Politiques linguistiques familiales / Family language policies

John E. JOSEPH

(The University of Edinburgh)

Fore word

We have before us a book offering new empirical work of considerable depth and breadth, with analyses that significantly expand our theoretical and methodological framework. I shall briefly inventory its contents in this Foreword, written in English to complement the Introduction in French by Shahzaman Haque, itself an original and significant contribution laying out the shared theory and methodology for the empirically grounded chapters to follow. Our family of researchers into multilingualism and translanguaging have a policy of practising multilingualism, though we know our larger global academic family’s policy is such that the chapters in English may be more widely read than those in French. If I give more detailed summaries of the latter, that is why.

To say that none of us is entirely happy with our Global Family language policy of according this status to English would be an understatement. In my other families, I do not agree with all the policies maintained by my children, my late parents, my students, my teachers and university colleagues past and present … but the most important thing is to accept differences, whether linguistic or political (insofar as the two can be separated). One can then argue for change, by persuasion rather than by attempted imposition, which tends ultimately to backfire. This embracing of diversity is signalled by the plural Politiques of this book’s title, in contrast to the singular Politique of its predecessor (Haque ed. 2019).

Bernard Spolsky (1932–2022) was always a model of how to persuade whilst accepting diversity. He nurtured three generations of later scholars, with a gentleness that never impeded his intellectual rigour, but instead compelled it. Corinne Seals’s reminiscence of him in the present volume is both enlightening and moving. The many tributes in academic journals following his death likewise testify to the depth of his impact on the fields of language policy, multilingualism, sociolinguistics – the list goes on – through his publications but also through the vast heritage of research of which he was, and continues to be, the grandaddy.

It is surprising to look back at work on language planning from the 1960s and 70s, and to see the extent to which it was assumed that all change would be managed from the top down, and that all such change would be beneficial.¹ The intentions were those of what is now called ‘white saviourism’, a term which captures the ambivalence of a coloniality that believed unquestioningly in the value of science and the moral need to extend its benefits to everyone in the world (see e.g. Khan, Dickson & Sondarjee eds 2023). Dissident voices were being heard, particularly in the Francophone world, with the war for Algerian independence which shaped the thinking of people such as Frantz Fanon (1925–1961; see Fanon 1952, 1961) and Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002; see e.g. Bourdieu 1990, and Joseph 2020, p. 111–112), but it would be years before any of their echoes turn up in the sociolinguistics literature.²

In the work of Joshua Fishman (1926–2015) we see attention shift steadily from the top-down orientation of the papers in Fishman, Ferguson & Das Gupta (eds 1968) toward the power of language in the home, rather than just in the school and other institutionalised spaces (e.g. Fishman et al. 1985). It is finally with Spolsky that the idea of language policies is conceived as not confined to such spaces, as traditionally assumed, in line with the etymology of policy, from Greek polis, the city, the communal organisation, from which derive also political and police.³ His work has brought to completion a revolution in how linguists conceive and analyse how the forces of language choice are managed (Spolsky 2004, 2018, 2021a). He lived his scientific creed, by not pushing his programme and methods onto anyone, but helping others to turn their own lived experience of languages into lessons to share with the world.

Spolsky’s intellectual vivacity was such that, just a few months after his Rethinking Language Policy appeared from Edinburgh University Press in 2021, he gave an online seminar in which, wonderfully and astonishingly in equal measures, he proceeded to rethink some key aspects of his newly appeared book (Spolsky 2021b). Certainly his vibrant presence runs throughout the present volume, to the point that we may consider him a spectral co-author. His importance is especially highlighted in Haque’s Introduction, which includes a complete and up-to-date survey of the relevant research literature, and of course in Seals’s reflective chapter.

Next, Angie Baily, Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen, Jinyao Chang and Xiaoli Liu offer a study of the language policies of families in the Chinese diaspora, focussing on the UK and Ireland, and on the particular context of cultural festivals, celebrations especially of Chinese New Year, and to a lesser extent the Dragon Boat Festival in late spring. It quickly emerges that food is the key: dishes special to the festivals become a linguistic anchor point for the diaspora-born generations, and the practice of preparing those dishes provides a locus for a shift from the everyday family language policy, where Chinese is a point of potential contestation, to a special policy in which the younger generations not only accept but take on agency in using the heritage language. The chapter presents its original data clearly, and the insightful discussion is well grounded in earlier research, including that on the importance of food in family language policies of many other cultures and languages.

