Ideology,agency,and imagination in multilingual families: An introduction

This thematic issue: The contributions

These two broad trends—one more tangible and demographic, and one more abstract and conceptual—profoundly shape our approaches to understanding language among families. The need to better document how multilingual, transnational families work to imagine themselves and collectively construct and negotiate daily practices drives this thematic issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism. Each of the four papers here takes up this challenge, examining ideology, identity, agency, and imagination among multilingual families as they move through unchartered waters, and enact myriad family language policies with varied interactional outcomes. Below we offer brief overviews of each of the four papers, and then move on to analysis of the shared threads across all of the papers. We close by considering the ways in which this thematic issue moves the field ahead.

Sarah Gallo and Nancy Hornberger’s article, “Immigration policy as family language policy: Mexican immigrant children and families in search of biliteracy,” critically examines how US immigration policy acts as family language policy for Mexican immigrant children and their caretakers. They draw upon the ethnography of Language Policy and Planning to analyze how young Latino children with a recently deported parent construct family language policies across their routine interactions. In order to illustrate how children orient to monoglossic schooling ideologies as they grapple with the possibilities of transnational schooling in Mexico, they present a case study of one eight-year-old girl (Princess). Gallo and Hornberger’s contribution highlights the very limited opportunities to develop dynamic bilingualism or biliteracy in US schools, and how this English-only orientation shapes families’ decisions. These decisions include enduring family separations rather than repatriating to a Mexican school because of the widely spread belief that Mexican-American children are not prepared with the academic Spanish skills needed to succeed in Mexico. Gallo and Hornberger’s analysis reveals the unintended language education consequences of immigration policy as well as the complex ways that a child—in the face of potential separation or repatriation—discursively contributes to family language policy and migration decisions. As they illustrate, these decisions are not only made in a top-down manner by adults, but they also profoundly shaped children’s imagined educational childhoods across transnational contexts. More broadly, Gallo and Hornberger argue for increased attention to the dynamic ways that children discursively contribute to imagining and constructing educational futures across geopolitical borders.

Fatma Said and Zhu Hua take up this challenge in their article, “No, no Maama! Say ‘Shaatir ya Ouledee Shaatir’! Children’s agency in language use and socialisation’’. Their contribution documents how children in multilingual, transnational families mobilize their developing linguistic repertoires to assert personal agency. Defining agency as a person’s “socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn, 2001, p. 11) and to exercise control over their action, they analyze why these acts of agency are conducive to successful maintenance of the so-called “home,” “community,” or “minority” language. Said and Zhu Hua draw on close, qualitative analysis of mealtime multiparty conversations carried out over eight months within one Arabic and English-speaking multilingual family in the UK. Their data reveal the family’s flexible language policy and the importance the family attaches to Arabic. In particular, Said and Zhu Hua document how children in this family are fully aware of their parents’ language preferences and are capable of manipulating that knowledge and asserting their agency through their linguistic choices to achieve their interactional goals. Said and Zhu Hua demonstrate how children are able to negotiate and take up their agency, thus, they argue, influencing parental language use, choice, and inevitably the family’s language policy.

Juldyz Smagulova, in her article, “Ideologies of language revival: Kazakh as school talk”, analyzes the everyday interactions of families engaged in re-acquisition of a “native” language, Kazakh, in a former Soviet republic that became independent in 1991. Smagulova draws upon 15 hours of audio-recorded interactional data from one urban family of ethnic Kazakhs in this post-Soviet context. Children in this family, like in many others, were brought up speaking Russian, but are now enrolled in a Kazakh-medium pre-school. Smagulova’s analysis reveals the changing conceptualizations of Kazakh—from a low-status, “backward” vernacular, to a high prestige language of school. Her close analysis of code-switching in adult–child interactions uncovers how this re-imagining of Kazakh is accomplished, and identifies four mutually reinforcing metalanguaging practices. These include limiting Kazakh to pedagogic formats, constructing Kazakh as school talk, confining Kazakh to “prior text,” and the co-occurrence of shift to Kazakh with a shift to a meta-communicative frame. Smagulova’s findings expand our understanding of the discursive processes through which ideologies of language revival are both created and sustained.

Lastly, Judith Purkarthofer, in her article, “Building expectations: Imagining family language policies and heteroglossic social spaces,” critically examines the language expectations of three multilingual couples, each of whom has a different language background and varied experiences of migration—and each of whom is expecting, or has just had, their first child. Purkarthofer adopts speaker-centered qualitative methods, including what she defines as language portrayals and biographic narratives, to analyze (real and imagined) constructed spaces of interaction. Close analysis of three co-constructed narratives based on the expectations of the future parents shows the construction of the child as a multilingual self in her or his own right. Purkarthofer’s multimodal analysis of drawings and interviews demonstrates the collective and interactive construction of three-dimensional future family spaces, and provides a window into the parents’ imagined language future of these children. Here, the languages of the parents are important, but concomitantly, moments of choice are reserved for the child, for the involvement of friends, and for yet to be determined environments. Hence, the child’s agency is also taken into account. Purkarthofer’s work highlights the importance of imagination, and also the ways in which parents’ planning for multilingualism can remain open to new possibilities.

Common threads

Together these four papers describe a wide array of family language practices and policies, differing in noteworthy ways, and in particular in terms of contexts and languages studied. Collectively, participants include Mexican families in the US, Arabic-speaking families in the UK, Kazakh speakers/learners in a former Soviet Republic nation, and multilingual couples residing in Vienna, Western Hungary, and South Tyrol/Italy. The languages under analysis vary between English and Spanish; English and different Arabic dialects; Kazakh and Russian; and various other European languages, including Hungarian and Italian in addition to Turkish. Lastly, the family types also differ significantly, including traditional two-parent homes, homes with twins, couples who have yet to have their child, and extended families (grandparents). Yet, despite these obvious differences, these papers are bound by at least four common threads, each of which is highlighted below.

