Graduation (Image credit: Emily Pacheco)

During my Master of Research (MRes) studies, whenever I met someone new, they would often enquire about what I was doing for my thesis.

When I told them, I was doing research with hearing children of Deaf migrants, people would respond and say, “Wow, that is very specific, do you know anyone personally that applies to?”.

I would then proudly explain that I have Deaf parents whose families migrated to the U.S. and that I do know many wonderful people who also grew up using signed and spoken languages and experienced ‘interpreting’ for their parents. I always enjoy it when my thesis intrigues people, and oftentimes they express they had never thought about migrant Deaf-hearing families and all the languages that could be used in interactions with them.

Because of my identity as a Coda (child of Deaf adults), occasionally a viral clip will be sent to me, or I will stumble across ones like these that captures a hearing child ‘interpreting’ for their Deaf parent:

• “Daddy’s Little Interpreter”
• “Fantastic’ 4-year-old uses sign language to interpret movie for deaf parents, wins hearts online”

The children in the viral clips above are acting as sign language brokers, and this practice is one part of what my thesis investigated.

In my thesis, I created and used the term Comda (child of migrant Deaf adults) to focus on the brokering and heritage language maintenance experiences of participants in their migrant Deaf-hearing families.

By creating the term Comda in my MRes research, this population was explicitly researched for the first time. My study found that Comdas broker frequently inside and outside the home. In the family, multilingual practices led to Comdas feeling conflicted with both emotions of linguistic pride and linguistic burden. Linguistic pride stemmed from praise given by family members to Comdas who maintain sign language use in their multilingual repertoires. Some also felt pride in keeping the connections to their Deaf and cultural heritages through their multilingualism.

However, at times, they experienced their multilingualism as a double-edged sword. While it brought pride, it also constituted a linguistic burden in the family when Comdas felt their hearing family members were not putting in the expected effort, as they had, to communicate with Deaf family members.

In institutional settings outside of the home, Comdas broker in low and high-stakes contexts. Comdas enjoyed brokering in low-stakes contexts (telephone conversations, restaurants, and shops) but felt pressure in high-stakes contexts (legal or medical environments). In addition to brokering in these contexts, Comdas’ multilingual experiences also led them to broker for other Deaf migrants in their communities.

Through uncovering the brokering experiences summarised above, I found Comdas valued them and felt brokering supported their multilingualism. By highlighting this positive impact, the skills Comdas can develop through brokering in their families in low-stakes institutional contexts can in turn support their future interactions with multilingual Deaf communities.

Additionally, my study found that the family language policies of migrant Deaf-hearing families are nuanced, as evidenced by the multilingual repertoires present in Comdas’ lives. Their multilingualism presented mixing of a spoken and signed language or two signed languages, which was commonly done by their parents and themselves. This language mixing practice was normal in their upbringings, and Comdas had to learn to separate these languages in formal institutions. The language acquisition of Comdas was not clear cut as to which languages came first in their upbringings. Comdas reflected a holistic and interconnected use of signed and spoken languages which was learned through brokering for their migrant Deaf parents.

Through my analysis and uncovering Comdas’ unique linguistic experiences, we can further understand the languaging skills they develop and how Comdas overcome audism by possessing a multilingual mindset (Lising, 2024). This resilience supports the intersection of brokering and heritage language maintenance.

The full thesis can be downloaded here: Sign Language Brokering and Heritage Language Maintenance Among Hearing Children of Deaf Migrant Parents

References

Lising, L. (2024). Multilingual mindset: A necessary concept for fostering inclusive multilingualism in migrant societies. AILA Review, 37(1), 35–53. https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.23023.lis

Migration separates families

I am a second generation migrant from my mother’s side. When my grandfather migrated from the former Czechoslovakia to Australia after World War 2, only one member of his immediate family was a fellow survivor, his older brother. The brothers were desperate to get out of war-torn Europe and start a new life, but there was a catch. They weren’t able to go to the same place. While my grandfather received permission to emigrate with his young family to Sydney, his brother received the same from the United States. Despite already losing their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in the war, the brothers were unable to prevent losing each other. After they emigrated, although they wrote letters, and spoke on the phone very rarely, they never saw each other again.

Today in Australia where I live and work, cross-border communication is likely to be by phone, not letter and for the majority of migrants the greatest barrier to seeing family is likely to be economic. Many of the participants I spoke to for my research into mixed language couples living in Sydney frequently spoke to family members by phone, sometimes even daily. This is significantly more affordable now than it was fifty years ago. However, migrant families continue to be separated for many years and often permanently. The border closures during the pandemic were a very difficult period for migrants unable to travel to spend time with family, particularly aging parents and relatives. So how does communication maintain family ties across borders? And how can we as scholars engage with this topic, theoretically, methodologically and ethically?

A theory of communicative care

I was recently lucky enough to speak to Dr Lynnette Arnold about her new book on this topic, Living together across borders: communicative care in transnational Salvadorean families. In the book she describes how communicative care both sustains and resists dominating geo-political forces which maintain continued migration from El Salvador to the United States across multiple generations as solution to meeting the economic needs of the nation.

In the book Arnold details an analytical approach based on the concept of  communicative care. By this she means that the everyday communication which families engage in is an enactment of care, and that this care is “the most fundamental way that transnational families maintain collective intergenerational life in the face of continued, and seemingly endless, separation.” (p.6) She uses the term convivencia or living together, to describe the culturally specific practices she observed in her data collection with transnational Salvadoran families.

I found communicative care a particularly useful lens for examining the links between what are sometimes referred to as local or micro practices and processes and their connection to larger macro processes such as the economic and political systems governing nations. An example of this is the role of communication in maintaining the flow of global remittances which support the Salvadorean economy as well as the individual families. In this sense the book is a powerful tool for researchers who are interested in both a nuanced exploration of language practices in context and in the transformational power of research to speak back to hegemonic forces such as borders, global capitalism and neoliberalism.

Participants as researchers: researchers as participants

This study took a two stage approach to collecting the data. Starting with a lengthy ethnographic study of a village in El Salvador where she lived and worked as a young women, Arnold built up relationships with two transnational families. These families then formed the research participants for the second stage of the study, where four months worth of telephone conversations between migrant and non-migrant family members were recorded.

This stage centred the agency of the participants themselves by training them as data collectors of the recorded phone calls between transnational family members. In the interview, Dr Arnold discusses how she also employed research assistants from El Salvador who recognised the social identities – as well as the language varieties – of the research participants. This facilitated their contributions, both as accurate transcribers of the audio data but also as cultural informants in the data analysis process.

The ethics of working with migrants and language issues

For those of us working in the field of migration and language, how can we behave ethically in a space where there are profoundly unequal power relations, the stakes are high and global tensions continue to bubble around issues of migration, borders and citizenship? This is especially true for scholars like me, who are not first generation migrants themselves and thus speak from a relatively privileged position.

According to Arnold, we can start by asking what is language doing? How does it connect with the relational aspect of people’s lives and the geopolitical contexts they exist in? Thinking critically about the role of language in creating social reality allows us to become informed advocates for linguistic diversity. It enables us to think about issues of access, inclusion and ultimately social justice.

I’ll leave you with one example from the book’s conclusion which I found particularly compelling due to my own research interests into the links between language maintenance in migrant families and second language education. Arnold makes the point that one way we can support transnational families to maintain networks of communicative care is to change existing educational language policy “which all too often functions as a tool of state-sponsored family separation by pushing the children of migrants towards monolingualism in dominant languages like English” (p. 171). Instead of turning bilinguals into monolingual, language in education policy must be guided by what migrant families themselves need, which is the communicative resources to maintain ties across borders. This includes a recognition of the linguistic variety in migrant repertoires, which extend way beyond standard languages.

Reference

Arnold, L. (2024). Living Together Across Borders: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families. Oxford University Press.

Related content

Piller, I. (2018). Globalization between crime and piety. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/globalization-crime-piety/
Weiss, F. (2012). Christmas in Nicaragua. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/christmas-in-nicaragua/

Transcript

Hanna Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the move podcast, a channel on the new books network, my name is Hannah Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics and applied linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Lynette Arnold, Dr. Lynette Arnold is an assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and we’re going to talk about her new monograph living together across borders, communicative care in Transnational Salvadorian Families published by Oxford University Press. Welcome to the show. Lynette.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you so much. Hi, everybody! Ola.

Hanna Torsh: Can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book?

Lynnette Arnold: Sure! So my book, Living together across borders, explores how members of transnational families find ways to live together despite being separated across borders. The families I work with are from a small rural village in El Salvador, with migrant relatives living in urban locations across the United States. I am not Salvadoran. I do not have Salvadoran family members. So you might wonder, what is it? How did I get involved in this? And my interest in this topic really emerged from 2 different but interrelated personal experiences.

I spent 5 years living in El Salvador from 2,000 to 2,005 during the years when most people are in college. I was living in El Salvador, and this is a really eye opening experience, because I got to know many young people, my age, who had grown up during the Salvadoran Civil War that happened in the 19 eighties, and in getting to know them I learned a lot about the involvement of the Us. Government in perpetuating this 12 year conflict through immense financial support of the Salvadoran military and training Salvadoran soldiers in brutal, scorched Earth tactics. All of these, the ways that us support had really caused a lot of harm in El Salvador, and that was an eye opening experience for me to realize that this big gaping hole in my education as a Us. Citizen not understanding something so vital about my country’s history and involvement in the world.

So that was one inspiration was really to help my fellow citizens better understand the human impact of us foreign policy. Our involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War was a direct cause of the widespread emigration that El Salvador shows still today. And so that was kind of one piece was recognizing that I hadn’t learned these things and wanting to share them with my fellow citizens.

The second experience was sort of more deeply relational, and it has to do with the ways that the relationships I made in El Salvador continued. When I moved back to the United States to go to college. When I moved to the US. I stayed in contact with people in El Salvador through phone calls, and I suddenly found myself part of this transnational network of folks in El Salvador, their relatives here in the United States, who I had met in El Salvador, but who had since migrated, and I started to get really interested in what was happening in those phone calls and all the kinds of complicated things that people were working out on the phone across borders. At the same time, at that moment in my life I was navigating a kind of growing realization or separation from my own family of origin. I had left at that point permanently left the Christian Commune where I was raised, and where my family still lives, so I have a very different reason for separation. But I was navigating in my own life how to be family with people that I wasn’t living together with. And so, though I juxtaposing those 2 experiences, got me really interested in how people do family at a distance and the role of language? So that was really what brought me then to the topic of the book.

Hanna: That’s so fascinating. And just a quick follow up question. You know you talk about living there, living in this rural village at a time when sort of other people were at college. How was that experience of language learning for you at that age, in this very remote community, especially when we consider today how almost how difficult that experience is to have with the new affordances that we have in terms of technology and the reach of technology.

Lynnette Arnold: That’s such a great question. Yeah. So I went to El Salvador, knowing very little Spanish. I had been raised in a kind of bilingual culture with German. So I had German as kind of a heritage language, not for my family, but from my community growing up and understood a lot of German, but went to El Salvador, so I knew how to be bilingual. I didn’t know Spanish. I took 2 weeks of intensive one-on-one Spanish courses in the capital.

And I told the guy, the instructor like this is what’s going to happen. I’m going out to this rural village by myself for the next 4 months like I need to be able to survive in Spanish, and I had a dictionary, and I had a grammar workbook and then I went out into the village. I knew one other person in the country who spoke English, who I saw maybe twice the entire time that I was there. So it was really immersion. I was living with a family. I was trying to figure out how to, you know, support the English teacher who didn’t really speak English, you know, like all of these things while also learning the language. So I think obviously, having already been bilingual, helped me like my brain, knew how to learn language, knew that, like learning, the grammar was helpful, and that then I could be like, oh, that person just used the subjunctive! That’s what it sounds like in real life, you know. I remember having experiences like that.

I think the other thing that came out of that experience for me was that I was really learning the language and the culture at the same time. So it wasn’t that I was learning these abstract grammatical forms, but I was learning how to communicate in the language as a young woman, so that was the other, like the gendered, and age the fact that I was, you know, a Us. Citizen, a foreigner. All of those things I had to learn how to use Spanish in that very kind of accurate, contextual way. And still to this day, when I speak Spanish, I find myself realizing how much that has influenced the way that I speak Spanish today. People are not familiar with my accent. I have a very Salvadoran accent. The vocabulary that I’m most comfortable with is like about farms, and, you know, growing food and animals and raising children and not, you know, academic things. And I think that experience was certainly also influential in shaping my research trajectory and the project of this book, because it made me think a lot about the really close connection between language and culture and the sort of social work that language does.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, wonderful. I think a lot of our audience can resonate with that experience of finding their voice in another language, and having to learn how to be an identity in that language, and then perhaps shifting to another space, and having to then relearn how to be in that language.

So moving on to your book in your book, you talk about two really important concepts, and I’m interested in hearing what these mean. I think our audience would like to hear about them, too. So the 1st one is this idea of convivencia, or living together, and the other one is the idea of communicative care. Can you explain what these 2 concepts mean, and how you use them in your research and in the book.

Lynnette Arnold: Sure I’ll start with convivencia, because it’s the title of the book. So convivencia is two words; con together, and vivencia, live, so live together, made into one word in Spanish convivence as a noun form. It can be all these different things. It’s really a flexible word. People use it a lot when talking about social life. In El Salvador in general, it’s just a very high frequency word. Convivio is another related noun, that is a word for a gathering. Many different kinds of gatherings can be called convivios.

So, in addition to using the word convivencia a lot. People also spend a lot of time carving out opportunities for convivencia or living together what we might call at least an American lingo hanging out just spending time. So it’s a very common thing in rural Salvador culture to see people sitting around on the patio, kind of intermittently talking. Maybe somebody is doing some husking of corn or some other kind of work is happening. Children are in or out, in or out but that sort of spending time together, talking, hanging out, not doing a whole lot of anything is a really important part of the culture. Sometimes convivencia happens in more formal ways, like big gatherings for birthdays, or, you know, religious celebrations or things like that. But they can also be much more informal.

So when I this really sort of caught my attention in the context of the book project, because when I talk to members of transnational families both in El Salvador and in the United States. Many of them mentioned that they missed the ways that they used to convier with loved ones. So they missed that kind of living together when they were separated across borders. So I heard that truth coming out over and over in the interviews, but at the same time from my research perspective, I was seeing these families still doing a whole heck of a lot of conviviando. Even if they weren’t in the same place, they were still finding ways to live together. So I knew that from participating in the transnational networks that from sort of a research perspective, convivencia was still happening, but families were telling me that it looked different than it did when they lived together.

