are then presented and analyzed to arrive at some conclusions about parental
co-construction of multilingual family spaces, including the role of the (unborn) child in
the construction of the FLP.
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2 Multilingual speakers in social spaces
In talking about families as constructing and inhabiting dynamic systems of meaning-
making, attention needs to be drawn to the positions and imaginations that family
members hold as subjects. These experiences can be regarded as lived language
experiences of speakers, composed of their individual emotions, their social encounters,
their biographies of language learning and use, and their aspirations and ideas about
languages. Over time, these experiences form linguistic repertoires (Gumperz, 1964;
Busch, 2012), including not only competencies, but all kinds of relations and knowledge
drawing on different languages, speech styles, modes of expression and the contexts of
their use. The linguistic repertoire changes over the lifespan as it develops according to
individuals’ needs, ideas and possibilities of participation. Some languages gain more
importance over time; some may be forgotten or even lost as they are not used any
longer or associated with negative social value. Important biographical events, like
becoming a parent, are expected to have an influence on the construction and re-
evaluation of one's own language biography. Language choices are likely to be
negotiated between the parents: as such, aspirations and imaginations occupy an
important part of the interviews and activities in the data elicitation methods of this
study.
Drawing on Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia (Busch, 2012), forms of speech and
language are taken here as being combined meaningfully to accommodate linguistic and
communicative needs in any given time and space. Kramsch (2009, p. 2) introduced the
notion of the multilingual self to understand how “[a]s a sign system, language elicits
subjective responses in the speakers themselves: emotions, memories, fantasies,
projections, identifications. Because it is not only a code but also a meaning-making
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system, language constructs the historical sedimentation of meanings that we call
our 'selves'”. These multilingual selves are seen as changing over time, building up
experiences to construct one's own positioning as an individual in society. Individual
speakers may feel confident or vulnerable in their heteroglossic environments,
depending on their resources and strategies, but they are also dependent on the language
ideologies and language regimes they encounter. Norton (2013, p. 45) uses the term
‘identity’ to describe “how a person understands his or her relationship to the world,
how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how the person
understands possibilities for the future”. Both Kramsch (2009) and Norton (2013)
provide insights into the affective links and imaginations helping or hindering desired
participation in (new) language environments.
Language environments are shaped by language ideologies, which encompass beliefs
and evaluations of languages and (maybe more importantly) their speakers. Irvine and
Gal (2000) described processes of differentiation through ideologies in multilingual
contexts. More recently, Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004, p. 3) pointed to the
importance of language ideologies, stating that “the fact that languages – and language
ideologies – are anything but neutral is especially visible in multilingual societies where
some languages and identity options are, in unforgettable Orwellian words, 'more equal
than others'”. Within families, language ideologies can motivate parents to push their
children towards the use of perceived languages of social success, but they can also
drive parental support for the maintenance of family languages in minority or migration
contexts. There is little question about the crucial role of family socialization when it
comes to language transmission, maintenance, or shift (Lanza, 2007; Hinton, 2013), and
FLP proves an especially interesting perspective to understanding choices by
multilingual parents (King & Fogle, 2006; Piller 2002) or parental choices in situations
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of migration (Curdt-Christiansen, 2009). Despite the focus on parents in these works,
the family in FLP is generally seen as a dynamic system, including both adults and
children as actors with their own agency (Gafaranga, 2010; Schwartz & Verschik,
2013). This aligns with the emerging focus on children as actors 'in their own right'
(Mayall, 2002). As parents and children move through social and geographical spaces,
they encounter different language ideologies and different language regimes.
Language regimes are seen as the set of manifest, implicit and explicit norms and
regulations of language use in any given social space (see contributions in Kroskrity,
2000). They include individuals' decisions as well as nationwide language policies and
contradictory language regimes might exist within the same space. Language regimes in
family spaces are of course influenced by FLP, but while the focus of FLP is on a
smaller number of social actors, societal language ideologies and language regimes are
negotiated among a greater number of speakers, bound together by long-term
connections but also short-term interactions.
Conducting research in a specific, localized environment, and gaining situated
knowledge about spatial and language practices, allows for in-depth insights into
complex systems (England, 2008). Space, seen as a relevant dimension for the analysis
of social interaction, is understood as a documentation of social forces, dynamically
constructed, and both historically grounded and performed over time (Massey, 2005;
Tuan 1977).
Lefebvre's (1991) triadic framework of the production of space, which is the main
framework of analysis, focuses on the construction of social spaces, as they are
negotiated between actors with their discursive power, material constraints, and spatial
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practices. Examples of the ways that his work has provided theoretical grounding to
research on multilingualism and space include, among others, Ma's research on
translocality in Hong Kong youth culture (2002) and Busch's research on the use of
diacritics as a spatial marker in a minority language context (2013). Lefebvre
distinguishes three aspects of the production of social space: spatial practices, which
consist of a multitude of (almost invisible) actions, and they cannot be accessed as data
directly. Through language use and everyday actions, spatial practices contribute to the
construction of spaces, and make them recognizable to speakers. Participants can make
use of spatial representations to express their intentions and the 'rulings' of their
surroundings (planned space). In the building exercise in this study, spatial
representations are used to express intended policies and to distinguish spaces as they
ought to be. At the same time, spaces of representation (lived space) are present,
specifically in the form of intervening experiences and actions. Space of representation
is what Lefebvre names ‘perceived space’, the space of inhabitants and users. When
talking about their future, parents used these spaces to negotiate potential interventions
and the unexpected.
