Child Agency and Language Policy in Transnational Families

Abstract

Study of family language policy unites research in child language acquisition and language policy to better understand how parents’ language decisions, practices and beliefs influence child outcomes (King, Fogle & Logan-Terry, 2008). Thus far, this work has focused on how family language policy shapes children’s language competencies, formal school success (e.g., Snow, 1990), and the future status of minority languages (e.g., Fishman, 1991), with less attention to children’s active roles in shaping parents’ ideologies and practices (cf. Fogle, 2009; Luykx, 2003). Addressing this gap, this paper examines how child agency and language use patterns influence parental language behaviors. We draw from three studies of transnational families (Russian adoptive families and Spanish-English bilingual homes), to describe four aspects of child-parent discourse: (a) children’s metalinguistic comments, (b) children’s use of resistance strategies, (c) parental responses to children’s growing linguistic competence, and (d) enactments of family-external ideologies of race and language.