ALS Research Grant for Hanna Torsh

Pride and shame ten years on: Revisiting linguistic identity and family language policy

This project aims to re-interview fourteen mixed language couples who were originally interviewed in 2012-2013 for Hanna's PhD in 2012-13, entitled  Between pride and shame: Linguistic intermarriage in Australia from the perspective of the English-dominant partner (Torsh, 2019). The study aims to understand how parental linguistic identities change over time and potentially intersect with child language development, and how family language policy changes over time in response to micro- and macro-level social process and 'mudes', or phases of life (Pujolar & Gonzàlez, 2013). This project is significant because it will focus on parents’ experiences in a period of life when young children who have acquired two languages as infants often abandon their heritage language in favour of the dominant societal language, here English (De Houwer, 2021). This research will add to our knowledge of language in the family in two ways: (1) by contributing to the literature on parental linguistic identities in multilingual families and (2) by adding a longitudinal dimension to the original research which accounts more fully for the ways in which phases of life affect linguistic practices and repertoires for both adults and children.

References

De Houwer, A. (2021). Bilingual development in childhood. Cambridge University Press.

Pujolar, J., & Gonzàlez, I. (2013, 2013/03/01). Linguistic ‘mudes’ and the de-ethnicization of language choice in Catalonia. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(2), 138-152. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2012.720664

Torsh, H. I. (2019). Between pride and shame: linguistic intermarriage in Australia from the perspective of the English-dominant partner Macquarie University]. Sydney.