Examining family language policy through realist social theory

Abstract

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)

‘You are Iranian even if you were born on the moon’: family language policies of the Iranian diaspora in the UK

“…Unlike the Iranian immigrants in farther countries like New Zealand (see Gharibi and Seals 2020), the geographical proximity between Iran and the UK and the possibility of more frequent trips to Iran makes it possible for parents to take this strategy to promote Persian acquisition and maintenance for their children. This suggests that understanding family language policy entails taking an approach which considers not only the dynamics of language practices at home informed by certain language ideologies, but also how families draw on sociolinguistic, socio-political, and geographical realities to achieve their goals (Mirvahedi 2020).…”

“…This happens due to the fact that the private and public spheres of social life and the accompanying requirements of each, i.e. orientations towards intimacy and family-bound affection, and orientations towards trajectories of success and mobility, respectively, intersect and compete at home (Canagarajah 2008;Curdt-Christiansen 2013;Mirvahedi 2020;Mirvahedi and Macalister 2017;Tannenbaum 2012).…”

“…This suggests that research examining language socialization patterns of families and ideologies guiding them can unravel a 'cross-scalar complexity,' which is 'a stratified and polycentric language-ideological construction enveloping multiple resources and scripts for their deployment across scales' (Blommaert 2019, 3). FLP scholarship can thus no longer offer a comprehensive account of what is going on in the family if it neglects the affordances and constraints of a language ecology in which families find themselves (Mirvahedi 2020).…”

What can interactional sociolinguistics bring to the family language policy research table? The case of a Malay family in Singapore

“…The interviews are used in this paper to both provide demographic information about the family and explore the parents' language ideologies. As language managers in the family, parents' language ideologies and their agency have proved significant in language maintenance (Mirvahedi 2020); however, parental ideologies and agency do not always bring about the expected, anticipated or claimed outcome (Mirvahedi and Jafari 2018;Yu 2010). Ideologies and practices reported by the parents are then explored along with samples of real-life language socialisation at home to illuminate what the families did with languages they knew (Spolsky 2004(Spolsky , 2009.…”

“…Having illustrated how large-scale discourses such as language policies influence language choice, she argued that while shift to another language might be seen, in part, as a choice parents make, but in reality they did not always have a choice (see also Sicoli 2011, for agency in language maintenance and shift). Taking a different approach, Mirvahedi (2020) recently applied realist social theory to understand language maintenance and shift among Azerbaijanis in Iran. He demonstrated how realist social theory, giving equal weights to agency and structure, helps avoid falling into structural determinism and individual rationalism in the analysis of family language policy and its interplay with social structure.…”