In transnational and multilingual families, the learning and use of as well as socialisation through the so-called ‘home, community or minority’ languages is often embedded in everyday conversations during joint activities such as...
moreIn transnational and multilingual families, the learning and use of as well as socialisation through the so-called ‘home, community or minority’ languages is often embedded in everyday conversations during joint activities such as mealtimes. One aspect that is receiving increasing attention from researchers is children’s agency in language use and socialisation. In this paper, we use the interactional data of mealtimes in a multilingual Arabic and English-speaking family to examine children’s agency and creativity in their multiple language use. We look closely at how such language use reflects children’s awareness of language ideologies (often contradictory and competing), how they negotiate that knowledge and importantly how it influences their choice of language or their choice of particular linguistic features in a given language. The intense face-to-face tempo-spatially controlled activity of mealtimes affords a unique environment like no other in which children and parents are forced to use language in ingenious often-unpredictable ways to address the needs of the interaction as they unfold over the interaction time. Through such language use family language policies and local language policies and practices are challenged and brought to the fore. The data reveals that parents choose one language over the other or choose a particular grammatical form in one language to index their feelings of affect, to teach and socialise, to connect, to assert their authority and create solidarity as well as enforce their language ideologies. Whilst children use language in the same way to resist socialisation, to be socialisers themselves, to transform language practices or to conform and appease their parents as well as show closeness and solidarity at the same time. Both children and parents use language to achieve their own distinct interactional goals, and to display and negotiate their identities. Hence the outcome is that mealtime language use is ever richer and ever innovative and both children and parents undergo a change at the end of each episode as a result of such language use.
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