Homescape, parental agency and family language policy: how Yi parents utilize semiotic resources to facilitate language maintenance

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ABSTRACT This paper incorporates the notion of homescape into family language policy, investigating how a group of Yi parents who migrated from Yi communities to urban areas in China facilitates or limits their children’s Yi maintenance. Through participatory observations in four Yi families and semi-structured interviews with the parents, this study examines the homescapes established in each family, the rationales behind their creation, and the family’s engagement with them. The analysis of data reveals that the parents agentively crafted their homescapes to create a family language environment conducive to Yi language learning in response to the limited resources outside the home domain. Homescapes were strategically designed to foster children’s ethnic identity construction, Yi literacy development and daily use of Yi. In these families, parents as agents employed homescapes as an agentic space where they subtly shaped children’s language ideologies and practices so as to eliminate conflict between parental and child agency. The study advocates the examination of homescapes as a critical part of family language policy that reflects the de facto language ideologies, practices and language management skills of family members in their everyday lives.