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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 334

Part of Session 107: Minority and Majority Languages within State, Community and Family (Other abstracts in this session)

Perceptions and reflections: Parents and adolescents in Tallinn discuss their family’s language policy

Authors: Doyle, Colm
Submitted by: Doyle, Colm (Tallinn University, Estonia)

In the last decade a growing awareness and appreciation of language policy as operational at the family level has given birth to the field of family language policy (King et al., 2008; Schwartz, 2010). Family language policy (FLP) investigates how parents plan for and regulate the use of language in the family as well as the language ideologies of family members.

This paper presents the findings of a study on family language policy in inter-marriage families in Tallinn where Estonian coexists with a foreign language that does not enjoy wider-community support in the city. The languages in question are English, Spanish, German, Swedish and Finnish. In an overview of the field of FLP, Schwartz (2010) points out that few studies to date have incorporated the voices of the children of these families. This study has therefore considered as central alongside that of the parents the experiences of the adolescent children as self-reported.

Estonia is a country that has experienced an enormous political and economic transformation in the last twenty years since it left the Soviet Union. Likewise, great change has taken place in the sociolinguistic sphere and the issues of language and language policy are never far from the collective consciousness. In a study on parental attitudes to language and language planning internationally, Piller (2001) reports that a limited knowledge of the research literature and ‘a limited understanding of the sociolinguistics of bilingualism often leads to disappointment and self-doubt’ (p. 61).  This study investigates FLP with reference to the wider context of the modern multilingual city that is Tallinn and asks: Is FLP a salient issue to Estonian parents and adolescents given the salience of language policy at the societal level? Furthermore, Estonian, while the official state language, is spoken by only 1.1 million speakers worldwide, small even compared to Swedish and Finnish and minuscule compared to German, Spanish and English. This study questions what effect this power-imbalance on the macro-level has on language policy in the home.

Semi-structured interviews were employed to elicit linguistic autobiographies from the family members to investigate how the FLP was conceived, experienced and re-designed at various phases in the family’s life. Per the advice given in Pavlenko (2007), the biographies were treated not as ‘observation notes, transcripts, or collections of facts’ but rather as ‘discursive constructions’. As such they were demonstrations of how the participant-families subjectively recall linguistic experiences and relationships within and without the familial-unit. Ethnographic observation by the participant-observer researcher, in combination with the interviews, allowed for a mixed-methods approach which is encouraged by Pavlenko (2007) and Schwartz (2010).

References:

King, Kendall, Lyn Fogle and Aubrey Logan-Terry. 2008. Family language policy. Language and Linguistics Compass 2, 907-922.
Pavlenko, Aneta. 2007.  Autobiographic narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 28 (2), 163-188.
Piller, Ingrid. 2001. Private language planning: The best of both worlds? Estudios de Sociolingüística 2 (1), 61-80.
Schwartz, Mila. 2010. Family language policy: Core issues of an emerging field. Applied Linguistics Review 1, 171-192.