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‘Ikke snakke norsk?’ – Transnational adolescents and negotiations of family language policy explored through family interview

  • Maria Antonina Obojska EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: February 13, 2019

Abstract

Multilingual families and their language policies have attracted considerable attention in recent sociolinguistic work. Adding to this line of research, this article focuses on a case study of a transnational Polish family living in Norway and investigates the role adolescent children may play in the formation of family language policies. To this end the article analyses stances towards language practices at home taken in an interaction between the father and one of the adolescent daughters of the family. The article argues that the perspectives of adolescent children may be of crucial importance for the establishment of family language policies and thus deserve scholarly attention. Methodologically, the article draws attention to family interviews as a useful tool in generating sociolinguistic data for studies of Family Language Policies and advocates an interactional approach to interview data.

Funding statement: The writing of this paper was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265 (MultiLing) and 240725 (MultiFam).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Family X for sharing their time and thoughts with me. I am also very grateful to Bente Ailin Svendsen, Ana Deumert, Elizabeth Lanza, Piotr Garbacz, Judith Purkarthofer, Kristin Vold Lexander and Rafael Lomeu Gomes for close reading and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this text.

Transcription conventions

(.)

pause

,

brief pause

.

Falling intonation

?

rising intonation

!

exclamation

<…>

overlapping speech

:

elongated sound

@

laughter

Bold

emphasis

Italic

Polish original

Underline

Norwegian

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Published Online: 2019-02-13
Published in Print: 2019-11-26

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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