In this article I adopt a family language policy approach and a diachronic perspective to explore how the dialect-Italian dynamics unfolds differently within different cohorts of Italian migrants due to the hierarchical position of the two heritage languages. I highlight three main issues that emerge across time in the language policies in the…

During the past decade, the field of family language policy has broadened its scope and turned its attention to diverse family configurations in versatile sociolinguistic contexts. The current study contributes to this endeavor by focusing on two single-parent families who live in Finland and who strive to support Russian as a family language.…

New citizens are typically characterized as people who occupy an estuarial position between the global and the local: to simultaneously become authentic to their global provenience and rooted in their new local societies, they are expected to cautiously partake in processes of differentiation as they construct their identities. This article…

The main objective of the article is to illustrate how language ideologies and language management at the macro-level (state language policy), micro-level (in families) and meso-level (local communities) influence language change and the conceptualization of multilingualism of immigrants from Upper Silesia residing in Germany. Language biographies…

Minority language studies have received increasing attention over the last decade in Iran. Drawing on Spolsky's (Spolsky, Bernard. 2004. "Language policy." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) language policy theoretical framework, this inquiry reports on the language ideologies, practices, and management efforts of an under-explored…

This article explores playfulness and creativity in translingual family interactions. In particular, it focuses on how and to what ends adolescents mobilize multilingual resources in family interactions. It investigates the cases of two multilingual families with adolescent children (13-18 years old). The families have different linguistic…

In many immigrant families, children often learn the language and culture of the host society quicker than adult immigrants. Consequently, children serve as language brokers, translating and interpreting face-to-face communication. The aim of this paper is to present a study based on 19 qualitative in depth interviews with young adults reporting…

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…

This paper is based on the data collected during fieldwork in the northern part of Mexico's state of Puebla in 2018-2019. During that period, there was a need to gather information that would serve as a starting point for the participatory-action research project in San Miguel Tenango, a village where the majority of people speak Nahuatl as their…

This paper explores linguistic and cultural complexity within immigration legal advice communication. Drawing from a linguistic ethnographic study, ethnographic and interactional data from two linked advice meetings about UK refugee family reunion processes are subject to deductive analysis using Risager's model of the language-culture nexus,…

The concept of sincerity has links to honesty, openness, and authenticity, including of feelings. As expressions of sincerity become formalized in epistolary practice, however, a tension arises between sincerity and the articulation of it. An examination of a corpus of private family letters in French and Spanish from the eighteenth and nineteenth…

This paper investigates the use of codeswitching at traditional inter-ethnic marriage ceremonies in the southern part of Ghana. The study site is Accra, the multilingual capital of Ghana which is located in the south of the country, and was selected due to the high frequency of inter-ethnic marriage ceremonies which take place there. The data…

Mixed-ethnic children in Japan do not usually acquire the language of their non-Japanese parent. This study looks at their lost opportunity to acquire their minority parent's language through a retrospective investigation of their language experiences from childhood to young adulthood. Transcripts of interviews with ten mixed-ethnic children (ages…

Born and educated in the UK, with Arab parents and Muslims, second-generation British-Arab immigrants in Cardiff find themselves at the core of a complex web of power relations which potentiates their production of multilingual practices. However, while Cardiff is officially bilingual, English being the dominant language and Welsh becoming…

This article derives from a three-year ethnographic project carried out in Norway focusing on language practices of Brazilian families raising their children multilingually. Analyses of interview data with two Brazilian parents demonstrate the relevance of examining intersectionally the participants' orientation to categorisations such as social…