Naturalism and ideological work: how is family language policy renegotiated as both parents and children learn a threatened minority language?

Towards a parental muda for new Basque speakers: Assessing emotional factors and language ideologies

“…Eva viewed these new attitudes as related to the fact that, now that Iker was at school, he was able to compare Eva's language practices to those of more competent speakers, such as his father or teacher. Similar to the results of Armstrong (), who depicts how new Gaelic‐speaking mothers struggled against the rapidly evolving language competency of their immersion‐schooled children, Iker's developing language competence caused issues of linguistic insecurity in Eva, to the degree that she was reconsidering whether she should even use the Basque she did know with him.…”

“…Family language transmission is commonly linked to parental ideologies that underscore the importance of sounding “natural” when transmitting the language (Pavlenko, ). In his study of Gaelic new‐speaking mothers, Armstrong () describes how ideologies of “language naturalism” are narrowly linked to “authentic” speakers or “someone who uses language unselfconsciously […] in an apparently natural way” (cf. Armstrong, : 576; Woolard, ).…”

“…In his study of Gaelic new‐speaking mothers, Armstrong () describes how ideologies of “language naturalism” are narrowly linked to “authentic” speakers or “someone who uses language unselfconsciously […] in an apparently natural way” (cf. Armstrong, : 576; Woolard, ). Such ideologies permeated the narratives of the mothers in that study, who struggled with the perception that, by using the minority language, they were “forcing” the language on the child.…”

“…A common attitude among parents with low levels of proficiency who send their children to minority‐language‐medium schools is the fear that their lower linguistic competencies will exclude them from staying involved in their children's upbringing and education (Armstrong, ; Kavanagh & Hickey, ). As a mother of a Basque‐schooled child, Eva speaking with Iker in her non‐fluent Basque signified a deliberate and concerted effort.…”

New speaker parents as grassroots policy makers in contemporary Galicia: ideologies, management and practices

“…Soler and Zabrodskaja (2017) use the 'new speaker' lens to analyze empirical data collected in Tallinn households among Spanish-Estonian speaking families but focus more specifically on the dynamics of family language policy in the context of transnational multilingual families. Armstrong (2014), on the other hand, provides a more explicit focus on what can be termed "potential" new speakers (see Ramallo and O'Rourke 2014;Carty 2018) in minority language contexts in his study of mothers with children attending Gaelic-medium education, who have to varying degrees learned Scottish Gaelic and who are attempting to create a new language policy in the home. The mothers in Armstrong's study differ to the Galician parents at the centre of the current study, who as will be discussed in more detail below, had already made a conscious decision to adopt Galician as their main language and had in most cases displaced their first language, Spanish, altogether.…”