“You have to repeat Chinese to mother!”: multilingual identity, emotions, and family language policy in transnational multilingual families

Abstract

A growing number of family language policy studies have started to pay more attention to the emotions that transnational multilingual families (TMFs) identify regarding their multilingual identity, even if much of the research remains primarily focused on TMFs residing in Europe and North America. This article reports on a qualitative study that explored the emotions that five TMFs residing in Russia identified with their multilingual identity, and how these emotions affected their family language policy. The study combined ethnographic elements in the form of video recordings and two rounds of semi-structured interviews. The findings indicated that the parents felt pride and satisfaction in their own multilingual identity yet feared that their children were developing a monolingual identity, which led to them experiencing anger and frustration. Coupled with these negative emotions, they were found to adopt monolingual practices with their children in hopes of making them more multilingual. The study adds to our understanding of how emotions, multilingual identity, and family language policy interact in TMFs outside of Europe and North America and is one of the first studies to explore the experiences of such families in Russia.

“Maybe it was a shield, you know”: Exploring family language policy through the lens of perezhivanie

“…In this study, we, responding to a call by Soler (2023), explored the development of FLP as a holistic process in which the individual and environment, as well as emotion and intellect, are not seen as separate but as parts of a dialectical developmental process. This metatheoretical, theoretical, and analytical angle allows for an approach qualitatively different from previous studies which focused on the impact of certain emotions on language identity and use (Pavlenko, 2004;Tang & Calafato, 2022) or the effect of certain variables on anxiety in language use (Sevinç & Dewaele, 2018). That is, instead of focusing on the role of certain components (e.g., language practices, identity, or emotions) in FLP, we focused on being of individuals in their process of becoming through perezhivaniya.…”

“…This study brings in several theoretical and conceptual implications. First, our study expands on the growing number of studies focusing on the role of emotions in FLP (e.g., Sevinç, 2022;Tang & Calafato, 2022) by building the argument for the inseparability of emotions and intellect in meaning formation. The development process happens as individuals make sense of their experiences, recognise and build their understanding of the tensions these experiences create, and work towards resolving these tensions (Vygotsky, 1998;Zaporozhets, 2002).…”

“…Emotions, too, have recently been gaining prominence in FLP research. Tang and Calafato (2022) studied how emotions associated with the identities of multilingual families impacted their multi-or monolingual practices. They found that positive emotions led to the continuation of multilingual practices whereas negative emotions, such as frustration, led parents to implement monolingual family language policies.…”

Clasificación de las familias transmisoras de lenguas en contextos diglósicos

“…En relación con el estudio de las familias, los conceptos ampliamente utilizados en sociolingüística hacen referencia al número de lenguas de los progenitores: familias monolingües, cuando los miembros pertenecen a la misma comunidad lingüística; familias bilingües o multilingües, en los casos donde encontramos más de una comunidad lingüística; e incluso familias multilingües transnacionales (Tang y Calafato, 2022), que alude a la procedencia internacional. En este sentido, también es habitual el término familia mixta, del cual también se desprende la fuerte presencia de actitudes hacia las lenguas del hogar (Bernat, 2017;Kostoulas y Motsiou, 2022).…”

Worldwide Trend Analysis of Psycholinguistic Research on Code Switching Using Bibliometrix R-tool

“…It can be influenced by social factors, affective elements, and the speakers' emotional states. Code-switching can be a means of expressing identity, cultural affiliation, and a sense of belonging to a particular social group (Auer, 2005;Heller, 1988;Tang & Calafato, 2022c). For bilingual individuals, codeswitching may serve as a way to negotiate their complex linguistic and cultural identities (W. Li, 2020).…”