3 Methodology and Multimodal Data
Using an innovative methodological framework, this research links bodily and
emotional experience to social constructions and representations, and focuses on the
motivations and interpretations of the parents. Conducting research on lived language
experience can be done through different modes, but it always deals with individual and
societal experience: asking speakers to reflect on and talk about their language
biographies, specific parts of their linguistic repertoire or learning experiences that may
have accompanied them for an extended period of time. Rather than guiding participants
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to discuss FLP directly, their understandings and explanations are interpreted through
engaging them in discussion and creative manual activities. Categories are introduced
by the research participants themselves, as they draw on their knowledge and
evaluations to construct their future language goals. For the analysis, two sets of data
were used, and the methodological background and procedure for each is described
below.
3.1 Collecting biographical data
Participants were asked to use an empty silhouette of a human shape to draw with
colored pens all the languages that were/are/will be relevant to them. This task has been
developed as part of language biographical research (Busch, 2006; 2012), both with
children and adults. Language portraits cannot be analyzed independently from each
speaker's descriptions and explanations, but they are used as a starting point for
interviews, enabling participants to think about their languages in a different way and
through the visual cues to foster understanding between participants and researchers.
Busch's (2006) work on biographical methodology, bodily experience and
interpretations of language experience shows how a set of methods is needed to access
meaning and to offer insights into the meaning-making of speakers. The multimodal
methods employed in this study fulfill this purpose.
The couples in this study were asked to draw individual language portraits and then to
talk about their own language biographies, their imaginings and aspirations for
themselves and their child. In the course of the conversation, they were also asked about
intended language use and policy. These first parts of the interviews were audio-
recorded, transcribed and analyzed to identify individual's language biographies, and the
language decisions and experiences the parents considered meaningful for their own
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parenting style.
3.2 Eliciting representations of social spaces
Language biographical methods tend to focus on individuals' accounts and while most
participants will start talking together about their expectations, it is productive to use a
complementary research method that demands a higher degree of negotiation and
intersubjective construction. To capture intended and imagined FLP as they are about to
happen in a social space, the second part of the meeting consisted of the building of a
joint future – taking a closer look at the social spaces and encounters the families were
planning for themselves and their child. Thus, the parents were provided with LEGO®
building blocks (of different shapes and colors, including plants, human figures and
some animals) and asked to use them to express the spaces they found relevant, now and
in the imagined future. Gauntlett (2007) used a comparable approach in media studies,
asking for expressions of identity through building with LEGO® blocks. However,
while his participants were asked to build their own identities, the focus in this study is
on the joint character of this visual and verbal method. The playful character, the re-
discovering of childhood memories linked to these building blocks, and the joint
endeavor made this approach appealing, with all participants starting to work on their
constructions without hesitation. After a short period of uninterrupted building,
participants were asked to explain their construction, which led to interesting
negotiations, possible resignifications, and subsequent shifts in meaning throughout the
conversation. Through this novel task, the parents were presented with the necessity to
(re)formulate points of view they perceived as shared, which fostered talking about
'everyday life' from a new perspective. Each couple was recorded, with audio and video
recording, and pictures of the buildings and arrangements were taken. These data were
transcribed and analyzed for spatial representations and spaces of representations. The
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findings from this exercise were brought together with the professed intentions and
evaluations from the biographical descriptions and interpretations.
3.3 Participants
The participants were three heterosexual couples: two expecting their first child within
two months, and the child of the third couple was born four weeks prior to the interview.
Participants were between 28 and 45 years of age, and four of them had completed
university education. At the time of the interview, the three couples were each living
together – in Vienna, Western Hungary and South Tyrol/Italy respectively. While two of
the couples have different first languages (English/German, German/Italian), the couple
in Hungary is German-speaking and living in a de facto bilingual border region (see
Table 1). English plays an important role for all participants as a lingua franca in work
contexts but also for personal relations. Italian is one of the main languages in South
Tyrol, relevant for both family and work contexts. Hungarian, Spanish and Turkish were
connected with biographic events for some of the participants but carried less
importance at the moment of the interviews. All but one of the participants had prior
experience of living abroad.
Table 1. Reported background information.
Couple 1 (Vienna) Couple 2 (Hungary) Couple 3 (South Tyrol)
Ilse (I) Jack (J) Pia (P)
Friedrich
(F)
Susanna
(S) Adriano (A)
First language German English German German German Italian
Languages in the
relationship E, G E, G G G E, I E, I
Languages with friends G, E E, G, T G, S, E G, E, H G, I, E I, E
Languages of the
environment G G H, G H, G G, I G, I
Languages of work G G, E, T G, E, H G, H, E G, E I, E, G
Languages of the G, E E, G G G G, E E, G
