Ideology, agency, and imagination in multilingual families: An introduction

Abstract

Ideology, identity and agency are central concerns in the current study of multilingualism and transnational families as greater analytical attention is given to how multilingual families imagine and collectively construct themselves. This introduction reviews recent shifts in the study of multilingual families and discusses the four articles that comprise this thematic issue. Together, these four papers present new empirical data concerning a wide array of family language practices and policies, differing in noteworthy ways, and in particular in terms of contexts and languages studied. As demonstrated here, these articles critically analyze the everyday ways in which ideologies, identities, agency, and imagination are created and enacted among multilingual families in divergent contexts. These analyses provide important windows into how meaning is produced within particular places, activities, social relations, interactional histories, and cultural ideologies, and collectively, this body of work advances our understanding of language use and learning within multilingual families.