This research applies language socialization theory within a family language policy framework to investigate how language shift is realized in daily activities within a Malay‐English bilingual family in Singapore. Applying Goffman's frame analysis to two excerpts of siblings’ play from ninety hours of recordings of family interactions, we illustrate how children as young as four and seven enact adult roles such as teacher and student within the frame of play. In creatively enacting these roles, identities and social relations, the children draw upon their knowledge of play‐external structures – with which they have experience from other (non‐play) situations. The children consequently use English – what is typical of educational settings in Singapore – to portray an image of a teacher and student within the frame of play.
In this article, I argue that one social theory that could help us better understand the interaction between social structure and human agency in the context of family language policy (FLP) research is realist social theory. FLP studies in multilingual contexts have shown that home often becomes a site where dominant societal ideologies and discourses of structuring nature compete with individual views and agency, ultimately informing language behavior. Realist social theory advocates the analytical separation of structure and agency and attributes causal powers to both social structures and individual agency. This conceptualization of structure and agency prevents us from falling into structural determinism or individual voluntarism. Through examining the linguistic ideologies and practices of thirteen mothers of young children in Tabriz, Iran, I illustrate how family language policy emerges in interaction with and response to structural powers. (Family language policy, realist social theory, Iranian Azerbaijanis, agency, social structures, language maintenance)
A growing body of research highlights the significance of visual language use in public sphere in discursively transforming geographical spaces into places. This symbolic construction of places plays a paramount role in the vitality of minority languages by increasing the prestige of minority languages and thus redressing the balance between minority and majority groups. The present article explores the symbolic construction of Tabriz, a Northwest metropolis in Iran which is home to nearly two million Azerbaijani-speaking people. Despite the rich bilingualism in Azerbaijani and Farsi in the city, Farsi, the official language of the state, continues casting a shadow over Azerbaijani through various language policy mechanisms. Drawing upon language policy and planning theories coupled with the principles of geosemiotics, the research examines linguistic landscape data collected in three main streets in Tabriz. The analysis demonstrates what types of discourses mediate and are created by language choices on governmental and private signs. Farsi is normalized for both governmental and private signs reflecting and reproducing national ideologies. The absence of Azerbaijani as the native language of the people in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Tabriz is noticeable. In its entirety, the findings suggest that the linguistic landscape is not always a fair representation of the linguistic repertoire of the people living in a geographical space, but rather language choice in the LL is deployed by the state and/or people to portray an image of a place they desire and aspire to.
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