Aspirational family language policy

Abstract

The current article applies interactional sociolinguistic discourse analysis to interviews with three parents of Ukrainian families living in New Zealand to further complexify what we know about Family Language Policy (FLP) and language transmission. More specifically, this article theorizes what we call “Aspirational FLP”—when the desired imagined language identities of family members will require families to adopt an FLP that goes above and beyond what might otherwise be considered practical. In the case of our participants, this involves Ukrainians living in the diaspora who discuss the homeland’s “changing your mother tongue” discourse (from Russian to Ukrainian) and what this means when it involves replacing one heritage language with another when both are minority languages in the hostland. Additionally, we consider the importance of both homeland and hostland sociopolitical contexts, as the interviews reflect dominant discourses from both. Finally, our interview data occurs twice with the same participants (2014 and again in 2021), therein allowing us to investigate the participants’ Aspirational FLPs diachronically, bringing further insight to the dynamism of FLP. Our findings show that participants’ Aspirational FLPs are connected to both homeland and hostland sociopolitical contexts, and as such are dynamic and shifting. Aspirational FLPs also shift differently as individual family members’ investments and imagined future identities also shift. Furthermore, the longitudinal nature of the data sheds light on how and why Aspirational FLPs become reality for some families while they remain aspirational for others. We conclude that both local contexts and wider world contexts are important to consider when investigating FLP, and diachronic research is highly valuable for uncovering factors that contribute to the complexity of FLP, both Aspirational and realized.