No abstract

The Internet has permeated all aspects of daily life in many areas of the world. Its advancement and feasibility affects how we work, socialize, and spend our time. The advent of social media networks has greatly contributed to these changes and has become the place where people on the Internet are. In light of this new social movement, we propose that social media networks can and should be viewed as the potential way of reaching participants in social studies research. In the current paper we review Internet"s social effects research and provide an example of how the Internet and more specifically, the social media networks and other Internet tools can be utilized to perform a questionnaire based social research study in the area of Family Language Policy. We provide the "how to" guide of conducting such research by sharing the technique employed in our study.

Challenges of heritage language maintenance and benefits of bilingualism have been widely acknowledged. Heritage language maintenance research most oft en focuses on heritage languages in English-dominant societies. This paper presents a case study on family language policy experiences, strategies, and outcomes led by an American-born mother in her effort to maintain and promote English, her heritage language, within the home in the Hebrew-dominant environment in Israel

Bilingual partnerships (Piller & Pavlenko, 2004) and transnational families (Hirsch & Lee, 2018) are on the rise. With mothers spending more time with their children at home, even in dual career partnerships (Hochschild & Machung, 1989), the labor of family language policy (FLP) implementation often falls on them. While increasingly more new hires in academia are women (Finkelstein, Seal, & Schuster, 1998), only 31% of them are mothers (Perna, 2003). In this work, we examine the dominant discourses regarding bilingualism and FLP among academic mothers who find themselves at an intersection of multiple and often competing social positions. Data was collected from 46 academic mothers residing in linguistically-different host societies but all whom gather in an online community they have co-created. Data collection procedure included 22 open-ended questions exploring bilingualism and FLP orientations. Iterative and recursive content analysis was performed, yielding thematic patterns centering around language ideologies, practices, and bilinguality.

Linguistic Landscape (LL) refers to language use on objects in public space. An analysis of LL can uncover social realities and inter-group dynamics that are not readily apparent. The purpose of this study is to review the pertinent literature and to describe the LL of a limited area of Cape Town in terms of 1) Language represented in public space (street signs, commercial signs, and public notices), 2) Source of language selection (Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up), and 3)Type of sign (street, commercial, public notice). The use of English was found to be disproportionately dominant, and multilingualism underrepresented. Implications of this study point to the importance of LL analysis in order to obtain a clear picture of de facto realities of different linguistic communities within a single space.