The diasporic theme continues with Salih Akin and Mertcan Altinsoy’s examination of the case of Kurdish speakers living in Istanbul, where no Kurdish-language education is provided. The research is based on interviews which Altinsoy conducted with around 40 Kurdish speakers as part of his 2021 doctoral thesis. The focus is on ‘epilinguistic’ discourse, a term introduced by the French linguist Antoine Culioli (1924–2018) to refer to ‘unconscious metalinguistic activity’,⁴ though it has subsequently come to be associated with activity in a zone between the unconscious and conscious, or indeed, as Akin and Altinsoy do, setting aside this classically problematic distinction. They find that Kurdish literacy, although limited by the absence of a place in the school system, intersects complexly with orality, including with the prominent intermediary role played by music, songs of various sorts (epics, battle songs, love songs, religious songs, lamentations) in the family culture.

The study by Héctor Álvarez Mella and Ana Gómez-Pavón Durán of Spanish heritage-language families in Germany takes up the additional complications presented when the family language policy needs to take account not just of two languages, but of dialect variation in the heritage tongue. Their three subjects are Andalusian, Argentinian and Mexican women, married to men with different Spanish-dialect backgrounds from theirs, all living in Germany. The authors draw upon the considerable body of work on bilingual Spanish-English-speaking families in the USA (on which see further Joseph, 2021), as well as on Spolsky’s model. They find, significantly, that whilst the Spanish spoken by the generation born in Germany combines features of both parents’ dialects, there is a greater inclination towards the mothers’, and, in two cases, additional input from caretakers in a bilingual language day-care centre whose Spanish differs from that of both parents.

The next chapter, by Isabelle Martin (Col), Sophie Alby and Abdelhak Qribi, is the only one which is not about a diasporic setting. Parikwaki, referred to historically and in the linguistics literature as Palikúr,⁵ is an American language of the Arawak family, spoken by the Parikwene people in French Guiana and across its border with Brazil, a historically contested border which has seen much movement over its history and continues to do so. As an overseas territory of France, French Guiana is part of the European Union, and has the Euro as its currency and French as its official language. French Guianese Creole is the most widely spoken language, and is recognised as a regional language by the French Ministry of Education, although education is entirely in Standard French. On the Brazilian side, Portuguese is the language of education. The study is based on research by Martin (Col) for her 2021 doctoral thesis, into family language policy regarding Parikwaki, Creole and the two European languages in three ‘peri- urban’ villages just over the border in French Guiana. The authors have an exquisite sensitivity for choosing passages from interviews with younger and older speakers which allow insight into what is inevitably, in these circumstances, a hugely complex set of family language policies, variable even within the same generation of a single family. Their conclusions lead them to question Fishman’s (1991) generational model, and to highlight ‘the role of children, who are not simple receptacles of family language policies, but genuine agents who, through the richness of their repertoires, show a great ability to adapt to the choices and competencies of the adults around them’ (p. 168, my translation).

The next two chapters are both about the Lithuanian diaspora, the first being an ethnographic study done in France, and written in French, whilst the second is based on a survey conducted across the globe, and written in English. Vitalija Kazlauskienė and Inga Hilbig have done research with six first-generation Lithuanian immigrants to France, all mothers, married to men who are not Lithuanian, and for whom, we are told in what transpires to be an understatement, ‘the children’s bilingualism in Lithuanian is not harmonious’ (p. 171, my translation). For each of the mothers, the Lithuanian language is the core of their identity, and the interviews with them are run through with worry about a rupture with their family in their home country. The authors show the women’s shared strategies for maintaining a family language policy that will minimise the rupture – but recognise that the best outcome that can be hoped for is ‘passive bilingualism, especially with the younger children’ (p. 182). If this sounds like pessimism on the authors’ part, I would contend that it is actually realism, and indeed a realism as optimistic as their observations might allow.

