The first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in school closures and homeschooling for families across the world. This provided a unique scenario to investigate multilingual family language interaction, and specifically, challenges and opportunities for home language (HL) use. This study is rooted in Family Language Policy (FLP) research,…

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…

The study analyses teenagers' e-mail requests during academic cyber-consultation, exploring how the performance of request modifiers is influenced by participants' perceptions of the degree of imposition of the speech act and social distance with the recipient. A total of 295 e-mail requests, 145 produced by British English speakers (BES) and 150…