Family language policy through the eyes of bilingual children: the case of French heritage speakers in the UK

‘Then suddenly I spoke a lot of Spanish’ – Changing linguistic practices and heritage language from adolescents’ points of view

“…The findings in this article draw attention to the complex ways in which young multilinguals represent and use their linguistic repertoires, and add to the line of research that underscores the importance of considering children's and adolescents' agencies and perspectives in studies of HL maintenance and family multilingualism (e.g. Obojska, 2019a;Wilson, 2019). Research on child agency in multilingual families show that children's language choices often lead families toward language shifts in favour of the majority language (Fogle & King, 2013;Gafaranga, 2010).…”

“…For example, choosing Spanish as a language subject at school, like Tania and Matilda have done, enables a possibility to develop their proficiency in Spanish that may (or may not) influence HL use in other arenas. As shown by Wilson (2019) in the UK, where French is included in the mainstream school curricula, French-English bilingual children hold positive attitudes toward their HL. In Norway as in many other countries, multilingual children have relatively few possibilities of cultivating individual multilingualism in the mainstream school system (Svendsen, 2018;Svendsen & Ims, 2020).…”

“…King, Fogle, & Logan-Terry, 2008;King & Lanza, 2017). Language ideologies and linguistic practices in the family context may be diverging and even conflicting (Curdt-Christiansen, 2016;Fogle & King, 2013;Little, 2017;Melo-Pfeifer, 2015;Obojska, 2019a;Wilson, 2019). For example, Obojska (2019a) shows how a Polish father and his daughter hold diverging views of home language practices, suggesting that adolescents' language preferences play a role for the decisions regarding language practices in the home.…”

“…Using language portraits (cf. Busch, 2016, see methods section), Wilson (2019) investigates the HL experiences of a French bilingual children and their parents in the UK. Her findings suggest that certain bilingual strategies employed by parents may impede family communication and potentially lead to disharmony.…”

“…In assessing young peoples' experiences, visual methods may enable a deeper understanding of the complexities of their language experiences and metalinguistic reflections (cf. Obojska, 2019b;Wilson, 2019). The Language Portrait method, which was developed in Vienna by the group Spracherleben (Busch, 2016) was therefore used.…”