Abstract
This paper investigates adoptive parents’ representations of their children’s birth-language and language negotiation which takes place during early stages of transnational adoption. By drawing on the interview discourse of 20 Italian transnational adoptive parents, in the first part we will focus on the reasons that led parents to use the child’s language with him/her and with orphanage staff during the first contacts in the country of origin. In the second part, the parents reported that they relied both on productive and receptive acquired linguistic knowledge to negotiate linguistic contexts with the child. Language negotiation has been described by the parents as involving the practice of intercomprehension, a plurilingual communicative strategy, which allows participants to speak their first language, while exhibiting receptive competences in the language of the other. Eventually, in the third part, we will describe how the mothers and the fathers rationalized the children’s linguistic transition from their first language to the parents’ language and, finally, we will explore the parents’ discourse around language shift. Examining parents’ perceptions of the role that language plays in the experience of adopting contributes to understanding the negotiation which takes place over the topic of language maintenance in specific contexts where parents and children have divergent linguistic repertoires.
Highlights
Transnational adoption necessitates a vast range of abrupt life-changes and requires consistent efforts for both adopted children and the hosting family
Based on interpretative analyses (Bork & Mohler, 1994), we developed an initial conceptual framework which led towards three general research questions which make up the three sections of this paper: a) when do parents resort to the child’s birth-language during early stages of transnational adoption and why? b) how do they negotiate the language context with their children? c) and how do they cope with language shift? This, in turn, helped us to draw up an initial list of categories (Table 4), which helped us to review, explore and analyze the text of the interviews by means of NVIVO qualitative data software
As far as adoptive parents are concerned, the children’s diversity, embodied by a different language, represents the opportunity to negotiate the terms of a new identity, both as a family and as individuals
Summary
Transnational adoption necessitates a vast range of abrupt life-changes and requires consistent efforts for both adopted children and the hosting family. This study took place two years on average after the first encounters with the children, to get an Strategies for language maintenance in transnational adoption overall scenario of the first period after adoption. It does not come as a surprise that the parents attached an important role to the birth language during the first months after the arrival of the child, when both they and the children needed to adjust linguistically to one another. This hypothesis is confirmed by studies like Fogle’s (2012) and it is supported by some of the examples reported in this paper
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