Family language policy and survival strategies in a Greek multilingual family with deaf and hearing members

Each multilingual transnational family is unique and thus deserves to be carefully studied in terms of its family language policy (FLP). Speaker-centered approaches can provide a deeper understanding of linguistic diversity in a multilingual setting. The studied Russian-Italian family is raising a multilingual boy (8:2) in Finland. The multilingual repertoire includes Russian, Italian, Finnish, English, and Hebrew. In this case-study, an ethnographic approach is used to explore the multilingual family repertoire by presenting their lived experiences and language practices. I discuss the FLP and child's active role in shaping the family's linguistic practices (child agency). The following methods were combined: semi-structured interviews, language background surveys, written diary entries, self-recordings of interactions in the family, and a language portrait that depicts the child's multilingual repertoire. The interviews and other recordings were transcribed manually. The following research questions guided the study: (1) How do the family members describe their FLP? (2) How does the FLP evolve through everyday interactions (language practices)? (3) How does the child exercise his agency in the family setting? The results reveal that the family's language practices follow predominantly an one person-one language (OPOL) strategy; consequently, the child speaks a different language with each parent. However, the analysis of the language ideologies reveals positive attitudes toward both multilingualism and all the languages in the family's repertoire, which explains the multilingual practices having multiplicity and unexpectedness. FLP is shaping the family language practices. Evidence of language hierarchy can be explained by a number of family-external and family-internal social factors.

1. Beginnings John Macalister & Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi Part I: Challenges in Family Language Policy 2. Family Language Policy: New Directions Cassie Smith-Christmas 3. Family Language Policy for Deaf Children and the Vitality of New Zealand Sign Language Rachel McKee & Kirsten Smiler 4. Family Language Practices as Emergent Policies in Child-Headed Households in Rural Uganda Maureen Kendrick & Elizabeth Namazzi 5. Exploring Family Language policies Among Azerbaijani-Speaking Families in the City of Tabriz, Iran Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi 6. The Role of the Zapotec Language from Lozoga' in the Californian Migrant Community Daisy Bernal Lorenzo 7. Adrift in an Anglophone World: Refugee Families' Language Policy Challenges Diego Navarro & John Macalister PART II: Opportunities in Family Language Policy 8. How Religious Ideologies and Practices Impact on Family Language Policy - Ethiopians in Wellington Melanie Revis 9. I speak all of the language!: Engaging in Family Language Policy Research with Multilingual Children in Montreal Alison Crump 10. Dynamic Family Language Policy: Heritage Language Socialization and Strategic Accommodation in the Home Corinne Seals 11. Language Ideologies, Social Capital, and Interaction Strategies: AN ethnogrpah8ic Case Study of Family Language Policy in Singapore Guangwei Hu & Li Ren PART III: Consequences for Family Language Policy 12. Home: A Confluence of Discourses in Multilingual Linguistic Ecologies Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi & John Macalister

This paper presents the first project on the formation of Sign Language Interpreters in Greek Universities. At the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the training of sign language interpreters is an experimental project organized by the Social Policy Committee and is carried out in collaboration with the School of English Studies and the Postgraduate Program in Translation and Interpretation Studies. This project has been initiated because of the realization that deaf students represent a linguistic minority in our University. In universities, the growing number of deaf students increases the demand for community and conference interpreting between the Greek sign language and the Greek — general or special — spoken language.

Family language policy in Italian transnational families in the UK: Influence of language ideologies on heritage language management

This study investigated three local Shanghainese families’ family language policy with a special focus on understanding parental agency through the perspective of parents’ language ideology. Data for this study came from semi-structured interviews with one parent from each family. A process combining deductive and inductive analysis captured the (sub)dimensions of language-as-resource ideology identified from the parents’ data, followed by relating their language-as-resource ideology to the identified language practice and language management. The study found that parental agentic efforts are carried out on two levels: the negotiations of the family linguistic environment and the allocation of educational resources for language learning. The study further argues that the parental agency is essentially parents’ conscious decision-making on whether to follow, alter, or complement the linguistic environment that the larger society offers for the children’s multilingual development. Parents’ ideological beliefs on what kind of language resources they wish their children to obtain, prioritising accessing social resources and citizenship resources, guide the negotiating process. The study supports elevating the status of Fangyan in Chinese society, and also suggests expanding parents’ understanding of language resources, especially from the perspectives of families and individuals.

