Critical Perspectives on Language and Kinship in Multilingual Families
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2020
Language: eng
Number of pages: 184
ISBN-13: 9781350088283
Description: "Applying critical kinship studies to the study of multilingual families, this book foregrounds kinship, gender, and sexuality in discussions of family language ideologies, practices, and planning and affords a new point of view on family language processes. It demonstrates how bringing together family discourse, family language socialization, and family language policy approaches to focus on the social construction of family provides insight into multilingual experiences in the family, children's language development, and societal level language maintenance and shift. Focusing on historically marginalized families in multilingual family research (i.e. adoptive, single parent, and LGBTQ+), this book centers nonnormative family configurations as a way to focus on kinship processes (located in, for example, the use of kinship terms, explicit talk about family, and routine family interactions) where family members "do" kinship. The volume explores the construction of family in private and public spheres including interview and interactional data in homes as well as public forms of production such as memoirs, documentaries, and even comedy. Ranging from discussions of how single and adoptive parents talk about and to their children and the use of Russian on a mother-daughter walk-to-school routine to the Trump family's invisible multilingualism and African American lesbian comedian Wanda Sykes's jokes about her family's exclusionary use of French, this book explores how bi- and multilingualism play a role in family construction"--