And so, as part of the kind of participating in these transnational phone conversations. I really started to realize that my intuition about where a lot of this living together was happening was that it was happening in these phone calls and these transnational conversations were a really crucial way that families were still able to live together when they couldn’t be in the same place. So that’s what really got me into thinking about what’s happening with this communication and communication away as a way of being together, living together when you’re separate.

So that seems like, if we want to put a label on it, we could call that the more Emic framing right the more the way that people in the community would understand what’s happening here. Convivencia is probably the label they would put on it. Communicative care is really my term and is kind of more informed by my theoretical considerations. I’m a scholar of language and communication, and I’m very interested in how language acts in the world and what language does. And at that time I had been thinking a lot about and reading a lot about feminist scholarship around care and feminist scholars, writing about care often describe it and define care as the labor or the work that we do to keep ourselves alive as a species. So it’s the work that allows individual and collective well-being and survival.

And I came to feel that what was happening in the conversations was families doing precisely that work through language? So I decided to come up with this idea of communicative care as a theoretical frame to capture what I what I thought the work was that was happening in the Conversations. I also wanted to label for the fact that I saw that care and communication were entangled in some very complex ways, and so I wanted a framework that could capture all of those different ways of entanglement. So I decided the communicative care would be a capacious way to talk about that.

Hanna: So just for our audience to understand, you have talked about those transnational phone calls. So maybe we could just take a step back and you could just describe the actual data that you work with in this book, so that so that we have a context for that.

Lynnette Arnold: The data that I’m working within the book primarily are recordings of transnational phone calls. So they are dyadic, mostly dyadic conversations between a person in the United States and a person in the El Salvador who are related to one another in some way. I have interviews and other kinds of ethnographic data that I use to sort of triangulate. These were conversations that were recorded over a 4 month  period. So in many cases I could track how something developed over time. The conversations involved, although they were dyadic, many different dyads within the family. So I could track how different dyads talked about different issues.

So that’s when I’m saying that the families are doing a lot of this conivencia, this living together through conversations, I was able to see that in recording, these phone calls and paying really close attention to what exactly they were doing when they were talking to each other on the phone and why they spent all of this, you know, effort, money and time to have these regular phone calls with one another.

So I felt the need for a framework, because I wanted something to capture the different ways that language and care were connected. So it was very clear to me that language is something that makes other kinds of care possible. So think about many kinds of care that we all engage in on, you know, part of our everyday lives. Language is absolutely central to those for these families. The money that immigrants send home is probably the form of care that most people associate with transnational families. That is not possible without communication. There’s a lot of communicative work that goes into making those remittances, those economic transfers happen. But beyond that I wanted to show. And I show in the in the book that language enacts care. Language is something that does itself do care work. It’s a way of maintaining and forging the kind of relational bedrock that is the foundation of all other kinds of care. So that was really important to me to draw that out. That language is not just facilitating other care, but that it is itself a kind of care. And then also, as we know, scholars of language know, language is always making meaning. So as it’s facilitating remittances. And as it’s enacting relational care, language is also a way that people. I used to create meetings about like what kinds of actions, when carried out, by which people count as care and which things don’t count? So all those things are sort of entangled and happening at the same time. So with a communicative care perspective, I was really trying to come up with a theoretical and analytical way to approach that and fully grapple with what was happening with this communication. And the book demonstrates ultimately that communicative care.

This approach really sheds light on how transnational families are able to forge convivencia and live together across borders, through language when they can’t be at the same place for many years at a time.

Hanna Torsh: One of the things that I found really fantastic about reading your work is that the approach you took to data collection, this very inclusive, very participant centered approach to data collection. Could you tell us a bit about how you approached the methodology in your work, and why?

Lynnette Arnold: Sure. And I want to answer this question in a way that will be helpful to emerging scholars who are maybe formulating their first research project or anybody embarking on a new research project. Because, as we know, things often don’t go to plan when we’re doing research. In fact, they often tend not to go to plan but really, if my research had gone to plan, I would not have the book that I have.

So that’s the kind of message here that things can go differently than you imagine, and still be great. So my project started off as a very traditional ethnographic. Sort of like an ethnography of communication. In that tradition I did a lot of participant observation in El Salvador and in the United States with family members, spending time in their homes, eating meals with them, hanging out on the weekends, trying to go to their workplaces, going to their schools. Just kind of spending time understanding what was happening in their lives. And then I conducted interviews with members of families in both countries. And I had that, you know, interview data that I recorded and started to analyze, and, you know, have some other work about narratives that were told in those interviews, for instance.

And then I was planning to do a longer stint in El Salvador of sort of more intensive ethnographic research, and really tracking what was happening. Over an intensive period of time in El Salvador. But then things beyond my control happened. Things got very dangerous in El Salvador. So this was in 2,014 which was a time when there was an intense spike in organized crime and gang violence, especially targeting young people. And there was a whole crisis of unaccompanied minors coming across the Us. Mexico border in relation to this and the area where I do. My research is kind of on a line between the territory of two gangs and got incredibly dangerous.

So my advisor felt like it was really unsafe for me to go back and spend a long time in El Salvador, and she was probably right. So I had to pivot and I decided to pivot to a project that was much more focused on the transnational communication.

So I ended up focusing on the phone calls and deciding to work with two extended families that I had. I knew the most members of and had the deepest relationships to. And I worked with them to record phone calls that they made across borders over a period of 4 months. I based on the interviews I had a sense of from the interviews how much people spent on phone calls per month, and I gave families this kind of stipend per month to cover the costs of the communication during the time that the recording was happening, and then I also hired research assistants in in each family. These were in both cases young people living in the United States because I was able to get to them and train them. So these were young people who were more tech savvy, who were literate and who crucially didn’t have tons of family obligations like they weren’t parents yet and so I was able to go visit them and train them in how to use the recording technology. I used a very, very simple earpiece recorder that you just held the phone up to. I had a little carrying thing for the recorder, so people could still walk around on their cell phones. These were all cell phone calls while having a little MP. 3 recorder on the kind of in their holster

And the family decided amongst themselves which calls to record. And then they didn’t necessarily have to pass all the recordings on to me. They could delete data if they wanted to. I still did delete some things that were passed on to me that I felt, especially when they were pertaining to people’s immigration situation. That I felt like legally, I didn’t want to be responsible for having that information. So I just deleted those recordings.

So that was the sample that I got was the things that families, you know felt okay about me having. And I was still surprised. You know they still felt very from my experience, participating in these networks, very authentic conversations. And there’s conflict. And there’s, you know, disagreements. There are things that happen in these calls. So I I would definitely say it’s not a entirely representative sample in that. Maybe, like the most extreme cases of conflict were not recorded, or whatever but I didn’t get the sense, either, that people were like consistently, always on their best behavior on these phone calls, for instance, it felt like they had. You know they were kind of in the habit of doing this.

Hanna: What did you then do with the with the recordings that you had. How did you go about analyzing that data?

Lynnette Arnold: Yeah. So this is another thing that many of us who do language research, you know, end up with hours and hours of recorded data, and we want to look at it closely, and it gets really overwhelming. So one thing I did that I learned from my undergraduate advisor, Mary Bucholz, was, instead of transcribing all my data. First, st I did a 1st pass of doing what’s called an in what she calls an index, which I think, is a good term. So you’re making a time stamped kind of account of what is happening every minute or so. 30 seconds, depending on how fast moving. The data is in the call, and that is a good way to listen through your data. And just what is in there, what’s happening. Get it in your head right in a way that maybe transcribing especially. This was obviously in the time before AI. But I know now lots of people are using AI to do a 1st pass on transcription. It’s not getting the data in your head in the same way. So working through an index is really good because it makes you start to see the patterns so indexing allowed me to do some qualitative sort of coding of what were some communicative patterns that I started to see what were. Think, what were things that people were doing over and over and over and over again? And decided to focus on transcribing, then, examples of those things that were happening a lot, and you’ll see if you read the book that there’s a chapter about greetings. That’s a thing that happens a lot in these phone calls. And by an example of greetings. There is a chapter about negotiating remittances which is also a thing that’s probably the thing that happens for most of the time.

And then there’s a chapter about remembering in conversations kind of reminiscing in conversations, which was one that I hadn’t, you know. It wasn’t 1 that I went in looking for necessarily but jumped out at me as something really powerful that was happening in these conversations. I was really fortunate.

During my graduate time, when I was collecting and preparing the data to be able to work with undergraduate research assistants. All of whom were Salvador of Salvadoran descent, which meant that they had the linguistic capability to understand this variety of Spanish I think at one time I tried to work with a Mexican descent student, and they were just like this. Spanish is so different from the Spanish that I’m familiar with. I don’t think I can transcribe this accurately. So it was a lovely, lovely opportunity to also extend mentoring towards you know, 1st generation largely Salvadoran American students who were an amazing help for me as well in doing the transcription, and they are all named in my acknowledgements.

Hanna Torsh: Excellent. Yeah, that’s that’s a real challenge for us here in Australia, because we are so linguistically diverse. Having that match with research support in terms of linguistic repertoire.

Lynnette Arnold: And I think even in doing the transcriptions we would meet to talk about the transcriptions. But our conversations would diverge just from the actual transcript. And they would say things like, Oh, my mom. Salvi, mom, this is a thing my mom does all the time. Or, you know, topics of conversations. They were all parts of, you know, transnational families as well. So it was really enriching, not just in the transcriptions, but also in helping me to recognize that what I had in my data was something that was broader than just the two families I was working with.

Hanna Torsh: In your book, you talk about the contradictory ways that digital communication has impacted on the families that you worked with, but also on transnational and cross border family communication generally. So could you tell us a bit about what you found out about these contradictions for your research participants, and any examples that you had would be also fascinating to hear.

Lynnette Arnold: I think there’s kind of a couple of possible answers here. And I think I’ll go with. There’s like a technology answer. And then there’s like a social life answer. And I think we maybe can do both. The technology answers that we often assume that like newer technology, more inclusive, like video technology is better and that people will default to using technologies that are more complete. So if families have access to video calling, they will use video calling, for instance, research with transnational families beyond mine. But just within the field of transnational family research has found that video calling can actually be very emotionally challenging and costly for people to engage in, and that sometimes people dis prefer, even if they have access to videos, that they prefer other forms of communication. So I argue in my work that for these families, phone calls are a real sweet spot. Because they don’t require as mo as much emotional investment. I mean, imagine yourself as a parent or as a family member separated from your loved one for years at a time. You see them on screen, and you see in real time that they’re different than they were when you were there with them. So it’s a real physical visceral reminder of the passing of time that you’re not together. On the phone that is a little bit more held at bay. But you still have the intimacy of somebody’s voice, and you can really hear all of those cues of emotion and all of those things that are so important, especially in the sort of delicate communication that families are doing often on the phone.

Phone calls are also very accessible. So I think that’s another thing to think about in terms of technology is like, and the family is who within the family can use a given technology and phone calls for the families I worked with were maximally inclusive because preliterate children can still talk on the phone and also in the families I worked with elders, and the families were often not literate or had very low literacy levels, and certainly did not have technological literacy to know how to navigate something more complex than a phone call. So phone calls were really a sweet spot, both kind of relationally and what they allowed but also because of their accessibility to everybody within the family. So talk a little bit about that in the book. Why, phone calls in this era of all polymedia. I felt the need to talk about that. It also had to do with the fact that smartphone technology hadn’t really entered El Salvador quite yet. Now it has but I still talk on the phone to my comrade. The mother of my goddaughter in the El Salvador we sell each other voice memos on Whatsapp. So you know again, you see that kind of preference for the voice communication over over video, even though it’s now more possible than it used to be.

And then there’s another answer that has to do with what digital communication affords for these families in terms of their relationships. So as I’ve been talking already, on the one hand, communication is absolutely vital. It’s the way that families are able to live together and sustain their relationships across border. It’s a means of emotional support. It forges the groundwork for this ongoing economic support like remittances. So it’s really positive things for families. But we also know from transnational family scholarship in general that digital communication for families can be really charged. It can lead to people feeling surveilled or micromanaged, especially children and women in families.

In my book, I found that kind of the the negative consequences or effects of digital communication were the ways that it perpetuated divides between migrants and non migrants within families. So if you think about a transnational family, you’ve got this big division of people living in different countries, and the migrants are perceived as those with access to more resources, and the non migrants as those with less access to resources who need help from their migrant. This is kind of a pretty broad generalization that holds for most transnational families, I think.

And what I found in my research was that this divide played out in communication, so that in family conversations there were very different communicative expectations placed on people depending on if they were migrants or non migrants. So, for instance, non migrants needed to learn that when they needed remittances they shouldn’t just ask. They shouldn’t just say, Hey, can you send me 100 bucks?

But they should tell these elaborate stories about family life in El Salvador, in which they would embed conversations of somebody else complaining to somebody else about needing money. So this very like indirect, layered way that people learned a very specific way of doing like a remittance request right?

And then, if you zoom out to think at the kind of macro level. This kind of communication is sustaining and shoring up migration right? It sustains the transnational family form. It keeps the remittances flowing so from a nation perspective, it makes migration succeed as an escape valve, as a means of generating revenue through migrant migrant remittances. Right? So in that those ways, we can see that the communication is really shoring up some inequalities right at the interpersonal and kind of the global level.

Even as it’s a lifeline for these families. So both of those things are true at the same time. And I just want to kind of end by saying it isn’t the case that communication only re in reinscribes inequalities. There are. There are ways in which communication also opens up space for people to resist and create, create new ways of doing things.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, I’m I’m really keen to hear if you could tell us about some of the participants that you talk about in the book, and some examples of those ways of maybe either kind of perpetuating those inequalities or resisting those inequalities.

Lynnette Arnold: Yeah, I think I’ll go with the resisting examples, because they’re more interesting to me.

Hanna Torsh: Sure.

Lynnette Arnold: So one thing that’s really interesting about digital communication is that it opens up ways for young people to participate in family communication. So some transnational family research shows that young people are actually really get involved in family communication because they have to be the tech. And they’re let the tech help, you know, and then they’re there helping grandma with the laptop or whatever, and then they participate in the conversation. In my families, I found that the kind of a polymedia kind of situation where there were phone calls, but also other kinds of technology happening. Between family members opened up some conflict. So in this one case, some young men were being raised by their grandparents in El Salvador, and their dad was in the United States. He sent them a laptop. They opened Facebook accounts. They started messaging their dad on Facebook. Their grandparents are not literate. Their grandparents are not tech literate. They have no idea like what’s happening when their sons are on the laptop and so the sons use this kind of private channel of communication to complain to their dad about some stuff like teenagers do right.

