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Language Maintenance in a Multilingual Family: Informal Heritage Language Lessons in Parent–Child Interactions

  • Mina Kheirkhah ORCID logo EMAIL logo and Asta Cekaite
Published/Copyright: March 6, 2015

Abstract

The present study explores language socialization patterns in a Persian-Kurdish family in Sweden and examines how “one-parent, one-language” family language policies are instantiated and negotiated in parent–child interactions. The data consist of video-recordings and ethnographic observations of family interactions, as well as interviews. Detailed interactional analysis is employed to investigate parental language maintenance efforts and the child’s agentive orientation in relation to the recurrent interactional practices through which parents attempt to enforce a monolingual, heritage language “context” for parent–child interaction. We examine the interactional trajectories that develop in parents’ requests for translation that target the focus child’s (a7-year-old girl’s) lexical mixings. These practices resembled formal language instruction: The parents suspended the ongoing conversational activity, requested that the child translate the problematic item, modeled and assessed her language use. The instructional exchanges were asymmetrically organized: the parents positioned themselves as “experts”, insisting on the child’s active participation, whereas the child’s (affectively aggravated) resistance was frequent, and the parents recurrently accommodated the child by terminating the language instruction. The study argues that an examination of children’s agency, and the social dynamics characterizing parental attempts to shape children’s heritage language use, can provide significant insights into the conditions for language maintenance

Acknowledgement

Collaboration with the project ‘Language policies and practices in multilingual families and preschools’ (Swedish Research Council) is gratefully acknowledged.

Transcription conventions

Talk has been transcribed by using conventions developed by G. Jefferson.

(.5)

pauses in tenths of a second

(.)

micropause, i.e., shorter than (0.2)

=

latching between utterances

[

overlapping talk

-

denotes cut-off

:

prolonged syllable

.

denotes falling terminal intonation

?

denotes rising terminal intonation

>what<

quicker than surrounding talk

<what>

slower than surrounding talk

˚what˚

quieter than surrounding talk

WHAT

relatively high amplitude

what

denotes emphatic stress

(( ))

further comments of the transcriber

vet inte

talk in Swedish

afᴂrin

talk in Persian

lowbia

talk in Kurdish

okay beans

translation to English from Swedish, Persian or Kurdish

Key to morphologic abbreviations

1

first person

2

second person

3

third person

DEF

definite

EZ

ezāfeh (connects two words)

IMP

imperative

NEG

negative

PL

plural

POSS

possessive

PRF

perfect

PRS

present

PROG

progressive

PST

past

SG

singular

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Published Online: 2015-3-6
Published in Print: 2015-5-1

©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton

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