Multilingual Families in a Digital Age by Lexander, Kristin Vold; Androutsopoulos, Jannis;

Short description:

This book offers new insights into transnational family life in today’s digital age, exploring the media resources and language practices parents and children employ toward maintaining social relationships in digital interactions and constructing transnational family bonds and identities.

Long description:

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This book offers new insights into transnational family life in today’s digital age, exploring the media resources and language practices parents and children employ toward maintaining social relationships in digital interactions and constructing transnational family bonds and identities.

The book seeks to expand the boundaries of existing research on family multilingualism, in which digital communication has been little studied until now. Drawing on ethnographic studies of four families of Senegalese background in Norway, Lexander and Androutsopoulos develop an integrated approach which weaves together participants’ linguistic choices for situated interaction, the affordances of digital technologies, and the families’ language and media ideologies. The book explores such key themes as the integration of linguistic and media resources in family repertoires, creative practices of digital translanguaging, engagement in diaspora practices, and opportunities of digital communication for the development of children's heritage language skills.

With an innovative perspective on ‘doing family’ in the digital age, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in multilingualism, sociolinguistics, digital communication, language and communication, and language and media.

"This book crackles with innovation and promises a new future in multilingual family communication research.  Lexander and Androutsopoulos provide detailed discussions on how to document, analyze, and visualize the multilingual, multimodal repertoires of Senegalese diasporic family communication, highlighting digital communication as a “key enabler” of transnational family life."  -  Lyn Wright, Professor of Applied Linguistics/TESOL, University of Memphis, USA

"This timely book provides a much-needed empirical study of language and media practices in transnational families. Using four Senegalese families in Norway as a case in point, the authors examine how these transnational families engage with a wide range of semiotic resources, including multiple languages and media platforms, in the act of ‘doing family.’ The book provides a new integrated theoretical perspective, mediational repertoire, to understand the interactional dynamics underlying family relationships. This book is a definite must-read for researchers, students, and practitioners who work with family, language and media in cross-disciplinary contexts." - Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen, Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education, University of Bath, UK

Table of Contents:

List of tables, images, and figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

1.1 A day in the digital life of a young multilingual family member

1.2 Theoretical dimensions: Family multilingualism, digital interaction, and polymedia

1.3 Fieldwork for this book

1.4 Outline of the book

2.1 Multilingual practices

2.1.1 Practice approaches to multilingualism

2.1.2 Repertoires and registers

2.2 Family multilingualism

2.2.1 Family language policy and practice

2.2.2 Heritage language practices and heritage language socialisation

2.2.3 The discursive construction of the multilingual family space

2.2.4 A ‘digital turn’ in FLP literature

2.3 Multilingualism online

2.3.1 Code-switching approaches

2.3.2 Networked multilingualism and digital translanguaging

2.3.3 Affordances for mediated interaction in the digital ecology

2.4 Transnational families and digitally mediated communication

2.4.1 ‘Doing family’ transnationally

2.4.2 Digital co-presence in transnational families

2.2.3 Polymedia: An ecology of media choices

2.2.4 Language and media in family-making practices

2.5 Conclusion: Towards the study of mediational repertoires

3.1 Sociolinguistic research with Senegalese migrants in Norway

3.1.1 Language and society in Senegal

3.1.2 Language and immigration in Norway

3.1.3 Senegalese immigrants in Norway

3.2 Presentation of participants

3.2.1 The Diagne family

3.2.2 The Bâ family

3.2.3 The Sagna family

3.2.4 The Coly family

3.3 The families’ linguistic repertoires

3.3.1 Wolof

3.3.2 Joola

3.3.3 Peul

3.3.4 French

3.3.5 Arabic

3.3.6 English

3.3.7 Norwegian

4.1 Visualizing repertoires

4.1.1 Language portraits and network graphs

4.1.2 Media maps

4.1.3 Mediagrams

4.2 Data collection

4.3 Developing mediagrams

4.4 Data analysis

4.5 Ethical considerations and other challenges

5.1 Pleasure and pressure: Balancing co-presence

5.2 Multilingualism and multimodality: Managing a network of generations

5.3 Media, language, and connectedness: A comparison of three fathers

5.4 Media choices

5.5 Conclusions

6.1 Language, power, morality, and solidarity in the family

6.2 Translocal connectivities

6.2.1 Mediated interaction in the household: Coordinating family issues

6.2.2 Translocal household interaction: Making decisions and sharing

6.2.3 Transnational family-making: Power, solidarity, and teasing

6.3 Multilingual expressions of affection

6.3.1 Wife and husband

6.3.2 Parents and children

6.3.3 Extended family and beyond

6.4 Conclusions

7.1 Diaspora and digital diaspora

7.2 Digital diaspora and polycentricity

7.3 Polycentric participation: A kaleidoscope of practices

7.3.1 Digital spaces of diasporic sociality

7.3.2 The Senegalese public sphere

7.3.3 Religious discourse

7.3.4 Beyond diaspora: Traces of Norway and global pop culture

7.4 Conclusions

8.1 Parents’ ideologies of linguistic heritage

8.2 Heritage language repertoires in time and space

8.3 Children’s transnational heritage language practices

8.3.1 Heritage repertoires by interlocutors

8.3.2 Heritage language registers

8.3.3 Learning Wolof through online interaction

8.4 Conclusions: Heritage languages and mediational repertoires

9.1 Multi-sited ethnography: Studying mediational repertoires

9.2 Transnational connectivity and family multilingualism

9.3 A digital perspective on heritage language repertoires

References

Index