Hanna Torsh: Yes, I do. Yes.

Lynnette Arnold: As they do and the dad was just hearing from them about this, and so then he called his parents, and, you know, kind of scolded them, taking his son’s word as like you know the truth rather than realizing that it was just kind of one perspective on what was happening. And this resulted in a lot of conflict within the family that then got resolved by multiple phone calls from multiple people, in which people then navigated and kind of smooth things over, and he eventually called and apologized to his mother for not understanding the situation more clearly. But so there there was a case where young people were using technology to kind of have more agency right in what’s going on in the family and try to pressure, you know, put some weight on the scales in terms of things coming out in the way that they wanted it to come out. The other example that I I like to talk about and think about is about gender. So we haven’t talked about gender yet, but it is a theme throughout the book. We know from feminist work that women around the world do the lion’s share of care in pretty much every context you can think of, and that is also true in communication.

I do have cases of men doing amazing communicative care work, a lot of like really touching emotional communication between men. So this is not to say that men are not doing the work. But one thing that I find is that women get asked to do kind of the most onerous tasks. So if a report about oh, the migrants sent money for the cornfield, and there was a flood, and all the corn seedlings died, and we need more money so that we can replant women get asked to have that conversation, even though agriculture isn’t traditionally feminine domain. But they get asked to kind of communicate that information and take on that less pleasant communicative burden. But what I found in some cases was that sometimes women were then using that that they were put in this kind of conduit position to migrants. They were using that to kind of carve out more space for themselves within family decision making. So in one instance, the father in El Salvador had sold one of the family’s cows. He had not consulted with his daughter, his eldest daughter, who lived with him in El Salvador about this decision, and she was kind of mad that he hadn’t consulted with him. But then he this was the same corn example. He needed her to talk to her brother in the United States, his son, and, you know, get some money for the corn so he came over at one night and asked her to do that the next time her brother called to ask him for more money so that they could replant I happened to be there when the brother called, and she didn’t say anything, but instead she told all about the cow, and how her brother had, how her dad had sold the cow without consulting with her, and how it was a poor decision and a waste of the family’s resources and blah blah, and that she should be consulted. So really getting a kind of word into the migrants. And then, when her Dad came back the next day to see what had happened. And what if the money was coming? She was like? Well, I didn’t tell him about it, because, you know, if I’m not consulted on things, I I can’t. You know I can’t communicate. So she really kind of used her. She was in this pivot Lynch kind of PIN position communicatively, and she used that to try to press for a like more decision, making power within the family in these kind of agricultural domains that traditionally, in traditional kind of salvadorange roles would not have been within her purview. So those are the kinds of things, and I think there were more of those things happening than I saw where people were using women especially. We’re using communication to do this kind of torquing in the mechanical sense of gender roles and kind of incrementally shifting things a little bit. So all that’s to say, I think that there are.

There were other ways to in which people were using communication to resist. So I in my, in my account, I wanted to kind of resist. One size fits all characterization of what was happening here, and really capture the complexity of communication as a wonderful lifeline for these families, but also as reproducing inequalities, and also maybe sometimes allowing for resistance, especially to gender them, and generational hierarchies within families.

Hanna Torsh: That’s wonderful. It’s a great example it kind of reminds me of also the the kind of dual role of women in households where they have to do the bulk of the domestic labor, but that also affords them a certain amount of power over some decisions. And so it’s often hard to for them to give it up, because that is then their only power traditionally, in the in those sorts of family situations. So I think that’s a yeah. And it’s really interesting, the way that intersects them with the digital world. And how the same sort of negotiations are taking place. So like, Okay, well, if this is my job, then I am going to try and carve out more agency for myself in a system where I have less agency, you know a patriarchal system. So yeah. Oh, look I I would love to talk more with you, but I am have to jump to my last question. And and and make it really open for you. I I think one of the one of the things that you talk about in your book is how you’re essentially interested in, in, as you say, providing a much more contradictory and nuanced picture of particularly transnational migrants when they have been traditionally particularly, you know, in in public discourse, cast as victims and and and really there’s been a lot of focus on the negative. So I guess I would like to ask you, you know, what? What did you? What are the key? Things that you would really like? The key findings. You would like emerging and established researchers in linguistic diversity and in transnational migrants, to take away from your wonderful book.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you. I’ll start with a linguistic diversity piece. And I just the I cannot say strongly enough that we cannot. We can’t study linguistic diversity without also be thinking, thinking about what language is doing. So linguistic diversity cannot be separated from the function of language. What people are doing with their communication and the context in which they’re doing those things really shape what linguistic diversity does and what it’s made of. So it’s really vital to think about. One of the main things that people are doing with their communication always is relational. They’re doing relational work of all kinds, with family members, with bosses, with everybody. Right? We’re constantly managing relationships through our language. And so we need to think about that. And also the kind of geopolitical context within which those relationships are playing out. So this may get to your question about language maintenance. Actually, because I wanted to talk here for a little bit about the children of migrants in the United States. So I noticed in my research that the children of migrants in the Us. Were largely excluded from transnational communication.

This was not the case for children in El Salvador, who participated quite actively in and were trained actively trained to participate in the transnational communication, as I show in my chapter on Greetings. That shows how kids learn even before they’re verbal. They’re taught how to do these greetings.

So why does that happen? Well? Linguistic diversity is part of an answer to the question. Relatives in El Salvador tended to perceive the children of migrants in the US as not being Spanish speakers, and therefore they perceived the language barrier that kept them from communicating with grandchildren, nieces, nephews.

Whatever the relationship was, there are, of course, language barrier issues here. There are educational issues at play. Many of the children in the United States did not have access to bilingual education in Spanish and English, and obviously the social dominance of English, certainly reduced Spanish fluency for some, at least, some of the children, but many of the children who were perceived in El Salvador as monolingual English speakers would actually be characterized as bilingual. They just didn’t speak Salvadoran Spanish. They spoke US Spanish, which is a variety of Spanish that has large has been in contact with English right for a long period of time. And so it’s grammar. Its vocabulary is shaped by English and so I think that the unfamiliarity of the children Spanish was perceived by some relatives in El Salvador and this dialect difference was perceived as a as a full on language, barrier, and led to to children being excluded.

So the linguistic causes of children’s kind of exclusion from family communication were really complicated. But it’s also important to recognize that their exclusion from this communication was also influenced by non linguistic, relational and structural issues. So when families envision their future generations down. You know they envision the future of continued emigration, of continuing. So today’s children in El Salvador are tomorrow’s future immigrants. And so it was really essential for children in El Salvador to be heavily socialized into being members of transnational and families to being committed to these cross border relationships, because they would then be the ones to carry those seeds with them. When they traveled the children of migrants are seen as kind of less predictable sustainers of transnational families like well, they just really weren’t sure what was going to happen with these kids.

They weren’t sure they were going to stay committed to the family, so they were less pro. Those relationships were less prioritized in the kind of communicative care work that families were sustaining across borders. The relationship with children in the in the Us. Just wasn’t a priority. Because of this way of thinking about right and this way of understanding their future makes a lot of sense from a geopolitical perspective. It’s heartbreaking.

But I think, unfortunately, realistic reading of the inequitable global distribution of resources, and that for families to get access to those resources. People are gonna have to keep migrating right? So what this example shows us is that the kind of linguistic, the relational, the geopolitical, are all like really tightly entwined with each other. So I just want this example to sort of be a call for us as researchers of linguistic diversity, to be able to think on all of these scales at once, and to think about their interconnections.

And for me, thinking about what language is doing in the world for people. What people are doing with their language is a way to get at that and the lens of care has been a really for me a very capacious lens that has allowed me to think about the relational and interpersonal and the geopolitical kind of within the same framework and their interrelationships. So that’s really my big takeaway for kind of language researchers. Is to think about what language is doing?

I think I have takeaways that are kind of more broad for people living in a global world, which is all of us. Now. And I think I want to especially speak to readers who may not themselves be migrant to listeners right who may not be migrants themselves may not be the children of migrants themselves. And just say that it’s really important for us to understand the lived experiences of migrants. They are so integral to maintaining our societies today. But their lives do not stop at our borders. You know they have connections that go, you know, far beyond what we can see in terms of what we think is happening with migrants and what their lives are like. So this is just kind of a call for all of us to think about, how can we establish relationships with the migrants that are in our communities? And start to think about? You know what’s happening in their lives? Beyond, you know, our immediate communities, our immediate national context.

To think about also the policies and that our governments are passing their foreign policy, their immigration policy, and how that’s affecting lots of people far beyond our national borders through these transnational family connections. So again, that’s kind of going full circle back to where I started of like wanting to educate us citizens about El Salvador. Just to say that there’s so much more that we need to be aware of as you know in thinking about migrants and the roles that they play in the world. And really, yeah, wanted to make sure that they ultimately, I think what I call for my book is that migrants? I want a world where people can have full self determination over how they choose to live as a family. And that is not true for most of us in today’s world. But it is really not true for transnational families. They do not necessarily want to live in 2 different countries for decades at a time, with no chance to visit each other. And so ultimately. That’s where I end. The book is just to say, like, What can we do? How can we work in our own individual ways? For a world in which people have more self determination over care in their own. Of all kinds, including communication.

Hanna Torsh: Oh, thank you so much. I think that’s such an important message and a a great place to finish, a great message to end with. The idea of self-determination for families. And yeah, absolutely reminding us that this we might find all of this very fascinating. But of course, this is not something that any family wants. It’s kind of decade, long separation. And I really love the idea of imploring non migrants to think about migrants, and to that idea of not finishing their lives, not ending at the borders. So yeah, thank you so much.

We’d like to thank you again for talking to us about your work. We will put a link in the blog to the book. Thanks everyone for listening to us today, and if you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5 star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the language on the move podcast and our partner, the new books network to your students, colleagues and friends. Thanks. Again, Lynette.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure to talk to you today.

Hanna Torsh: Thank you until next time.

This book details a study of sign language brokering that is carried out by deaf and hearing people who grow up using sign language at home with deaf parents, known as heritage signers. Child language brokering (CLB) is a form of interpreting carried out informally by children, typically for migrant families. The study of sign language brokering has been largely absent from the emerging body of CLB literature. The book gives an overview of the international, multi-stage, mixed-method study employing an online survey, semi-structured interviews and visual methods, to explore the lived experiences of deaf parents and heritage signers. It will be of interest to practitioners and academics working with signing deaf communities and those who wish to pursue professional practice with deaf communities, as well as academics and students in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Intercultural Communication, Interpreting Studies and the Social Science of Childhood.

Summaries of Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families can be found in BSL, ISL, and International Sign.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript

Emily: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Emily Pacheco and I’m a Master of Research candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr Jemina Napier. Jemina is a professor in the School of Social Sciences, Language and Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work includes researching interpreting and translation, linguistic and cultural diversity, gender inequality and interpreting in academic professions, higher education and leadership, and sign language brokering.

Today we are going to talk in general about an area of study in linguistics known as child language brokering, and in particular about a 2021 book that Jemina wrote entitled Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families.

Jemina, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today!

Dr Napier: Thanks, Emily. Thanks for the invitation. It’s really a real privilege to be here.

Emily: Oh, thank you so much again! And just to start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself, how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to research sign language interpreting?

Dr Napier: Sure. So, I’m, as you can hear, I’m a hearing person, but I grew up in a multi-generational deaf family. So, there are four generations of deafness in my family. Going back from, in my generation, I have one cousin, but my parents, siblings, their cousins, my grandparents and also great-grandparents and several aunts and uncles.

So, I grew up with British Sign Language as my home language and grew up bilingually between British Sign Language (BSL) and English. So, I have the lived experience of child language brokering, which I know we’ll come back to, and began work as a professional sign language interpreter when I was very young, when they were just establishing the profession in the UK, sort of separating out interpreting from social work, support for deaf people.

So, I was in the very early stages of that professionalisation. So, I did my first paid interpreting job when I was 17, and there wasn’t any interpreter training available at that time. But then, so I started working and kind of learning on the job, if you like, but went to university to study sociology.

And then I was lucky enough to enrol in a master’s program in BSL interpreting, which was finally set up. So, I was already working as an interpreter, but then I did training and through that interpreting program, I discovered linguistics and thought, ooh, linguistics! This has been an interesting way to kind of analyse what we do as interpreters and have a better understanding of what we do as interpreters.

So, I applied for a scholarship to do my PhD, a Commonwealth scholarship, and that actually took me to Macquarie University, where you are, where I did my PhD in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, so I graduated with my PhD in 2002, and I looked at linguistic coping strategies of sign language interpreters when they work in university lectures.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, that’s fascinating and awesome to hear how you got that start in-from interpreting into linguistics, kind of similar to myself. And as you’ve mentioned, quite a bit of your work has to do with the sign language interpreting profession, but there is a form of non-professional interpreting that exists and it is sometimes known as child language brokering. So, could you explain what that term means and why it’s something that linguists study?

Dr Napier: Sure, so child language brokering is a term that was coined by Nigel Hall, I think, back in the late 80s, early 90s, but there’s been a real explosion of research in that area probably over the last decade or so, 10, 15 years. Initially, child language brokering research was done to understand the kind of brokering. So basically, child language brokering is a form of interpreting that children do for their parents.

So typically, originally, research has been focused on migrant parents or people who relocate to a different country, whether it’s as refugees, asylum seekers, or for work, for marriage. And if they have young children, often children, as we know, children tend to acquire languages more quickly than adults do, especially if they’re exposed to a new majority language. So, there’s been a whole plethora of research that’s focused on this interpreting that children do between their parents and other people.

So, whether it’s in hospitals, at the local shop, at the bank, all these interactions that their parents might have. And the reason that the term child language brokering was coined was to try and distinguish it from professional interpreting, because what children do, or young children, or young people do is, obviously they are still interpreting. So, you know, language A to language B and back again, but they’ve got more of a vested interest and they’re more involved in it.

And also, there’s a kind of cultural mediation aspect. So, children might take responsibility to explain more, or, you know, they understand what their parents do or don’t know, or family members do or don’t know. So, it’s actually kind of seen as a slightly broader task, if you like, than just the sort of nature of the interpreting and sort of mediation that professional interpreters do and are trained to do. Because they are typically, they remain more impartial than, you know, they’re there just to facilitate the communication and not give any opinions. Whereas, as you can imagine, children can give opinions, but also have power to decide what to interpret and not to interpret. So that’s kind of the broad reason why this term has been coined.