First, while located in divergent contexts, each of the articles analyzes the practices of transnational families. Transnationalism, in broad terms, emphasizes the social processes by which migrants establish social fields that cross political, demographic, social, and cultural borders, maintaining relationships and connections that span nation-state borders (see Schiller, Basch, & Blanc-Szanton, 1992). Sarah Gallo and Nancy Hornberger’s article, for instance, examines the lives of families, who, due to US deportation policies, are tenuously spread across the US-Mexico border. In turn, Fatma Said and Zhu Hua, in their paper on children’s agency in language use and socialization, examine the practices of one four-member family within the UK. The family’s transnational connections and investment in local transnational institutions have resulted in the two boys (aged 6 and 9) speaking a mixture of Yemeni, Algerian Arabic, Classical Arabic, and English. Judith Purkarthofer, in turn, examines parental expectations within multilingual, transnational families, focusing on three European couples, each with several languages in their collective repertoires, including German (Austrian dialects and South Tyrolean), English, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, and Hungarian. Lastly, Juldyz Smagulova, in her article on the ideologies of language revival and Kazakh as a school language, focuses on a multiethnic context in which 63% of the population is Kazakh, 23% Russian, and 14% are representatives of other ethnic groups (e.g. Uzbeks, Uyghurs, Ukrainians, and Tatars). While the Kazakhs, who have long lived in the region, are not transnational migrants, the shift toward Russian was the result of Soviet border remaking and expansion, and the move to reclaim Kazakh is part of a larger effort to re-imagine a fully Kazakh nation-state.

Second, each of the papers shares a commitment to close analysis of language use in naturalistic contexts. Gallo and Hornberger collected ethnographic fieldwork and video recordings of everyday activities over three years; this work provided a clear window into ways family members engaged in routine talk related to language policy, immigration practices, and family migration. Said and Zhu Hua, in turn, conducted close turn-by-turn analyses of the extended multiparty mealtime interactions to uncover child agency, language use, and socialization patterns. Smagulova utilized both a survey and conversational analysis (CA) to uncover the ideologies of language in Kazak language revival, while Purkarthofer employed multimodal analysis of language portrayals and biographic narrative, and talk elicited during an interactive building block construction of future family spaces.

Third, while each of these papers was grounded in close analysis and interpretation of family language in natural settings, attention is paid by each of the authors to the ways in which the broader political, cultural, and ideological context shapes family life and family language practices in particular. Gallo and Hornberger, for instance, attend to how the highly politicized nature of deportation regimes impacts Mexican immigrant fathers’ participation in their children’s lives and shapes the ways in which families invest in language and imagine (or not) bilingual futures for themselves. Said and Zhu Hua, in turn, squarely locate their study of Arabic speakers in the UK within the history of migration to the UK, and the current demographic and cultural realities for the thousands of Arab families in London and beyond. Smagulova, for her part, highlights how imagining Kazakh as a language to be learned constructs new links between linguistic form and new socio-cultural experiences, and in doing so, frames Kazakh as the “authoritative word,” now associated with the institutional language of the national school. In addition, Purkarthofer examines how families envision multilingual futures for their children, and how these aspirations are linked to an imagined multilingual Europe in which language competence is highly valued.

Fourth and finally, each of these articles, as suggested above, unpacks the role of ideology, agency, and imagination in family life. Gallo and Hornberger, for their part, uncover the ideologies and practices that play into children’s and parents’ decisions toward achieving biliteracy for children. This decision-making is powerfully shaped by real and imagined geopolitical borders. Said and Zhu Hua, in turn, examine how multilingual and transnational families enact their agency in language use and socialization, and why these acts of agency are conducive to successful maintenance of the home, community or minority language. Smagulova asks, “How do ideas of Kazakh revival gain discursive visibility in Russian-prevalent discourse? What are the semiotic processes through which ideological dominance is challenged?” This work sharpens our understanding of the discursive processes through which an ideology of language revival is created and through which ideological dominance is challenged. Purkarthofer focuses on imagination and, in particular, the construction of a language future that is both planned and unplanned, that is, where the languages of the parents are important, but where a moment of choice is reserved for the child. Hence, the parents are open to the child’s future agency in the family.

Advancing the field

These four articles advance our understanding of how multilingual families imagine and collectively construct themselves. As suggested here, these articles meet this objective by carefully and critically analyzing the everyday ways in which ideologies, agency, and imaginations are created and enacted among multilingual families in divergent contexts. These analyses provide important windows into how meaning is produced within particular places, activities, social relations, interactional histories, and cultural ideologies.

Moreover, these four articles richly illustrate current directions in the field, as both individually and collectively, they are characterized by research questions that examine language as a means through which multilingual adults and children define themselves and their families; by a focus on globally dispersed, transnational or multilingual populations beyond the traditional, two-parent family; and by research methods that attend to meaning-making in interaction and as well as the broader context.

These shifts in focus are in many respects a gradual and natural evolution as the broader fields of socio and applied linguistics have increasingly taken up themes of mobility, globalization, agency, and superdiversity, and the field of language policy is increasingly characterized by critical and qualitative methods (Hult & Cassels Johnson, 2015; King & Bigelow, 2018). As these articles superbly illustrate, the field will no doubt reap benefits from these shifts as scholars closely document how families make meaning through language and, concomitantly, use language (and language policy) to construct and position themselves as families and individuals in rapidly changing environments. The insights gained from the contributions to this special issue are valuable as the field moves forward to address the everyday language experiences in families in contexts that are quickly becoming more and more hostile to immigrants and to their language practices, as perhaps most poignantly demonstrated in the events and media coverage in Europe and the US today.