Abstract
This study touches upon a widely ignored topic in family language policy (FLP) research, gendered language ideologies. It also contributes to expanding the narrow literature of FLP in both formally, though mistakenly, viewed monolingual settings, and in the even rarer literature of dialectology in FLP. The aim of this study is to explore the family language policy of one Arabic speaking family in Jordan, with a special focus on the interplay between language (language varieties to be precise) and gender among family members. Ethnographic data collected from observations and recorded naturally-occurring interactions are described and analysed through the lens of Interactional Sociolinguistics. This study argues that family language policy can capture how gender roles and stereotypes are internalised through interaction in the home. The analyses reveal that the existence of contradicting language ideologies within the family is ascribed indexically to gender rather than language. This study suggests that, in the case of gendered languages like Arabic, gender stereotypes have their genesis at the linguistic level and in the home.
Acknowledgment
The researcher would like to thank AOU research committee for supporting and providing insight and expertise that greatly assisted the current research.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- What does your accent say about you? The perception of Cuban and Peninsular Spanish varieties by native and non-native speakers of Spanish
- Loving from afar: Japanese language learners and their imagined target language communities in contemporary Hong Kong
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- Doing ethnography at the intersection of grassroots and research labour: new fieldwork imageries for critical sociolinguistic engagements
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- What does your accent say about you? The perception of Cuban and Peninsular Spanish varieties by native and non-native speakers of Spanish
- Loving from afar: Japanese language learners and their imagined target language communities in contemporary Hong Kong
- Multilingualism in an online US Moroccan support group during the Covid-19 pandemic
- Language ontologies and posthumanist critical pedagogy
- Russian invasion of Ukraine: analyzing linguistic means describing the enemy in Ukrainian media
- Doing ethnography at the intersection of grassroots and research labour: new fieldwork imageries for critical sociolinguistic engagements
- Shades of gender and dialectology in family language policy