And initially a lot of research was done by psychologists, like educational psychologists, child development psychologists looking at the impact of brokering on children, whether they know there’s sort of parentification, reverse parenting roles, and so on. But over the last 10, 15 years, more linguists and interpreting study scholars have become interested in it because of understanding more about bilingualism, how brokering can be an asset. It can be a cognitive asset for children to develop bilingual skills and actually utilise their bilingual skills. That they develop empathy probably from a younger age because they’re thinking about, well, who I’m interpreting for and what they need. And then linguists now and interpreting study scholars are more interested in looking at the act of brokering, just understanding more about the act of brokering itself. So not just the kind of emotional, psychological, cognitive effect, but actually just as a languaging practice. How, as you’ve said, I’ve done a lot of research on professional interpreting in different contexts like health, legal, education and so on. But child language brokering is a masked interpreting practice. And so, it helps us to understand interpreting needs, you know, where access needs are paramount and maybe not being provided by professional interpreters, but also just as a languaging practice in itself, it’s interesting to see how children manage, and young people manage those practices.

Emily: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating as a language broker myself growing up, I just think the act of brokering is something that needs a lot more research, right? So, it’s great to talk about this today. And thank you so much for defining what child language brokering is. A lot of people don’t know what’s the difference between that and interpreting. Aren’t you, isn’t it just kids interpreting?

So, I really appreciate that. And to move on to the next question, we can talk about your book, your 2021 book, Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families. In the book, you apply the concept of child language brokering to heritage signers in deaf-hearing families. So, what does sign language brokering mean and how might it appear as a language practice in deaf-hearing families?

Dr Napier: Sure, thanks. So just to start off with why I became interested in this, because I often used to be told, oh, you must have interpreted for your parents all your life and you must have been an interpreter all your life. And I used to say no, I used to say no, I’ve not interpreted all my life. Because I never felt that – interpreting wasn’t something that was imposed upon me by my parents. So, it was never something that I was required to do. And so, I always used to deny that and say no, it’s not true.

But then once I had my daughter, she was very young, she was only about 2 or 3, and I actually discovered her interpreting or brokering for my mother when she was watching TV once and the captions weren’t working or something, there was a cartoon on. And so, she was telling my mother what they were saying on the TV. And my mum said to me, I didn’t ask her to do that. And so, it piqued my interest. And I thought, hold on a minute. I realised that actually that’s exactly the kind of thing that I did when I was young, because when I was young, we didn’t have captions, we didn’t have video relay services, we didn’t have professional interpreting services.

So of course I did interpret for my parents, but because it didn’t feel like an imposition, I didn’t think of it in that way. And so, I started, so it piqued my interest, and I realised that I did that. So, I did do that. I did broker when I was a child. I did help my parents, but it was not from being asked, it was because I offered. And so, I started reading around and I discovered the early work on child language brokering and realised, I was like, this is it. This is actually, this captures what it was that I did and from my lived experience. And then I realised that there was no research on it. There was one seminal book that was published in 1994 by Paul Preston, where he did an extensive study with heritage signers, which is the term I prefer rather than children of deaf adults. And there’s a whole other reason for that. We might come on to later. And so, he did his study with heritage signers and touched on their experiences of interpreting or brokering for their parents, but he was focusing more on their sense of identity and linguistic and cultural identity.

So, he did touch on it. But apart from that, there was nothing. And there’s some anecdotal things here and there, but there was really nothing, no substantial empirical research anyway. So, I decided to do this. And so, I coined it sign language brokering because I felt it was important to distinguish between the child language brokering practices that might manifest in families that had deaf and hearing members, whether that was hearing children with deaf parents. And if you think about my family, there were lots of different deaf and hearing people in my family. And most of the hearing people could sign, but other families don’t have that makeup necessarily. So basically, I set out to explore what the parallels were. So, what the similarities and differences were between child language brokering, which has been identified as happening in a whole range of settings.

And even though there are lots of taboos around, you know, using your child as an interpreter or as a broker, we know it still happens. The research shows that it happens, and it happens everywhere and regularly. So, because I was able to draw on that data, I was able to replicate some of that and say, okay, well, let’s look at then how this happens in deaf-hearing families and is sign language brokering the same as child language brokering and what the synergies are and perhaps what the differences are as well.

So, what I found essentially is that, yes, sign language brokering happens in exactly the same way as child language brokering. It happens everywhere, it happens regularly, but it’s actually quite complex and quite nuanced as a languaging practice when you consider the different perspectives of the people that are involved.

Emily: I think it’s fascinating because, like you mentioned earlier, from child language brokering, typically the context is on migrant families, right? And in deaf-hearing families, you don’t always have that migrant aspect, but there is still brokering happening. I think that’s really, really interesting.

Dr Napier: And just add to, yeah, on that point is that many deaf parents might well be very bilingual, you know, in written English. And some parents might choose to speak at times, but for them it’s about accessing and participating in the world around them, which is not accessible because they can’t hear. Annelies Kusters and Maartje De Meulder, who are two deaf scholars, have coined the term sensorial asymmetries, that’s it. Sensorial asymmetries, because they were saying that even though a deaf person could be professionally qualified, professionally educated, you know, very bilingual, multilingual even, in sign languages and written languages, but they can’t access what’s going on around them. And they, you know, many people use different strategies, like, you know, gesturing and writing notes and all that kind of thing. But when you’re getting into quite complex conversations, then there’s some kind of access is needed through interpreters or whatever.

So, I think that’s one of the slight differences is that people might have competence. So, for example, in the UK context where I live now, deaf parents might well be very competent in English, but they still, their children are still brokers for them. And that’s where it becomes really complex and nuanced.

Emily: Yeah, and in your book, you present data from three stages of the four-stage project you did. And stage one utilised international survey across several countries. Stage two involved interviews conducted in Australia. And then stage three applied group interviews in England using vignette and visual methods. Can you explain what vignette and visual methods are and tell us a bit more about the innovative methods you used in stage three, as well as what ethical considerations were needed to work with signing communities?

Dr Napier: Sure. Yeah, that’s a very big question. (laughs)

Emily: I know. (laughs)

Dr Napier: I started off at stage one. Again, I think, I just to give context, I think which is important. So, stage one was the survey, which I actually adapted from a survey that had been done with child language brokers with Latino children in schools in America.

So, I adapted the survey so that it was more culturally sort of specific to deaf communities to get a picture of, okay, is this happening where it’s happening? And then that confirmed that it did. And then I went on to do follow up interviews for people who’d responded to the survey and who lived in Australia, which is where I was living at the time, who were willing to sort of delve a bit deeper and talk about their responses.

And then I did in stage three, when I was back in the UK, I did these focus group interviews with deaf parents and with young children. So up until that point, I’d only been interacting with or collected data from people who were 16 plus. And then I did interviews with some teenage, a couple of teenagers who are sort of 14, 15.

So, once I did the workshops in the UK, we had a workshop that was facilitated by a deaf parent. So, I worked with Deaf Parenting UK, an organisation here. So, I had a deaf parent facilitate a focus group with deaf parents. And then I facilitated a group with young heritage signers, and they were aged from 5 to 15. So, I really wanted to use visual methods because I wanted to engage the children in talking about what they were doing. And I wanted to do something equivalent for the parents.

So, I did a lot of reading around about visual methods and understanding that visual methods are a really great way to engage deaf communities as well as visual language users. And so, I ended up using art elicitation method. So, I asked after talking to children about what we mean by brokering and asking them if they do it, then I asked them to draw pictures and to represent what they did.

And then with the parents, the equivalent was how do you feel about when your child brokers for you? How does that make you feel? And I had photos, pre-existing photos, which were spread out on the floor, and they could pick them up and then talk about why that photo represented for them, how they were feeling.

But another component was the vignette methods where there was actually a video, it went, a video that went viral. I think it was around 2010, I think, at this little girl called Laura in America and she was signing a Christmas Carol, a Christmas concert, and it went viral because the mother posted the video on YouTube saying, oh, isn’t my little girl cute? And all of these people were saying, well, she shouldn’t have been doing that, there should have been an interpreter, and they shouldn’t have asked her to do that. And then the parents were like, hold on a minute, we didn’t ask her to do that, she did it herself. And it turns out that there was actually a professional interpreter there, it’s just that the girl, she was wanting to engage with her parents, and she was doing it for them, and she was very funny. So, I showed that video and asked the parents and the children to respond to that because vignette methodology is a way to present a case which might resonate but gives people a bit of distance.

So rather than saying, I do this, or asking them, do you do this, you can present a case study and then they can talk about their response to it, what they think about it, what they feel about it and then if they’re comfortable, then they can start to say, yes, actually, I do that too, or no, I never would do that and this is why, or I have done that but I wouldn’t do it now. So, it gives you a chance to respond to something, but you can kind of create a bit of distance from your own personal experience if it makes you uncomfortable. So, I used that video as one example and I also created a couple of case studies, written case studies, which I showed and talked through, which were again adapted from case studies that had been used in child language brokering studies with spoken language, in spoken language families, migrant families. So again, because I wanted to be able to have that point of comparison across the different child language brokering and sign language brokering.

The second part of your question was about ethics. And so, I think there are two key things there. One is about working with deaf people, using visual methods and thinking about how you make sure that informed consent is received. So, I made sure that all of my consent forms were available in British Sign Language. Everything was conducted in British Sign Language with the deaf parents. And I brought in a deaf parent so that they would perhaps feel more comfortable talking about some potentially sensitive issues with rather than someone who is a child of deaf parents, but also had to be sensitive to children, thinking about how do we get consent for the children? So, I had to ask parents for their agreement to have the children involved. Also had to ask the children as well about if they understood what they were being asked to do. And I tried to make it as fun as possible, but it was really interesting to see there was a definitely different engagement from the 5-year-olds compared to the 15-year-olds. And the 5-year-olds got bored quite quickly. Yeah, there’s the Sign Language Linguistic Society having a terms of reference for doing research with deaf communities and signing deaf communities and around involvement of deaf researchers, making sure that information is available in sign language, the consent is received and so on. So, I was very careful about adhering to those guidelines.

Emily: I loved reading about your methodology in your book and seeing the visual methods. I thought that was so interesting. And I loved seeing the drawings that you put. And most of the drawings were of children drawing about interpreting at McDonald’s. It’s pretty funny just at the drive-thru, ordering food. I loved seeing that. That was a nice different perspective that I hadn’t seen in brokering research so far. So, I really enjoyed reading about that.

Dr Napier: Thank you.

Emily: And then a really interesting theme you discuss in your book is shame resilience. You point out strategies used by deaf parents and heritage signers that normalise brokering in their families. What are some examples of direct stigma and courtesy stigma? And how did brokering overcome shame in your study?

Dr Napier: Yeah, and thanks for that question. So, Erving Goffman came up with the terms direct and courtesy stigma or indirect stigma. And I drew on another theory of shame resilience and shame web. I can’t remember the name of the author now off the top of my head, but from cognitive psychology and developmental psychology. And I really liked Goffman’s framing of stigma because so when direct stigma basically is when you experience stigma directly that you’re discriminated against directly because someone perceives you as being inferior in some way. So, for deaf people, typically that’s people making fun of them signing, perhaps making fun of the way their voices sound and using derogatory language such as deaf and dumb and just being, quite cruel. And so that would be like, so deaf parents potentially could experience direct stigma.

So, children who have deaf parents could experience courtesy stigma or indirect stigma. So, they see people making fun of their parents teasing their parents, being cruel towards their parents. But also, they can also experience direct stigma as well because a child might be bullied because they have deaf parents or teased because they have deaf parents at school. So, children, heritage signers can experience both. And in my book as well, I should also clarify that I did collect data with deaf and hearing heritage signers who have deaf parents because most research talks about children who have deaf parents as, because 90% of deaf parents typically have hearing children. But I wanted to make sure that I collected data from deaf people as well, because some deaf heritage signers also talk about similar experiences of brokering for their own deaf parents for lots of different reasons. So of course, you’ve got that kind of complexity then of the fact that you can experience direct or courtesy stigma. And what I found in my data from talking to the parents and from young brokers and older brokers is that often brokering is a way, is a form of shame resilience.

So rather than, some of them acknowledge that they did feel shame if they witnessed some kind of bullying or experienced bullying or witnessed teasing or cruelty towards their parents. But they often talked about the fact that they wanted to overcome that and kind of move towards shame rather than back away from it. So actually, kind of confront it almost. And brokering was a way to do that because they could stand up in front of people. And if people were like, I don’t understand what you’re saying, then the child would step in and broker and say, I can tell you what they’re saying. This is fine. My parents not an idiot. And they saw that as a way to almost like take control, not take control, but to support and help and mitigate against that kind of stigma. And the parents also commented on how it was very nuanced for them. It created a lot of tensions for them because parents often talked about the fact that they want to be independent. They don’t want their children to help them, but they appreciate that there’s times when perhaps there’s no other option. And also, they can see that sometimes the child’s pride in wanting to help, wanting to do that. And so, they don’t want to say no because they don’t want to diminish what their child is trying to do for them.

So, there’s kind of a tension there between I don’t really need your help, but I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me, and I want to support you to do that. So that was a very, really strong theme that came out through all of the interviews.

Emily: Yeah, and it’s super interesting to hear the perspective of deaf parents. That’s not really widely researched yet either. And this brokering act, what parents think and feel. So, thank you for explaining a bit more about that, about that shame resilience. I thought that was really, really interesting. And as I’ve mentioned briefly, I am a heritage signer, so both my parents are deaf, and I also am a sign language interpreter who’s now focusing more on linguistics. But just from my own lived experience, I believe your project really has lasting impacts on understanding sign language brokering as a languaging practice. So how does studying sign language brokering raise awareness for signing deaf-hearing families, their experiences with schoolteachers, health professionals, and even opportunities for heritage signers to become professional interpreters and translators?

Dr Napier: Yeah, thanks. As you’ll know, having read the book that the last chapter, I talked very specifically about the implications for these different groups. So not only for theoretical implications, but for parents and other professionals who come into contact with their parents. And I think the key things there are that, because I think child language brokering has been a taboo subject for a really long time. So, I think there was a kind of pendulum swing. When sign language interpreting was professionalised, there was a definite rhetoric, a definite kind of discourse in deaf communities saying, you should not be using your children as interpreters. You don’t need to. We have professional interpreters now. And there was, and I mentioned it in the book, there was actually a whole campaign from a video relay interpreting company in the United States, where they showed a video of a girl talking about how she used to missed school because she used to go to interpret for her parents. And they were saying, you don’t need to do this now. We have this company, we have this video interpreting, you don’t need to do this. So, they actually kind of really perpetuated that discourse.