Sign Language is used to facilitate the communication between Deaf and non-Deaf people. It uses signs-words with basic structural elements such as handshape, parts of face, body or space, and the orientation of the fingers-palm. Sign Languages vary from people to people and from country to country and evolve as spoken languages. In the current study, an application which aims at Greek Sign Language and English Sign Language learning by hard of hearing people and talking people, has been developed. The application includes grouped signs in alphabetical order. The user can find Greek Sign Language signs, English sign language signs and translate from Greek sign language to English sign language. The written word of each sign, and the corresponding meaning are displayed. In addition, the sound is activated in order to enable users with partial hearing loss to hear the pronunciation of each word. The user is also provided with various tasks in order to enable an interaction of the knowledge acquired by the user. This interaction is offered mainly by multiple-choice tasks, incorporating text or video. The current application is not a simple sign language dictionary as it provides the interactive participation of users. It is a platform for Greek and English sign language active learning.

In this article, a prototype Greek text to Greek Sign Language (GSL) conversion system is presented. The system is integrated into an educational platform that addresses the needs of teaching GSL grammar and was developed within the SYNENNOESE project (Efthimiou et al. 2004a. Developing an e-learning platform for the Greek sign language. In: K. Miesenberger, J. Klaus, and W. Zagler, eds. Computer helping people with special needs, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, vol. 3118, 1107–1113). The detailed implementation of the language-processing component of a Greek text to GSL conversion system is provided, focusing upon the inherent problems of knowledge elicitation of sign language (SL) grammar and its implementation within a parser framework. It is based on an SL dictionary (Efthimiou et al. 2004a) database of coded GSL knowledge. The proposed system has been designed and implemented after considering most state-of-the-art SL machine translation or Conversion systems, such as Vsigns (Papadogiorgaki et al. 2004. VSigns – a virtual sign synthesis web tool. In: Proceedings of Sixth COST 276 Workshop on Information and Knowledge Management for Integrated Media Communication, May 2004, Thessaloniki, Greece), ZARDOZ (Veale et al. 1998. The challenges of cross-modal translation: English to sign language translation in the ZARDOZ system. Machine Translation, 13, 81–106) and SignSynth (Angus 2001. SignSynth: a sign language synthesis application using Web3D and Perl. In: Gesture and Sign Lanauage in Human–Computer Interaction. London, UK: International Gesture Workshop), and taking into account their advantages and disadvantages. The overall architecture is innovative since other existing systems either do not consider the GSL or they cannot be effectively applied on sentences but just on single words. The system is demonstrable on any conventional PC.

This study aims to investigate parents� language ideology and family language policy (FLP) among Acehnese families that impact on language shift and language maintenance of Acehnese as a heritage language. The participants of the study were 10 female parents from one of the suburbs in Lhokseumawe City, who have young children from 2 years to 15 years old. The study employed a descriptive qualitative method. The data was collected through semi-structured interviews. The result of the study shows that the majority of parents� belief that Indonesian is significant for their children's education, has resulted in parents prioritizing Indonesian for their children as the dominant language to speak at home. Furthermore, the family language policy adopted by parents has an impact on language shift among Acehnese children to the Indonesian language. �Parents are reluctant to speak Acehnese to their children as a mother tongue and tend to abandon their heritage language. There are two significant points that are lost due to the consequence of parents� belief and there the family language policy to choose only Indonesian as a mother tongue to their children; first, it has led their children to grow as monolingual people that somehow is a big loss for the Acehnese children in order to gain various benefits culturally, cognitively, and communicatively from being bilinguals; second, Acehnese is under serious threat as Acehnese children ability in speaking their heritage language keep decreasing. Thus, strong efforts need to be done by all parties for Acehnese language preservation as a part of the unique identity of the Acehnese people.

The present study investigates immigrant parents’ family language policies in regards to their children’s heritage language development and maintenance by utilizing Spolsky’s theoretical model on which research on family language policy (FLP) considerably draw. Following the three core components of the FLP model, Iranian parents’ beliefs, practices and efforts in relation to their children’s home language (i.e. Persian/Farsi) acquisition and maintenance are investigated. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with twenty-five parents of Persian-English bilinguals (6–18 year old) in New Zealand. The findings reveal that although the parents hold positive beliefs towards the family language acquisition and maintenance, there are discrepancies between their language ideologies and family language practices. In light of these inconsistencies between parents’ beliefs and their actual family language practices and efforts to preserve the heritage language, we argue that to raise their children bilingually, immigrant parents should not only have strong beliefs towards family language acquisition and maintenance, but also their everyday practices and efforts should be in line with their beliefs.

