The current research examines family language policies within Russian-speaking single-parent families in Finland.
Family language policy has examined in detail language policies within normative families (i.e., double-parent families) (e.g., Curdt-Christiansen, 2009; Armstrong, 2014; Hua & Wei, 2016). However, single-parent families remain on the margins of scientific inquiry (see however Obied, 2010; Poveda et al., 2014; Wright, 2020). Following the call to encompass various family configurations (Palviainen, 2020) the current study focuses on two single-parent Russian-speaking families in Finland. The number of Russian-speaking single-parent families has considerably grown in recent years in Finland. According to the Official Statistics of Finland (OSF), it now exceeds 4400 families. Furthermore, Russian-speaking families that live in Finland often have transnational and cross-cultural experiences which are likely to shape the language policies within the families. The current study is a work-in-progress, which focuses on interactional data that was self-recorded by the mothers when they played with their children or read to them. The corpus consists of over 400 minutes of recordings including sociolinguistic interviews with the mothers. Informed by the tripartite model of FLP, the study explores language policies in families with the help of the interactional sociolinguistic approach to discourse analysis. This approach allows exploring how language policy emerges and how it is shaped by family members in everyday interaction (e.g., Mirvahedi, 2021).