And what was happening from my point of view is that people then didn’t talk about it. They masked, they was like, no, no, no, I don’t ask my children to interpret. But then through this research, we found that, okay, yes, they do, they broker, but it’s nuanced. I keep using the term nuanced because I think it’s really important because it’s not cut and dry. It’s not, they either, they do, or they don’t. So, okay, yes, sometimes they do and in certain circumstances, and there’s a reasoning behind it, and then there are mixed feelings about that on both sides.

So, I think it’s really important to raise awareness amongst deaf families or deaf parents of mixed hearing families that brokering is actually a normative practice in mixed deaf hearing families and that it’s okay to recognise it and talk about it and not say, no, you shouldn’t be doing that, but also not saying, yes, you should be doing it all the time either. It’s about finding a way to kind of identify, because in one of the chapters in my book, I talk about children’s need to feel helpful and want to cooperate, and that’s natural for kids to do, and they help with chores. So, this is a natural instinct for children as they grow up developmentally. So, for parents to lock that down actually could have an impact, a negative impact on children. So, I think it’s really important for families to have an awareness of what this means, why it happens, the different perspectives that are involved. So, I’ve given various presentations to deaf parent groups and CODA organisations about these findings.

But I think it’s also important to raise awareness amongst professionals like teachers. So, for example, if parents go to parent-teacher night or they bump into a teacher in the school playground, what’s appropriate? So, okay, if the bump into the teacher in school playground and the child turns around and offers to broker a brief conversation with the teacher, okay. So the child has offered, but for the teacher to think through what it means, it means if they say to little Jenny, can you interpret for your mom for me, what that imposition might feel like, both for the mother and for the child, and also not to expect that when you’re having quite detailed conversations with parents, that, I mean, I used to, I interpreted for my parents’ evenings when I was young, because we didn’t have interpreters available back then, but we don’t need, we shouldn’t need to do that now, but we know it still happens, especially in regional or rural areas where there might not be interpreters, but there shouldn’t be an expectation that the children do it. So, they should bring in professional interpreters for some things and then also recognise when it might be appropriate to say to the child, yes, okay, you want to tell me what your mum’s saying? Great, tell me what your mum’s saying, because it’s actually about recognising their bilingualism or their multilingualism and fostering that and making their pride in that.

And so I did another study with a group of people involved in mental health and healthcare research, and we interviewed 11 heritage signers here in the UK, specifically about whether they are a broker in healthcare context, and I was shocked that, I mean, we collected this data in 2017, 18, just before COVID, and all of them said, yes, I regularly interpret for one of my parents in a GP appointment, which, and I live in the UK, where there are very well-established, well-funded healthcare interpreting services, so it shouldn’t be needed, but it still happens. So it’s about educating professionals that they can book professional interpreters, there are mechanisms to book interpreters, and so if a deaf person turns up with their child, don’t just ask the child to interpret, especially if you’re giving a diagnosis and then the child is interpreting for health issues, and how’s that kind of transference and how that makes them feel, especially if it’s quite serious. So, we really need to raise awareness amongst professionals that come into contact.

And it’s the same applies to child language brokering, with migrant parents to speak other languages. It’s the same principle, is that you should be bringing your professional interpreters in these kinds of interactions. But acknowledging that it’s okay, if you come out to the waiting room and the kid says, hey, the doctor says your name has been called, fine. So, it’s all relative, really, isn’t it?

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And if I could just get you to touch a bit on heritage signers becoming professional interpreters and translators, do you think brokering provides an opportunity to do so? If you could talk a bit about that.

Dr Napier: Absolutely, I published an article about that based on the first survey that I did in 2017, where a lot of the people who responded to the survey and they were made a lot of open comments, like getting the opportunity to provide open comments. And they talked about their brokering experiences being a pathway for them into sign language, professional sign language interpreting. You might feel like this, I know, I certainly feel like this, because I realised it was something I was good at, and I enjoyed. And then when there was the opportunity there to become an interpreter, I followed it. I didn’t even, when I was a kid, I didn’t even know interpreting was a thing, a professional thing that you couldn’t do. Because it wasn’t really, I had never seen examples of it when I was young, very much.

So yeah, talking to people now that are professional interpreters, a lot of them will say, well, yeah, it was a natural process for me. And some said they kind of fell into it by accident because they were kind of pushed into it or they were strongly encouraged by parents or family members. And they didn’t really know what else to do. So, they were like, well, this is something I know that I’m good at. I can wave my hands around, I can sign. And then some talked about making conscious decision that this is something I want to do. And especially for younger generations, they could seek out interpreter training programs. And it tends to be the older ones that kind of fell into it because there wasn’t any training and it was just like, oh, you’re bilingual. We need someone you know. But interestingly, with the younger kids I’ve spoken to, professional interpreting is much more widely available. Some of them were saying, I think only about a third of them in all the interviews and things I did said that they were thinking about interpreting as a career. Others weren’t, but some of them were quite young. And I know that they might change their mind later on. So, there’s definitely a connection, a strong connection there. But interestingly, when we look at other research I’ve done in the last couple of years, looking at diversity and representation in the sign language interpreting profession, we found that numbers of heritage signers who do work as professional interpreters is quite low. And it’s probably gone, in the UK, it’s gone up from about 10% to about 30%, primarily because we have a lot more deaf interpreters now, deaf practitioners who, interestingly, a lot of deaf practitioners are heritage signers. Proportionately, there are more deaf interpreters who are heritage signers than hearing interpreters. So, I’ve actually been saying, well, we need to be thinking about how we try and actively recruit heritage signers into the profession, because maybe they’re not getting that message that it is something that they can do. So, I think we still have a bit more work to do in that area, I think.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think for myself, for me, I always loved brokering, growing up, or interpreting as I knew it then, that I did enjoy it, I wanted to help, I loved signing, working with signing communities, people, and so I just, I wanted to become an interpreter so bad. So, for me, I actively sought it out, but a lot of other friends that have deaf parents or people I know in the community are like, I know that’s not for me, but I don’t know if they fully understand what it means to be an interpreter, or what it looks like and all those things. So, I definitely, more work is needed to be done there and kind of the promotion, recruitment or education, I guess, maybe. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And just to kind of bring our conversation to a close, my last question for you is, what is next for you in your work? What other research are you working on now?

Dr Napier: Yeah, thanks. So, I’m actually just submitted a book proposal. So, I’m planning on writing another book, which focuses on data that I have previously collected, but I just had too much data for the last book.

So, this is going to be a smaller manuscript, hopefully, but actually draws on, kind of replicates the study that was done by Valdes and Angelelli and others in the US, probably about 20 years ago now, but they actually asked young Latino children to broker a meeting between a parent and a teacher. So, what I’ve done is replicated that study, but I’ve done it with sign language brokers all hearing with a deaf parent and meeting a teacher. And so, I’ve adapted the methodology slightly.

So, what I’ve done is I’ve brought in a range of different people. So, I have a professional interpreter who’s not a heritage signer. I have professional interpreters who are heritage signers. And then I have adult heritage signers who don’t work as interpreters. And then two young teenage heritage signers who obviously are not working as interpreters. And I get them all each, I’ve got each of them to interpret or to broker the same interactions. So, the teacher and the parent repeated the same interaction 7 times. So, I’m writing, I’m doing the analysis on that data now and writing that up. So, I’m hoping that book will come out. It’ll probably be 2026 by the time it comes out, I think. So that’s my kind of major, major focus at the moment. So alongside, I’m still doing research on professional sign language interpreting in other contexts. We’re just wrapping up a project on interpreting in Mental Health Act assessments and how mental health professionals work collaboratively with interpreters in that context. Because it was obviously such a high stakes context. So, I’ve had a few publications coming out of that, but I’m still loving the sign language brokering research. So, I plan to continue on that path.

Emily: Yeah, that’s awesome. I’m so looking forward to that book coming out. That sounds like really exciting to read. And something that I’ve always thought is the dream to do is to do that kind of data collection and that kind of method. So, I’m really looking forward to that. Those are all the questions that I had for you today. Anything else you want to add before we go?

Dr Napier: I think it’s probably worth just making the point because I alluded to it earlier on about why I don’t use the term Coda, which is very common. So, Coda stands for child of Deaf adults. And there’s a whole section in my book where I talk about why I don’t use that.

Historically, I think that I kind of moved away, if you like, from that term because I felt that there was a lot of quite paternalistic views of deaf people and their capacity and a kind of an assumption that Codas experienced a lot of imposition as children, you know, and had ruined childhoods or spoiled childhoods because they had a lot of responsibility. And I didn’t have that experience. So, I didn’t want to associate myself with that kind of terminology. I also felt like, well, I’m not a child and my parents aren’t just adults to me, they’re my parents. So, I never quite felt comfortable with using child of deaf adults. So, I coined the term people from deaf families because I also felt it was important to recognise deaf people that grow up in deaf families can also have very similar experiences to hearing kids growing up. And also, to recognise that there are partners or extended family members or people that might have deaf grandparents, but not parents who also have very similar experiences. So, I started to use the term people from deaf families. And then when I was writing my book and came across the concept of heritage speakers and then so, and then a few people have started to talk about this notion of heritage signers. And I really liked that. It really spoke to me a lot more. It’s actually, because I wanted to focus on the use of sign language and the fact that these people growing up, they’re using sign language as their home language, which is different from the majority language that they’re surrounded by.

And actually, it was a heritage language for them. So that’s why I wanted to recognise. But one other area potentially for future research is also acknowledging that a lot of children who do grow up with deaf parents who are hearing don’t necessarily develop fluent sign language skills. And there’s a whole range of reasons for that. And I’ve done some research with Annelies Kusters and Maartje De Meulder on family language policy in deaf-hearing families and who speaks when they speak or sign, who decides, all that kind of stuff. So that’s a whole other area of research around children who have deaf parents, because you can’t assume that everyone necessarily is a heritage signer. So, I just kind of wanted to make that qualification as well.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely, thank you so much for adding that. I think that’s important to mention as well. And I encourage everyone, if this conversation was interesting to you, to go read Jemina’s book, Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families. And I’m looking forward to your next book coming out for sure.

So, thank you again, Jemina, and thanks for joining everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time!

You may have seen the movie, CODA, which portrays the experience of a hearing teenager that has a Deaf family. A Coda, a child of Deaf adults, is an identity that represents the experience of having Deaf parents. Jessica showcases a perspective that is not widely discussed, which is the perspective of a Goda, a grandchild of Deaf adults. Her memoir explains the navigation of Deaf and hearing cultures in Australia with grandparents who migrated from the UK. The House With All The Lights On highlights and discusses themes around oralism, language deprivation, Deafness and music, and more!

The House With All The Lights On explores linguistic and cultural dynamics within Deaf-hearing families. Jessica shares her experience having Deaf grandparents and navigating the cultural borderline between Deaf and hearing cultures. It is a wonderful memoir about family, the complexities of identity, and linguistic diversity.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript

Emily: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Emily Pacheco, and I’m a Master of Research candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr Jessica Kirkness. Jessica is an author, researcher, and teacher of nonfiction writing at Macquarie University. Her work includes researching the value of life writing and creative nonfiction in animating the hearing line: the invisible boundary between Deaf and hearing cultures. As a Goda, spelled G-O-D-A, which stands for a grandchild of deaf adults, she writes about deafness, disability, and family.

Today we are going to talk in general about linguistic diversity in Deaf-hearing families, and in particular about a 2023 novel that Jessica wrote entitled The House With All The Lights On.

Jessica, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Kirkness: Thanks so much for having me, Emily.

Emily: It’s wonderful to have you here! And so just to start off, could you tell our listeners a bit about yourself? What led you to undertake your PhD in life writing and Deaf studies?

Dr Kirkness: Well, I guess family and love, which sounds trite, but I grew up in a house next door to my grandparents, so it was sort of a dual occupancy household where my grandparents lived in a granny flat on one side of the property and then my family, my mum, dad, brother and sister and I were in the main house. And so, I grew up with Deaf people all around me.

So, my grandparents had a huge hand in my upbringing, and they always hosted really lively Deaf parties and gatherings where I was around sign language and Deaf culture. And I guess naturally I was fascinated by that, I suppose, and just the you know, it was at once kind of part of my everyday life but also a point of intrigue and so when I got really into writing, particularly telling true stories, so creative nonfiction and life writing, I started to dabble with telling stories about my family and my upbringing and I wrote this little essay in an undergraduate course at Macquarie actually. (Emily and Dr Kirkness laugh) Which was called Telling True Stories, and I had this wonderful tutor who encouraged me to keep going. So, I wrote this 3,000-word essay, which then became a series of essays which then became a book.

So it was, also part of the PhD that I wrote. So, this was really investigating this idea of the hearing line that you mentioned in your opening, this boundary, this kind of cultural borderline that exists between Deaf and hearing cultures and again, I was really obviously invested in that having been sitting at that threshold, at that boundary for much of my life and thinking about how I embodied hearingness, how I enacted hearingness as a, as an identity and that was something that I came to in my studies and that was quite radical.

I’d always sort of understood my grandparents to be marked as different and other and that they had a cultural and linguistic background that was their own that they were that you know they identified as part of a cultural and linguistic minority group. And I had a relatively sound understanding of that, but when I started doing my PhD research and I found a lot of Deaf studies material, was doing a lot of research, I was kind of floored by the idea that hearing culture exists and that there are hearing ways of understanding the world and being in the world and it was this real sort of Aha! sort of a moment where it was like, yes, that’s so true! There are particular idiosyncrasies that I have that that show me to be a hearing person that I’m very auditory and that I, you know, I like listening to lectures and podcasts, for example, and I, learn about the world through through that particular sense, whereas my grandparents were very, very visual people and very tactile as well. So, sign language is obviously a kind of a spatial and visual language and so they used their bodies and to communicate but they were also highly sensitive to anything visual unfolding before them. And I really wanted to write about that and that kind of the boundary, the borderlines between our cultures, the ways that we were both similar, I suppose, but then and different in a way that was really important.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, I love that. I absolutely love everything you just said. (Emily laughs) I think it is really, fascinating because you know, I myself, I have Deaf parents which we’ll talk about a bit later in the interview, but, you know, being raised by Deaf people like you were in your childhood being raised by your grandparents where they were very present in your childhood. You have a moment where you’re like, oh, like my ability to hear has influenced the way I function as a human, right?And so, people, there is a Deaf culture and I think people kind of are like, oh, what does that mean?Like, isn’t it just a language difference or a linguistic thing? But no, that visual language, that visual nature really shapes the Deaf community and certain things that are important, that maybe hearing people are perplexed by or don’t kind of relate to and that’s always fascinating to talk about and discuss I think for sure that people don’t realize they have the label as hearing, you know, that Deaf people refer to them as hearing and they may refer to the Deaf as Deaf but that is the thing, that is that difference, that boundary of difference which I think is really interesting that you talked about so thank you for that great kind of introduction.