Ukrainians constitute the third largest ethnic group in Estonia (The Population and Housing Census, 2011). In the same time, it regrettably becomes evident that the maintaining of the language and culture of the Ukrainian minority living in Estonia and their attitudes towards their own heritage language have hardly been studied at all (see also Küün, 2022). This study seeks to fill mentioned gap by adding information on the family language policy practiced by the Ukrainians living in the Republic of Estonia to the field of research concerned with family language policy (FLP) and transmission of the heritage language and culture. The article describes the role of Ukrainian Sunday schools in two Estonian towns, Tapa and Sillamäe. Some of the parents of children studying Ukrainian language and culture in Sunday schools in mentioned towns are involved as informants of the study. I used four semi-structured interviews in frame of case studies as my research method. Study results reveal that the role of language and culture related Sunday schools should certainly not be underestimated in strengthening national mindsets and a sense of belonging, learning the heritage language, and encouraging the use of Ukrainian. / Keywords: family language policy, language ideology, language practice, language management tools, languages of education, Ukrainian Sunday school, Ukrainian

Qualitative applied linguistics research in Deaf Studies focuses on real‐world problems involving sign languages as well as spoken/written languages. This entry describes the evolution of applied sign language linguistics and the role of Deaf Studies in reframing academic and popular conceptions of signing deaf people. Ethnographic and autoethnographic research, linguistic ethnography, and interview‐based qualitative research are some of the methodologies that have supported the exploration of bilingual education models for deaf learners where a sign language is the language of instruction; the experiences of sign language teachers and sign language interpreters and translators; and family language policy in multilingual deaf and hearing families. It has also illuminated literacy practices in signing communities, language ideologies regarding deaf signers of nonstandard varieties, and translanguaging by deaf signers. Current and future research trends include sign language vitality and revitalization and the experiences of minoritized signing communities from outside and within the Global North and South.

The current paper describes a study that sought to determine the beliefs, practices, and needs of parents living in Montreal, Quebec, who were raising their children bi/multilingually. The parents (N = 27) participated in a total of nine focus group and individual interviews in which they discussed their family language policies (language ideologies, practices, and actions taken to maintain a language). Through rounds of deductive and inductive coding and analysis, family language policies regarding English and/or French were compared with policies regarding heritage languages. The participants’ family language policies were further examined in light of Quebec’s official language policy of interculturalism. Findings indicate a complex co-existence of family and official language policy in which parents both support Quebec’s official language policy by converging towards French as a common public language and questioning the policy’s stance on official institutional support for heritage languages.

This article examines the reported language ideologies and family language policies of the parents of Cantonese-English bilinguals in the U.S. in relation to their children's achievement scores in Cantonese and English. We explore the relationships first by language of instruction. Results show children in bilingual classrooms scored higher than those in mainstream (English-only) classrooms on the Cantonese tasks, but significantly more children in bilingual programs had Cantonese as a home language than children in mainstream classrooms. Parents from mainstream classrooms were significantly more satisfied with their children's English-language attainment than parents from bilingual classrooms. Using cluster analysis, we then identify four new groups of children based on their language proficiency: (a) English-dominant, (b) Cantonese-dominant, (c) “balanced bilingual,” and (d) “ideal bilingual.” Results show all children scored at or above the monolingual English mean on English decoding, but the ideal bilingual cluster had the largest Cantonese vocabulary. The English-dominant group heard significantly less Cantonese in the home, while all children in the ideal bilingual and Cantonese-dominant clusters heard only Cantonese. Findings point to the integral component of the family unit in children's bilingual development and bring up timely issues relating to family language planning and policy.

This paper focuses on the micro-level of language policy and aims to point out the critical role of family language policy (FLP) in language maintenance/shift of minority/heritage home language(s) and childhood bilingualism. FLP could resist broader language ideologies by transforming parents’ language ideologies and attitudes into language practices and language management that support the development of active or additional childhood bilingualism. Through a research into the interdisciplinary components of FLP, this paper aims to illustrate aspects of multilevel and dynamic relationships between each of these core components. An introduction to FLP as a research field is included as well as some of the studies that spotlighted the way parental agency in regard to each of the three FLP components could shape, explicitly or implicitly, language use and planning for the minority/heritage home language(s).

In recent decades, there has been among hearing people a growing interest in sign language. This increasing interest in sign language is attributed to a number of things, ranging from academics to professional job skills to personal interest. In Greece, Greek Sign Language (GSL) learners, after taking courses totaling 480 hours, can acquire a certificate of proficiency in GSL by successfully participating in the final examinations, which take place under the aegis of the Hellenic Federation of the Deaf. The research herein discusses the factors and criteria that contribute to acquiring the GSL proficiency certificate. More specifically, the research records views by GSL instructors as well as those of GSL learners on this topic, sets up a comparison, and extrapolates a conclusion whether they coincide or not. A multifaceted, twenty-five item questionnaire was filled out electronically by 35 Greek Sign Language instructors and 143 Greek Sign Language learners via the Google Docs application. The results have shown that both instructors and learners are on the same wavelength for most individual factors and criteria. Despite the homogeneity of the responses, a statistically significant difference (p < .05) is evident due to the divergence of the replies of GSL instructors and learners concerning the type of syntax that they teach or they have been taught respectively.