Negotiations of language(s) and inequalities in transnational family biographies

Abstract

Families that live in a new environment after having fled or migrated go through transformation processes that are connected to various challenges and possibilities. The focus of this paper is on negotiations of language policies in family biographies and family language practices, comparing cases of migrant families who arrived to Switzerland in different legal contexts of migration. The article addresses how these transnational families negotiate the meaning of (family) languages against the background of hegemonic language and migration policies. Questions of how these policies are experienced and dealt with and in what ways they do enable or disable possibilities for action are addressed using a qualitative analysis of narrative family interviews and participant observations in transnational families that now live in German-speaking Switzerland. On the basis of the analyses of interview transcriptions and field notes, I show how families deal with experiences of social and educational inequalities in the context of transnational pathways of education and how these are negotiated in the families. Language learning appears not only as an (un)available possibility, but it also requires one to return to the status of a student. At the same time, it is accompanied by a deep struggle for identity and belonging.