Blurred Biographies and Global Selves: Parents Re-Inventing themselves through their Family Language Policy

After almost a century of Family Language Policy that was dominated by the One Person-One Language approach, the research on Family Language Policy of the past 20 years has been influenced by a more fluid understanding of concepts such as Family Language Policy, family, language and identity (e.g. King/Fogle 2013; Van Mensel 2018). More and more families describe themselves as multilingual rather than by the languages they speak. If parents themselves are multilingual, they can choose from a range of linguistic options, e.g. the monolingual use of one or another language or different forms of language mixing. However, it involves not only the privilege of making choices but also pressure to have to decide against another language. Not only the children's linguistic identities develop through the language choices made in the family and the underlying beliefs but passing on language(s) to the next generation leads to the parents re-negotiating their own linguistic identities, which is often strongly influenced by their own biographies (Tannenbaum 2005). In this presentation, I use interview data from several transnational families to show the parents' struggle to match their former (linguistic) identities and their identities as multilingual parents and their attempt to use their daughter's linguistic repertoire to re-invent themselves as global citizens and to blur their biographies. References King, K. & Fogle, L. (2013), Family language policy and bilingual parenting. Language Teaching 46, 172-194. Tannenbaum, M. (2005), Viewing family relations through a linguistic lens: Symbolic Aspects of Language Maintenance in Immigrant Families. In: The Journal of Family Communication 5/3, 229-252. Van Mensel, L. (2018), 'Quiere koffie?' The multilingual familylect of transcultural families. International Journal of Multilingualism 15/3, 233-248.