And so, to talk about your memoir, in particular, The House With All The Lights On, definitely resonated with me as a Coda which is spelled C-O-D-A, a child of Deaf adults for those who might not be familiar with that term. So could you explain the meaning behind the title and other deaf-friendly technologies that you discuss in chapter 3, kind of those cultural things that might be different, people might not be aware of.

Dr Kirkness: Absolutely. So I think, just as preamble, I think a lot of people are surprised to learn that there is a vibrant Deaf culture and that we tend to understand in our culture deafness as a medical problem as something that needs to be fixed and every time I brought a new person home, a new friend or a partner, for example, I always had to navigate that threshold where there was some languagebrokering, there might be some interpreting, people tended not to be able to understand my grandparents voices.And so there was a lot of sort of cultural bridging that I was doing in those moments. And I was always astounded that people weren’t sure.They were very uncertain about how to communicate first of all, but also like, oh, there is a Deaf culture?And so, it felt to me like there was a real need to write a story that came from a Deafcultural space. But to be a sort of a facilitator or that cultural bridge so that I could allow hearing people an insight into the kind of the richness of Deaf culture and language.

But The House With All The Lights On really refers to the idea of literally light being in the house all the time. So, my grandparents needed to have conversations with the lights on because without the light one cannot see. (Emily and Dr Kirkness laugh) And so you can’t read lips. You can’t also read sign language. So, the house was always awash with light and so my grandmother had a million and one lamps on of an evening and she was quite frightened of the dark, because it was, I think it was just very, it took away her ability to understand the world and so darkness had a very different meaning for her I think than it did for me.

And so, the house was always full of light, but also there’s a sort of double meaning here in that sign language is often referred to as the language of light and Deaf people are often referred to as the people of the eye. And so, this kind of light and visual sort of phenomenon was something that I wanted to tease out and flag in the book, which is why the book is called The House With All The Lights On.

Emily: Yeah, I think that’s great. And certainly, sometimes people when they find out I have Deaf parents they will say oh it must be so quiet in your house, and I think that’s not the case either you know sometimes people have these assumptions but just the importance of light like you said. And The House With All The Lights On I just love that visual I think myself, so I wanted you to kind of highlight that in our interview as well.

I really enjoyed reading about the different language practices as well in your family. So could you maybe explain how your grandparents’ upbringing influenced their language and what communication looked like in your family in particular.

Dr Kirkness: Yeah, so communication was a really mixed bag in my family, and I guess for some sort of, a potted history, I suppose. Sign language was banned in many educational contexts for much of the 19th and 20th century. So, my grandparents went to schools where they were encouraged to speak and to lip read and they had a lot of speech therapy and things like that as a vital part of their education. And this was all part of a practice called oralism. And this was basically a pedagogy that encouraged children, not just encouraged, did in fact force them to speak and use auditory kind of practices. If, possible if the, if the child had any residual hearing as well. And that had left a real mark on my grandparents, and I think that they grow up, grew up, acutely aware that they were different. And that their language was not celebrated or encouraged, certainly not when they were in “hearing spaces”, and so there was a real self-consciousness that they developed. Signing in public was something that was quite difficult for them at times. They were always really aware of people staring, sometimes just out of pure curiosity, which was fine, but I think it after a while it would grate, but also people saying unkind things, or being punished at school for signing, for example.

So back in the days of oralism, children had their hands tied behind their backs. They were beaten, they were caned, they were called animals, monkeys, apes for using their native language, which is incredibly sad. But that kind of perception that speech is and and verbal language is better than signed language has been something that I think a lot of Deaf communities have had to contend with over the last several 100 years. And so that really, I think influenced the way that they felt within themselves.

So, they could be quite shy and protective about sign language and where they would sign. So, at home they would sign to one another, and they would sign with their Deaf friends and when we were very small, my siblings and my cousins and I, we would use fingerspelling, which is a, a manual way of representing the alphabet. And we did that for clarification purposes, and we knew very basic signs. So, food, home, more, chocolate, the things that we would want to ask for, the kind of the basics of communication, I suppose. But there was a limit, I think, to how we were able to communicate with one another. And once we went to school and, I actually went to a signing bilingual preschool. So, I was taught to sign at preschool, and it was a sort of I think they called it reverse integration where there were hearing and Deaf kids present and so there was a bilingual educational program and I really loved that, and my brother went to the same one. My sister actually missed out because of mum’s work.

But we, we all knew how to communicate at that basic level, but then there was just this big gap once we went to school. Signing fell to the wayside, and it was something that we, communication was something that we always had to work on. You know, it was never seamless. It was never easy. It wasn’t a thing that we took for granted. But I think as with many families with Deaf members a lot of us didn’t know how to sign fluently and that was something that I learned later in life. So even though I could always use, do the basics, my grandfather went blind in one eye later in his life and that meant that lip reading was incredibly difficult for him and was no longer a solution for us. And so, I put myself through multiple Auslan courses and got myself accredited, which was great. But it also, I guess it really enabled us to have a more meaningful relationship. It was a really beautiful thing to learn, but also a wonderful way of connecting to my grandfather in the last sort of decade of his life. And that was a really radical thing for the both of us and, and something that I still really treasure being able to, to sign with my grandmother now. That’s a real gift.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people don’t know what oralism means and thank you for explaining that and also how recent those practices were still in place I’m from the US and so that practice is not really as common anymore, but it was for even the early stages of my parents’ education. So, it’s just recently that signed languages around the world have finally been celebrated and cherished like you said for the cultural values they have and that importance there, but it was something that was kind of, you know, something you did in secret and not in public. So, I think people often don’t realize that experience of Deaf people like your grandparents and how that does influence the language practices your family had, but that’s awesome that you, you know, got to take formal Auslan courses and have that, you know, opportunity. So, thank you for sharing a bit of that story.

And if we can kind of shift now to talk about, in chapter 14 of your book, you discuss the misconceptions around cochlear implants, which are also known as CIs, and maybe the clashes that exist there with Deaf culture. So, I personally was shocked to read the comparison of the implantation rates. So, in the US, it being 59% of profoundly deaf babies receive CIs. While, in Australia, it is as high as 98% for candidates under the age of 2. So, can you tell us more about the misconceptions you’ve researched around CIs and how Deaf communities are responding to technology?

Dr Kirkness: So, I think, on that question of technology, there are lots of technologies that my grandparents did use, they were not implanted with cochlear implants and there’s a long history there that I will go into.But the technologies that were in their house were things like a doorbell that had a flashing light system, and that was connected to the main electrical system in the house.And so, when there was a caller at the door, they’d ring the, press the button and all the lights in the house would flash.There were also alarm clocks that had light functions where they would flash or vibrate and things like that.So, there were all those kinds of technologies too, but one particular technology that is quite, has been quite controversial in the Deaf community has been cochlear implants and they are an Australian invention, so, Graeme Clark pioneered these devices, and they were developed in Australia.

And so that’s one of the reasons that Australian children in particular have a very high uptake of them. And I think the, the comparison with the US is a really interesting one because we have different health systems. And so, there’s, I guess, limited access for potentially to cochlear implants in the US. I think here they’re there are rebates and sort of government incentives that allow children to be implanted at a young age. But they have been without their controversy.

So, I think back in the eighties when they were really becoming, when the public were becoming aware of them a lot of hearing people saw them as a medical miracle and it, you know, they were the bionic ear and it was fantastic and they were going to be this panacea, you know, it’s gonna fix deafness, it’s going to cure deafness. But that is antithetical to what Deaf people believe about their own state of being, that deafness is part of what makes them, them. And that they belong to a linguistic and cultural minority group and though they absolutely understand and, and experience barriers, cultural barriers and barriers with access to information, they don’t always have interpreting when it’s needed. There are, you know, all sorts of kind of barriers that Deaf people are confronting. Nevertheless, deafness and their, language and their close-knit communities and the kind of incredible, close-knit community that Deaf people have is rich and wonderful and they they don’t want to be cured and so that was a real point of tension I think between medical ways of understanding deafness and cultural ways of understanding deafness.

And so, these devices have been seen as a form of eugenics, you know, to eradicate the scourge of deafness and people have used that kind of really loaded language and there is also a long history of eugenics, and you know Deaf people being killed and exterminated in World War 2 and you know this is a really sensitive issue. But I think nowadays people have a more nuanced perhaps take on cochlear implants. There are many culturally proud Deaf people that still want to give their children cochlear implants so that they have access to the world of sound, but they want them to be raised as culturally and linguistically kind of bilingual I suppose, you know, bicultural, bilingual, so that they have access to the Deaf world from a young age but also have access to the hearing world.

So, I think it’s a really complicated thing, but they have been, you know, there’s been protests over the years about cochlear implants. And also, just challenging this idea that once you fit a child with a cochlear implant that they are hearing because they’re not that device gets switched off or taken off at the end of the day and that child remains deaf and there are lots of kind of challenging factors to understand and audiologists have their work cut out for them here. You have to learn to hear with a hearing device, whether it’s a cochlear implant or a hearing aid. And that takes a lot of investment. It takes a lot of investment from the child that’s being fitted with the device, but also from the parents, a lot of speech therapy and audiological training, you know, this is an improving technology, it’s improving all the time, but it’s not the same as hearing and that child, that person once they grow up will still be deaf.

So, I think a lot of a lot of culturally Deaf people really advocate for the use of bilingualism and giving a child access to sign language from a young age because there is that period where it’s incredibly exhausting to get used to the device and there’s a lot of arguments about fitting a child very early so that they have access to language. But there’s also another argument to be made that giving that child any language, whether it’s wherever you come from, I guess in Australia it’s probably spoken English, or whether it’s sign language, you just have to give them something so that you avoid that problem of language deprivation. So, there’s lots of conversation around this, but yeah, that’s, I guess, a little bit of the history of the (Dr Kirkness laughs)-

Emily: I know, I know it’s a loaded question, hey, and it’s definitely something the Deaf community still, is discussing and you know, audiologists do have their work cut out for them, I agree, but I think it is important to bring to the forefront like the voice and opinion of the Deaf community regarding these devices. And so, people are aware, you know, that it’s not as easy as, oh, like now you can hear and that’s, there’s a lot of work that goes into this. I think that’s important to mention. Yeah.

Dr Kirkness: Yeah, exhausting work, you know, really exhausting.

Emily: And in your novel as well, you also discuss the language barriers, which you kind of mentioned a bit so far in the interview, language barriers that you witnessed your grandparents face. And in particular, you share a few stories about the barriers your grandfather faced in hospital. So, in my personal experience I have done a fair bit of language brokering for my parents but what was it like for you to witness the language barriers and you having access to both Auslan and English in those situations?

Dr Kirkness: I think, I open the book with a passage about the moment I had to tell my grandfather he was going to die, that he was quite unwell for the last years of his life and he was rushed to emergency having had a, I don’t know if it was a heart attack, but a heart failure, he was in organ failure and there was nothing more that the doctors could do for him at that time. And he just regained consciousness and there was no interpreter available. And so, I ended up being the one to tell him that there were no more medical interventions possible. And that was a really difficult conversation to have. Not one I imagined having. And one that I, I had because I wanted to spare my mother and my uncle from having to be in that position. And I think Codas often do a lot of that language brokering as you, as you would well know and I, I think that in that moment they really wanted to be family members and they didn’t want to be a conduit for that information, particularly that information. And so that ended up coming to me and it also made sense I think because I had the skills to be able to do so and in a way it was a privilege, but it’s that double-edged sword, I think, of, of having that intimacy with a family member, and delivering such awful news, and being able to break it gently and in a way that I would like him to be treated. I suppose, you know, being able to choose the words is a sort of privilege. But also, an incredibly huge responsibility that weighed on me and I would have loved to be a family member in those moments too.

And I think his experience in hospital was, I’m going to say traumatizing and I don’t say that lightly, it was really awful to feel that he didn’t receive adequate care during his time in hospital. At various hospitals throughout Sydney, the language barriers were so profound that we didn’t feel safe to leave him on his own at any time. And so, we developed a roster so that someone would be with him to be his advocate. We, my mother would write handwritten signs and stick them on the walls with communication tips, you know, things like make sure you tap Grandpa on the shoulder to get his attention before speaking. You can’t yell, yelling will just distort your lip patterns and will mean he can’t understand you. You know, raising your voice does nothing in fact and it’s just confusing. So, there were lots of things like that, that we tried to put in place and there were some end-of-life meetings that we had at the hospital where we had an interpreter present and that was wonderful, but there were lots of moments throughout the day where, you know, an interpreter can’t shadow your loved one, 24/7. That’s just not possible.

So, there were many times that we turned up and and grandpa had had procedures without having informed consent being taken and that was very distressing for him and very distressing for us to witness and we would arrive first thing in the morning with things having been done overnight. And just grandpa having no understanding of them whatsoever. And so there was a lot of sort of calming and pacifying that we had to do for him in those moments. And it was very, very difficult. And in palliative care spaces as well, just that kind of communication breakdown and the lack of cultural awareness and lack of Deaf awareness and this is a really hard systemic thing you know, there’s not a lot of Deaf awareness in the world and you know, medical practitioners are not given a lot of training in this if at all. They might have a couple of hours in a lecture about hearing loss, not about deafness and certainly not about cultural Deafness. And so, you know, and then there’s all the other kind of structural systemic issues within hospitals themselves that I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for, but it was very very difficult to watch a loved one be so alone and so unsupported in that, in that space.

Emily: Yeah, I’m sorry to hear your family had to go through, you know, a traumatizing experience for your grandfather and for you as family members to see that happen to someone you cared about so deeply and people don’t always realize that sometimes in those instances having an interpreter is a luxury almost like you said you know, because there’s interpreter shortages in the US and inAustralia from what I’ve heard for Auslan interpreters, there is a desperate need for more people to become professional Auslan interpreters.And so, when you do get one because they’re very busy and these instances typically in medical situations are last minute or not always planned far in advance, like to book someone in can be, you know, a miracle.(Emily laughs)So, to speak, but we, I wish it wouldn’t be that way, you know, that, hospitals would have a better system and it is a systemic thing like you mentioned and then, families are impacted by that when they should be just thinking about their loved one and caring for them as a family member and not as a language broker or interpreter and so. Yeah, I think it is a huge systemic issue.So, thank you for discussing that and your personal experience. And I really do hope doctors and medical professionals really get that Deafness training because Deaf people exist and they’re gonna be their patients one day.It’s not an if chance there are Deaf people that exist and it’s important to recognize them as part of the population that they’re going to be servicing and giving care to, right?