Meilutė Ramonienė and Jogilė Teresa Ramonaitė continue a research project begun in 2011, during which they have surveyed thousands of diaspora Lithuanians, with 439 added in the new survey reported on here. Their results are enlightening in many respects, one of them being the unusual honesty with which their informants report frequent instances of parents ‘bribing’ (their word – they pull no punches) the younger generation with presents and favours for speaking Lithuanian. But the most valuable feature of their research is the time depth, showing how family language policies have evolved over decades.

With Ekaterina Protassova and Maria Yelenevskaya’s chapter we turn to the family language policies of Russian-speaking families in Finland, based on an online survey conducted in November to December 2022 of 140 parents, who amongst them have 269 children. This follows on from research to which Protassova contributed in the previous volume (Viimaranta, Protassova & Bursa, 2019) – but in the brief interim there has been a major upheaval: ‘In 2010s, most Russian-speaking immigrants came to study or start a business. In 2022 there was a massive influx of Ukrainian refugees and citizens of Russia fleeing the war and the danger of being drafted’ (p. 230). Protassova and Yelenevskaya’s study provides a snapshot of a critical historical moment, one that will have enduring value.

The final chapter, by Jésabel Robin, focuses on Bern, in Switzerland, a country which many of us grew up being taught was a paradise of successful multilingualism, with Bern as its capital. That makes three myths in one sentence: Switzerland is not a country as such, but a confederation of 26 cantons that are more like countries than is the conglomerate. Each canton has a capital, whereas the Swiss Confederation officially does not.⁶ As for multilingualism, Robin describes the reality succinctly: ‘Contrary to what the image of Switzerland would lead people to believe internationally, bilingual education is very uncommon in Switzerland’ (p. 252, my translation). At the start of an extended research stay in Geneva in the late 2000s, I was surprised to hear people there talking about les Suisses ‘the Swiss’ in a way that clearly did not include themselves; for in the Francophone Republic of Geneva, les Suisses means those Germanophones to the east. Bern has German as its official language, and the Bernese Alemannic dialect as the most widely spoken tongue. Robin’s research is part of a four-year (2019–23) project targeting Bern’s French- speaking minority, who constitute 7 % of its population, far below the 30 % threshold for a commune to be considered bilingual. Her interviews with around 20 parents are striking for how centred the parents themselves are on the school system and its lack of bilingual provision. One informant vividly reports her experience of having, as a secondary school student, been required to take a French class designed for Germanophones. The words horreur and horrible recur in her narrative, and although her Francophone identity remains intact, as far as multilingualism goes, this is more hell than heaven.

What I have come away with from this book, in addition to all the detailed knowledge and deep insights the authors provide, is an appreciation of what the conceptual innovation of family language policy has allowed us to see that was invisible just a few decades back. Also a realisation that the concept itself, as a theoretical and methodological construct, must continue to evolve, as family life evolves. My childhood already differed from my parents’, who were of Fishman’s and Spolsky’s generation, in that I could be in the family home having regular and lengthy conversations with friends over the telephone.⁷ My children rarely have their smartphones switched off when at home. Family language policy is less and less a matter of who is sitting round the dinner table; it grows more fluid by the day. How we adjust our work to take account of this, and at the same time to manage the ethics of privacy and of difference, is the challenge for the next wave of family language policy research.

1 Spolsky (2018) offers useful perspectives on this so-called ‘classical period’ of language planning.

2 An early mention of Fanon occurs on the final page of Calvet (1974, p. 236), but en passant. See also Ebion (2007).

3 The politiques of this book’s title translates as ‘policies’, which can create some cognitive dissonance for English speakers who tend to think – wrongly – of policies as being worked out by technocrats, and ‘above politics’.

4 Culioli (1968, p. 108): ‘activité métalinguistique non consciente’. Gombert (2008, p. 9–10 [1990, p. 22]) notes that the term had little uptake and has remained current only in Francophone usage, although this has changed somewhat following the influential English translation of Gombert’s book. Gombert (2008, p. 10 [1990: 22]) notes that ‘for Culioli, these epilinguistic activities are implicated in all language behaviour and thus represent the implicit self-reference which is automatically present in all linguistic production’. This makes them significant within Culioli’s development of énonciation ‘enunciation’ as the aspect of language which incorporates the speaker’s presence, a theory most closely associated with Emile Benveniste (1902–1976; see Benveniste 1970, and Joseph 2019, p. 36–40), although it developed conjointly in his work and that of other linguists, as well as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981).