Abstract Summary
Family language practices are changing especially due to the digitalization of communication. By adopting digital ethnography we therefore take a close look at the mediated bilingual family and their language practices, and discuss how apps and platforms shape roles and identities, and even redefine concepts such as language and family.
Abstract :
The aim of the study is to examine how language use appears in bilingual Swedish-Finnish families in Finland. The essential focus is to identify how bilingualism in the family is maintained from one generation to another, particularly when considering the role of grandparents and societal attitudes. The methods for collecting data are semi-structured interviews with family members and observations of language use between them via sound recordings, film clips etc. collected by the informants themselves using their smartphones. The method for analyzing data is nexus analysis, an ethnographic discourse analytic method, where the focus lies on social action, in this case the language use within the family. Those taking part in the pilot study are a parent and a grandparent from a bilingual family. The preliminary results from the pilot study show that the language strategy used in the family in question is “one person – one language”. The father speaks Finnish and the mother Swedish with their three children. The mother and father speak Swedish with each other and the children also speak Swedish with each other. The paternal grandmother speaks Finnish while both maternal grandparents speak Swedish with their children and grandchildren. According to the participants in the pilot study, parents need to be firm, supportive and consistent about their language use and choices in order to succeed in raising bilingual children. The participants emphasize that grandparents need to be natural role models and representatives of a language and culture in order to motivate and support children’s bilingual development. The participants believe that school activities should support and encourage bilingual children more, rather than restricting them to a monolingual norm.