To switch gears a bit again to discuss some of your fieldwork that you did for your PhD. It was fascinating to read the chapters where you describe doing your fieldwork for your PhD in England. You discuss oralism, Deaf education, Deaf musicians, and how diverse the experiences of the Deaf community are. So could you tell us a bit about how Deaf communities might be misunderstood by hearing society; some people might even be confused by me saying there are Deaf musicians. So, if you want to talk a bit about that.

Dr Kirkness:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I had the great pleasure of going to the UK because my grandparents were raised in the UK and they moved to Australia when I was one years old, one year old, (Dr Kirkness laughs) when I was an infant. And they were from the UK originally and went to schools for the deaf in the UK and so I got to go to both of their schools, which was really incredible, and I got to stay on site at Mary Hare Grammar School where my grandmother went to school, and they have this incredible music program which is initially what sparked my interest. I also am quite musical myself. I grew up performing a lot at school in plays and musicals and singing and playing piano. They were things that I did regularly and I actually had a little keyboard in my grandparents’ home when I was a child and I would come over to their granny flat and I would play on the keyboard and write songs and Nanny, my grandmother, would come and bring me little cups of pineapple juice because I told her that it was good for singing (Dr Kirkness laughs) and she would watch me play on on the piano, the keyboard and she would ask me about music and she was really interested in what I was doing. And then I sort of reached a point in my adolescence where I felt it was this illicit thing that I was really interested in music, and I started hiding it away from my grandparents. I felt this guilt that this was a hearing activity that I was participating in, and I thought that, you know, my grandparents can’t have any access to that world or to that particular cultural practice. So, I best keep it from them.

And so later on when I started doing some research around deafness and music, I realised in fact that I’ve been really quick to make an assumption there and in fact there are many people who are interested in music, many Deaf people who are interested in music and even perform and play professionally as deaf musicians, they might also identify as being culturally Deaf and they might also use sign language, but they’re really they love music as a language and as a phenomenon that is not just an auditory phenomenon. It’s something that is felt in the body, something that exists on a piece of paper, you know, a written score where they’re interpreting a piece of music on the page where there’s a sort of imaginative process and even in some cases with the musicians I spoke to a kind of synesthesia where all these kind of senses are kind of overlaid on one another in different sort of sensory pathways, neural pathways, in the ways that they understand music. And that was fascinating to me, and I was really, really pleased to work with an organization called Music and the Deaf, which are the only organization of their kind as far as I’m aware in the world, and they’re based in Yorkshire in the UK. And they do all sorts of work with deaf children and introduce them, particularly to rhythm and then they move on to pitched instruments and some of these kids have cochlear implants or hearing aids and so they have some auditory perception of music but there’s also that sort of embodied aspect I was talking about and one musician in particular his name’s Sean, he would talk about taking his shoes off when he plays trumpet so he can feel the drum so when he’s playing in a group he would take his shoes off so he’d feel the vibrations and keep time in that way. And he had this really interesting sort of perfect pitch and a way of locating pitch within his body. I think he talked about F sharp being his nose and F natural being in his lips or something like that. It was really, really interesting to hear his take and along with a lot of the other musicians.

I also came to realize that my grandparents were not just interested in me playing the piano because I was playing the piano, they were really fascinated by music in the world too and my grandfather in fact loved musicals and all of his favourite movies were musicals. He loved the sound of music and when my mom was a little girl she actually before captions existed, she actually transcribed the entire film including the songs by hand and my grandfather had a handbook that he would put on his lap as he was watching the film so he could move between the screen and the paper. And he just loved it. He loved the kind of the spectacle of music, performed music, especially dance and things like that. My grandmother loved dance. A lot of rhythmic things, marching bands, my grandfather loved marching bands, The Last Night of the Proms and the the Military Tattoo as well. He was fascinated by that and also things like Songs of Praise. There’s a BBC program called Songs of Praise, which is sort of a, it’s a religious program, but there’s a choir that sings and my grandmother was fascinated by faces in the ways that they would be animated when singing. So, there were all these visual elements that I was suddenly privy to as I started unpicking that assumption that I had that, oh well, music belongs in the hearing world. But in fact, just like sound, Deaf people have an understanding of sound. It’s just not an auditory one all of the time. It’s something that they feel through vibrations. It’s something that they identify with mouth movements and shapes and all sorts of other ways of apprehending the world. Yeah, and I guess that was linked in with this idea of the hearing line that music for me was this kind of threshold. So, there are, I mean, it’s not always adopted in Deaf culture. Sometimes it is seen as a kind of, belonging to the hearing world and almost as a normalising force. There are some people for whom music is just not for them. They say, I’m Deaf, music just that doesn’t appeal to me, it’s not my thing, but there are equally people for whom, music is for them. And I think that was really interesting to consider.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely can resonate with what you’re saying and, you know, my parents, they love music, you know, (Emily laughs) like you’re saying, certain Deaf people in the community do like want to be a part of that, you know, musical experience and I’ve taken my mom to like heavy metal concerts and she loves it! (Dr Kirkness laughs) Like it’s a great experience. Everyone should take their Deaf parents, their Deaf family to a heavy metal concert a lot of the vibration and being close up to the speaker, the spectacle it is, right? And the feelings that you feel in an environment like that, I think it’s awesome! So yeah, I loved reading about that in your book. And kind of to bring our interview to a close, what is next for you and your work? What other research are you working on now? If you could tell us a bit about that.

Dr Kirkness: Yeah, so another memoir actually that I’m working on, and I’m really fascinated with you know ideas around the body and so I’m interested in health and disability and embodiment and all those things. So, the next book I’m writing is actually about sudden illness and I had, it’s a personal story, so it’s about my lived experience being a carer for someone who had a very kind of cataclysmic life changing event. He had a sudden cardiac arrest in his sleep when he was very, very young and I was the first person to find him. So, I’m really writing about you know, what happens to that person who has that kind of life-altering moment, but also what happens to the people around that individual, what happens to the witness and to the to the carer and the people who provide that network of care.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, fascinating. I can’t wait to read your next memoir!

And so, thanks again, Jessica! And thanks for joining, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!

Alia Amir’s grandfather with his three daughters, ca. 1950 (Copyright: Alia Amir)

I admire people, who, on the move, maintain and transfer their heritage languages to the next generations. By “maintain,” I mean the transfer of spoken language or as a boli (Mahboob, 2023).

In our family, our generation has grappled with the challenges of preserving all of our languages, and unfortunately, we have not succeeded in passing down all these languages to the next generation.

Multilingual Kashmiri ancestries

My paternal grandfather Shams-ud-Din was born in Srinagar in Kashmir, and raised in a Kashmiri-speaking family, shortly after the Great Famine of India (1876-1878) under British Crown rule and after Jang-e-Azadi (the War of Independence) (1857), also referred to as “Mutiny” from the British Raj’s and coloniser’s perspective and language.

The Great Famine of India itself, during the Crown rule, not only took the lives of millions of people but also caused mass displacements and internal migrations. This era did not only result in an astounding loss of life, but also came to have long-lasting consequences for health. Recent research shows that the British Raj era heightened the risk of diabetes in South Asians, a testament to the complex and extensive consequences of historical episodes.

Even though my initial childhood years were spent with my grandfather, I am not aware of the extent of his formal education. Vivid in my fond memories of him, however, remain his proficiency in several languages. He was well-versed in writing English, Persian and Urdu, accompanied by the eloquence of his bolis, Kashmiri and Punjabi. A brief part of his life was spent in service of the Empire’s machinery, the British Hindustani Police. Despite that, I recall the fervor in his stories about the resistance against the angrez rulers.

My paternal grandmother, Rehmat, was also a Kashmiri, however, her Kashmiriness manifested slightly differently from my grandfather’s. Her story, and subsequently my story and my linguistic skills, are also entrenched in the environmental, socio-historic events and linguistic ecology of the region. Her family, along with numerous others, were among the migrants from Kashmir to the-then unified Punjab, specifically Lahore, colloquially referred to as the province’s heart, during a famine in the seventeenth century under the Company Raj.

Among these migrant Kashmiris was Allama Iqbal, one of the foremost poets and philosophers of the region. He wrote in Urdu (also called Hindustani at that time), Persian, English, and German, while he was a lecturer of Arabic. Also fluent in Punjabi, one of the major languages of Sialkot city, where his ancestors settled, Allama Iqbal’s second and third generations (as well his predecessors) can be regarded as fully assimilated into Punjabi culture and language. It highlights a poignant contrast – the loss of one language, and the gain of another, a reminder of the pulsating progression of cultural and linguistic identities.

South Asian diglossia

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris exemplify how diglossia functioned in multilingual communities. Pakistan and other South Asian nations similarly encapsulate traits of diglossic countries. In the case of South Asia and Pakistan, the notion of one language or one ethnic group is rendered a myth, just as the assumption that one nation necessitates one language. Based on this assumption, in linguistic communities such as the Kashmiris, it remains a challenge to pinpoint a single language that represents all of them. This monoethnic perspective, however, is rooted in Eurocentric global North discourses and epistemologies which does not capture the nuanced realities of bilingual communities (Bagga-Gupta et al., 2017).

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris also showcase that the purposes of languages in one’s repertoire can be different, and those uses do not necessarily need to confirm imperial language categorizations. For instance, consider the Punjabi language in present-day Pakistan (and in the context of British Hindustan). Even though it is a written language as well, it has never been used as a medium of instruction or even taught as a compulsory subject in schools. Its absence in primary, secondary and higher education does not mean it is endangered in any form. Take the example of ‘Pasoori,’ a Punjabi song from Pakistan that garnered 696 million views and was the most searched song on Google in 2022. This not only showcases the song’s immense popularity but also underscores the idea that languages can thrive in various forms and modalities.

New bolis in migration

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris also exemplify that language shift occurs in diasporic communities when the connection between the homeland and the migrants is weakened. Language shift means that when communities settle in new lands, new varieties will become part of the repertoire.

Fast forward to 2024, I find myself incapable of being able to speak all the bolis of my grandparents. I have lost two of my heritage bolis. Similarly, my children cannot speak all the bolis of their grandparents. Triple migrations and moving from one place to another have left us leaving one language for another; however, we still carry some of the mannerisms of our bolis in other languages – our Kashmiri-Pakistaniness manifests in English, Urdu, Swedish, and a mixture of all the above! We perform our identities through new vehicles, in new mediums, new bolis.

My autoethnographic account, my story, my loss of language is similar to some of those who are on the move and from those whose ancestors are forced to leave whether it is because of colonization, famine, family reunification, forced persecution, or fear.

My deep admiration extends to those who successfully maintain and pass on more than one heritage language in all modalities. I have strived to break free from the confines of limiting language competence within Euro-centric epistemologies and linguistic standardization ideals, recognizing their inherent written language bias (Linell, 2004) and the promotion of the notion of one language for one linguistic community. On the contrary, I argue that linguistic communities transcend beyond the geographical boundaries of nation states, provinces, regions, or clans.

Within the broad landscape of linguistic theories and epistemologies that conceptualize the multilingual competence of communities within the former British Raj, there emerges a pivotal challenge deserving attention: Euro-centric epistemologies and theorization fall short of accurately labelling and describing both individual and societal multilingualism. This challenge becomes vividly apparent in my family’s diglossia, where the interchange between two distinct linguistic varieties mirrors the diverse language practices found in both Pakistani society and its diaspora.

Child at annual Mongolian Festival (Naadam) in Sydney (Image credit: What’s On)

Maintaining their heritage language is paramount for migrants internationally as language is not just a communication tool. It carries our culture, tradition, beliefs and identity. Therefore, passing our language on to our descendants is a crucial responsibility.

Living up to that responsibility can be difficult in countries such as Australia, where a monolingual mindset prevails. Small languages of emergent communities, such as Mongolian, face particular challenges.

The Mongolian language

There are 8.4 million Mongolian speakers in the world. Only 3.4 million of them live in Mongolia. A larger number of 4.1 million Mongolian speakers live in Inner Mongolia.

You might wonder what the difference between Mongolia and Inner Mongolia is. Mongolia is an independent country located between China and Russia, while neighboring Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region within China. These contiguous heartlands of the Mongolians were separated in the course of the 20^th century.

The separation had linguistic consequences, too: in Mongolia, Mongolian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet but in Inner Mongolia the traditional Mongolian script is still in use.

SBS hosts a Mongolian channel

Mongolian in Australia

The separation also has consequences in the diaspora: only Mongolians from Mongolia are captured in statistics, but the number of Mongolians from Inner Mongolia are not captured, as they are Chinese nationals.

According to the Embassy of Mongolia, approximately 25,000 citizens of Mongolia currently live in Australia. I am one of them.

In addition to being an immigrant from Mongolia, I am also the mother of a 3-year-old boy.

Despite my commitment to raising him bilingually, my son is currently English-dominant, and the same is true of my nephew, and other children in my social circle.

The perspective of Mongolian migrant mothers

To find out more, and motivated by a study of parents’ emotional investment into their children’s heritage language learning, I interviewed five migrant mothers from Mongolia about their children’s proficiency in English and Mongolian. Between them, the five mothers had ten children, who have been living in Australia for 6 months to 6 years.

This is what I found:

• Preschool children regularly mix English and Mongolian, and, by and large, do not distinguish between English and Mongolian words.
• Primary school children are all English-dominant. This is particularly true when it comes to reading and writing. All six children in this age group read and write English well, but only two of them had any literacy at all in Mongolian.
• As children grow older, their oral proficiency in Mongolian declines. They only speak Mongolian to their parents, they hesitate and search for words, and some have completely lost their productive abilities.
• The only fluent Mongolian speaker among the children is a 5-year-old recent arrival, who is quickly learning English and seems to be in the process of transitioning to English dominance since starting childcare a few months ago.

Children in traditional costume at annual Mongolian Festival (Naadam) in Sydney (Image credit: What’s On)

Although this was a small-scale informal study, the trend is clear: second-generation Mongolians in Australia are not developing their Mongolian. In fact, they are rapidly losing it once they enter formal schooling.

How can we preserve Mongolian in the second generation?

Research suggests that there are many things migrant parents can do to support the bilingual development and heritage language maintenance of their children, such as sending children to bilingual schools, attending community schools, speaking only the heritage language at home, or engaging in heritage language literacy practices, such as joint book reading or use of social media with family back home.

