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11 - Establishing and Maintaining a Multilingual Family Language Policy

from Part Three - Family Language Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2022

By
Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen  and
Baoqi Sun
Edited by
Anat Stavans  and
Ulrike Jessner
Anat Stavans
Affiliation:
Beit Berl College, Israel
Ulrike Jessner
Affiliation:
Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria
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Summary

As an increasingly established research field, family language policy (FLP) provides a very useful lens to view how bi/multilingual home language-use patterns are influenced by socio-political ideologies and economic factors at the macro level and by family members’ language ideology at the micro level. This chapter starts with an introduction to FLP and outlines the development phases of the field. It then provides a discussion of the major research contributions to the field. Following that, it provides a synthesis of the extant research on how FLP is established and maintained in a range of countries and contexts, particularly in multilingual families. The synthesis focuses on internal factors, such as emotion, identity and cultural practices, and child agency in the negotiation of a family language policy. Lastly, insights gleaned from the more diverse range of social contexts are taken into consideration when making implications for parents, educators, and policy makers and a call for future research.

Keywords

family language policylanguage socialisationlanguage ideologyheritage languagelanguage maintenance
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Childhood Multilingualism , pp. 257 - 277
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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