Language Development, Discourse, and Politics

Abstract

This chapter presents three recent projects in the area of family language policy, highlighting how Lanza’s research has contributed to their development. The first project focuses on language practices and socialization in Malay homes in Singapore. The project is guided by Lanza’s early work, exemplified in her classic, influential research (1997/2004), which examined language contact and development within Norwegian-English bilingual families. This strand of research used close discourse analysis of everyday family life to reveal implicit family language policies as well as language development and use among young children. The second project, a part of a large ongoing project in the UK, looks at Chinese families. This project is related to the second strand of Lanza’s research, evident in more recent work framed explicitly under the banner of ‘family language policy’ (e.g., Lanza, 2016; 2017). It analyses identity, ideologies, and agency more directly, and is characterized by a more anthropological and ethnographic lens. The third project examines how Latino families understand restrictive immigration policies in the U.S. (King & Flugel, in press). It takes up the political dimensions of family language policy, including how nationalistic or anti-immigrant discourses impact family language decisions. Work in this strand is evident in Lanza’s examination of the impact of media on Polish families in Norway (2018). This chapter provides a clear overview of the development of the field of family language policy, and Lanza’s important contributions therein, while simultaneously showcasing new empirical research in each of these strands.