These are all great strategies. But they are extra difficult for speakers of small, under-resourced languages such as Mongolian. For instance, there is only one Mongolian community language school at preschool and primary level available in NSW and the community languages directory of the State Library of NSW does not hold a single entry in Mongolian.

While the need to maintain Mongolian into the next generation is keenly felt in our community, the path to achieving this goal is less clear. To preserve Mongolian, we need to find new ways to support our next generation to acquire it.

Related content

• Mongolian language
• Multilingual families

Image credit: Alexander Dummer via Unsplash

In the current crisis, when schools and childcare centres may be closed for long periods, many families have to make choices about work and childcare in new ways. In many households, mothers are finding that the burden of working and looking after children falls to them, while their husbands’ job, with its higher wage and lower flexibility, comes first. One writer has suggested that for women in the West, the pandemic has sent them back into the 1950s, when married women did not work outside the home.

This is not news to those of us looking at issues connected with women, work and the unpaid labour of childcare and the domestic sphere. In my work, I look at minority language transmission, through the lens of family language work, building on Toshie Okita’s book Invisible Work: Bilingualism, language choice and childrearing in intermarried families.

I started thinking about this topic while working as an English language teacher in Sydney in 2008. A student sought my advice on what language she should speak to her daughter. Her English-speaking husband wanted her to switch from speaking Thai to English, which she had been speaking to her daughter since birth. She wanted some “expert” advice to negotiate with her husband about the family’s language policy; I told her she was right to speak her language and she seemed happy with that.

But the episode stayed with me. Who wouldn’t want their child to grow up with two languages? And why would the husband ask his wife to stop speaking her strongest language to their child?

My resulting doctoral research draws on interviews with participants in 30 linguistically intermarried couples. Questions of what to do about children and language came up often. For mothers in particular, these questions were linked to a sense of primary responsibility for the child’s language development. Even, surprisingly, when they did not speak a second language themselves.

“And I never asked them to do it, it happened naturally”

In her book, Okita pointed out that many of the British husbands of Japanese migrant wives felt it was natural that their wives spoke to the children in Japanese, especially when their English was less proficient. The migrant mothers I spoke to in my research were highly accomplished multilinguals, which seemed to make the language choice both less clear-cut and more fraught. In fact, the majority of families reported that their kids were not actively bilingual. This was a source of great regret for those parents whose children could not effectively speak to family and friends in the first language of the migrant parent.

One exception was the family of Lucia and Marc, who had a sense of great pride that the kids spoke Spanish with each other, and not just with their Spanish-speaking mum:

And I never asked them to do it, it happened naturally and they always talk to each other in Spanish, of course they mix English words when they don’t have them, when they don’t have the Spanish word they, you know, insert the English word, but you know all the structure and the communication’s in Spanish. […] (Lucia)

Unlike many couples I spoke to, Lucia and Marc, were hopeful and positive about the idea of raising their kids with two languages. Perhaps Lucia’s positive attitude towards language mixing through language contact played a part in their approach. Related to this is the fact that Lucia, herself an English/Spanish bilingual from a young age, felt equipped for and was prepared to do the work of speaking Spanish to the children. For other migrant mums, working and integrating into a new country was enough to make the job of bilingual childrearing an ongoing and often insurmountable challenge.

All his friends said “oh my god, you’re not, your children aren’t speaking Polish”

The situation was different again for the English-speaking background mothers I interviewed, who were either monolingual or had become bilingual later in life, often without much formal education in the language. Despite this, they felt responsible for the presence (or absence) of the other language in their children’s lives.

They spoke about mothers-in-law sending books from overseas; about enrolling kids in language classes; about listening to music and watching television in other languages; and about the pressure they felt for their kids to be bilingual, as in this example from Michelle:

All his friends said “oh my god, you’re not, your children aren’t speaking Polish” and I would just say to them “that’s the whole, that’s why it’s called mother tongue, you generally, as a kid you generally spend more time with your mother” and so you know, um, I think that’s it.

Michelle argues against the pressure to raise her children bilingually by subscribing to a mother tongue ideology. Her mother tongue is English and so she feels she has done her duty. Other mothers talked about how they saw their role as encouraging their husbands to speak the language with the children, such as Megan:

My husband, he’s more than happy to read them books in Hindi but I have to be the instigator of everything (laughs). “Why don’t you sing them a song in Hindi? Why don’t you read them a book in Hindi?” (Megan)

This is similar to the findings of Piller and Gerber’s (2018) study of how parents conceptualised their children’s bilingualism in an online parenting forum. They found that English-speaking background mothers were the main contributors to the forum, and that their multilingual partners were often represented as failing in their duty to speak their language to the couple’s children.

This was echoed by the mothers in my research who, whether they had proficiency in the language or not, positioned their role in their children’s language education as a primary one. In contrast, many English-speaking background husbands saw their role as marginal, as supporting their bilingual wives’ efforts by sometimes just permitting the language in the home and tolerating the fact that this often left them excluded from conversations. They saw their wives, as speakers of the language, as the primary decision-makers around language choice in the home:

Hey look, I’m happy to help. If you’re trying to teach the baby something or talking to it in Serbian, teach me a couple of phrases like, “put that down, don’t do that […]”. (Jonathon)

In these examples, mothers are positioned as the parent who makes bilingualism in the home happen. This is not to say that fathers did not value bilingualism for their children, in fact almost all participants of the study were generally positive about bilingual childrearing. It just meant that they did not hold themselves as primarily responsible for it, even when the wives did not actually feel equipped to pass on the language. Thus, I argue that gender trumps language when it comes to bilingual childrearing.

Over the past thirty years there has been a welcome social shift in many places towards supporting families to pass on their indigenous or migrant languages in our transnational, globalised world. To better support families, researchers need to start paying attention to how social roles, such as motherhood, determine and shape family language policy experiences in very significant ways.

*This blogpost is based on chapter 5 of my new book on this and other topics to do with language in couples and families: Linguistic intermarriage in Australia: Between pride and shame, published by Palgrave Macmillan and available as an e-book and print edition.

References

Okita, T. (2002). Invisible work: Bilingualism, language choice, and childrearing in intermarried families. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227
Torsh, H. (2020). Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dr Van Tran, Charles Sturt University, presented this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity

In Australia almost a quarter of the population speak a language other than English (LOTE) at home but relatively few succeed in maintaining their home language across generations. The typical pattern in migrant families is bilingualism with LOTE dominance in the first generation, bilingualism with English dominance in the second generation, and English monolingualism in the third generation.

There is a gap between parents’ desires to raise their children bilingually and their success in achieving their aspirations (Piller & Gerber, 2018).

Why do some parents succeed in their efforts to maintain the home language and to raise their children bilingually in English and a LOTE while others fail? Our guest speaker in this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity, Dr Van Tran from Charles Sturt University, explored precisely this question with a focus on Vietnamese in Australia.

As part of the “Vietspeech” research project, the researcher surveyed over 150 first generation Vietnamese parents living in Australia with children aged below 18 years. The questionnaire study asked parents to rate their children’s proficiency in Vietnamese and English, respond to questions about language use practices, and identify characteristics of the child, the parent, the family, and the community. She then went on to identify the factors that differed for children with above and below average Vietnamese language proficiency (as rated by their parents).

With regard to spoken language proficiency, the best predictor was child language use. Maybe unsurprisingly, the more likely a child was to use Vietnamese, the higher their ability to speak the language.

This finding points to the existence of vicious and virtuous cycles in language learning. A vicious language learning cycle is one where there are few opportunities to speak, resulting in fewer practice opportunities, resulting in deteriorating language proficiency, resulting in reduced likelihood to speak. By contrast, a virtuous language learning cycle works in the opposite direction: many and varied practice opportunities lead to proficiency gains which in turn further increase the likelihood of language use.

This means that the ability to establish virtuous language learning cycles is one of the secrets of success in bilingual parenting.

With regard to written proficiency, the researcher identified a correlation with children’s age: obviously, a child has to be old enough to learn how to write. Literacy is tied to schooling. Therefore, children who had only recently arrived in Australia and had experienced some schooling in Vietnam had an advantage when it came to Vietnamese literacy.

In Australia, community language schools are supposed to teach literacy in the home language. However, the VietSpeech team has found that it makes no difference for a child’s Vietnamese proficiency whether a child attends a community school or not. However, it would be wrong to conclude that language education in school is pointless and that all that matters is parental effort.

Parental attitudes and efforts matter most in the early years. During the early years, the focus is necessarily on developing oral proficiency and on getting those virtuous language cycles going. However, the control parents have over a child’s linguistic environment decreases rapidly as they get older.

Starting school is usually a turning point and virtuous language learning cycles can all too easily collapse into vicious cycles at that point.

The challenge of maintaining the LOTE as the habitual language spoken in the home in the early primary years is magnified by the fact that, at this point, literacy comes into play. To continue developing the LOTE towards the full range of linguistic proficiencies, including academic proficiencies that will last into adulthood, it is essential for children to learn how to read and write in the LOTE. And learning to read and write does not only mean learning one’s ABC but being able to draw knowledge from increasingly complex texts.

Achieving biliteracy on parental effort alone, without school support, is extremely difficult. Some families adopt a “one child, two curricula” approach (Chao and Ma, 2019). In this approach, which is also employed by some of the participants in our team member’s Yining Wang’s research with Chinese parents in Australia, parents coach their children outside school hours in the curriculum of the home country. In Chao and Ma’s study, this included Chinese and maths; for one of Yining’s participants, coaching was even more extensive and also included history and social studies.

Adopting a “one child, two curricula” approach is only feasible for a small minority of families. The capacity constraints on the part of both children and parents are obvious. Therefore, for biliteracy to ever be a feasible option for all families who want it, school support is essential.

In Australia, only a very small number of schools offer bilingual curricula. Bilingual schools such as the German International School Sydney, are not a wide option, either. They are few and far between and almost always expensive private schools.

This leaves community language schools as the main option to develop and support children’s written home language proficiency. Unfortunately, Dr Tran’s finding that Vietnamese community schools do not seem to be particularly effective is not unusual. With so many other things competing for precious time, most community schools find that attendance starts to plummet by the mid-primary years.

Australia is not unusual in its neglect of community schools, as Martha Sif Karrebæk recently reported in her account of heritage language education in Denmark.

However, it does not have to be that way, as an initiative in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia shows. There schools are required to provide home language teaching if requested by a minimum of 15 parents. Currently, schools in the city of Dortmund (ca. 586,000 inhabitants), for instance, teach 14 different home languages as part of their regular curriculum.

So proud is the city of its achievement in bilingual education that they’ve produced a video about it. Entitled “Every language is a treasure”, the heart-warming video [in German, Arabic, Bosnian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish] features the voices of parents, children, teachers, and policy makers, and shows the real secret of successful bilingual parenting: communities and schools that value languages.

Next Lecture in Linguistic Diversity

Learn more about bilingual education and home language maintenance in Australia at next week’s lecture by Dr Kerry Taylor-Leech about “Translanguaging and identity: Creating safe space for Samoan language and culture in an Australian a’oga amata”

References

Chao, X., & Ma, X. Transnational habitus: Educational, bilingual and biliteracy practices of Chinese sojourner families in the U.S. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 0(0), 1468798417729551. doi:10.1177/1468798417729551

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [available open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/secrets-of-bilingual-parenting-success/feed/ 50 21699 https://languageonthemove.com/hoping-to-raise-bub-bilingually/ https://languageonthemove.com/hoping-to-raise-bub-bilingually/#comments Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:51:57 +0000 http://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=21092

New Zealand’s PM wants to raise her newborn daughter bilingually (Source: radionz)

New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, plans to raise her newborn daughter bilingually in Māori and English. Her desire for her child – and all New Zealand children – to grow up proficient in more than one language is not unusual in today’s world and echoes the desires of many Australian parents, too. A recent study of young Australian mothers found high levels of support for bilingual child rearing.

Mothers wanted to give their children “the gift of bilingualism” and spoke glowingly about the many advantages and benefits they hoped bilingualism would bestow on their children. They felt that proficiency in another language in addition to English would enrich their children’s future, that it would give them a career edge, and that it would allow them to travel overseas but also connect with diverse communities in Australia. Many also believed that bilingualism would give their children a cognitive advantage and they were aware of health benefits of bilingualism such as delayed onset of dementia.

In short, like New Zealand’s PM, the mothers in the study aspired to raise their children with English and another language for many good reasons. There was another similarity: while they knew what they wanted, they did not quite know how to achieve their goal. Like Ardern they confided that, while they were sure they wanted their children to learn English and another language, they found it difficult to figure out “how that will happen.”

The main difficulties with raising bilingual children in Australia – as in any English-dominant society – can be traced back to the overbearing role of English. The dominance of English makes bilingual parenting extra hard for a number of reasons.

To begin with, Australians often have relatively low levels of proficiency in another language and this can lead to deep insecurities. How do you do “being a competent parent” while fighting insecurities whether your pronunciation is good enough or struggling to find the right word?

Second, you may want bilingualism for your child. But you also want your child to be well adjusted, to make friends easily and to do well in school. English is the indispensable means to achieve these goals. So, you may suffer from a niggling doubt that the other language may detract from your child’s English.

By focusing on the other language in the home, do you inadvertently jeopardize your child’s academic success or their friendship groups? Research shows that this is not true but it can certainly seem that way when your child throws a tantrum in the supermarket and everyone stares at you as you try to calm her down in another language.

Third, contemporary parenting is difficult and fraught with anxieties at the best of times. Bottle or breast? Disposable or cloth nappy? Soccer or cricket? The number of decisions we have to make seems endless and each decision seems to index whether we are a good parent or a parenting fail.

Questions of language choice and language practices add a whole other dimension to the complexities of modern parenting: When should you start which language? Who should speak which language to the child? Is it ok to mix languages? The list goes on and on. Parents not only need to figure out answers to these questions, they also need to live their answers out on a daily basis.

Furthermore, parenting is not something that we do in isolation. Mums and dads may not arrive at the same answers. When one partner is deeply committed to bilingual parenting and the other is not, that can easily put a strain on the relationship. Many couples know that mundane questions like whose turn it is to do the dishes can easily escalate into a fight when everyone is tired and juggling too many responsibilities. Now imagine such daily problems amplified by debates over whose turn it is to read the bedtime story in the other language or whose fault it is that the bedtime story in the other language is always the same because there are only two books in that language in the local library.

The parents of New Zealand’s “First Baby” want to raise their daughter bilingually because they recognize that bilingualism is important in today’s world – just like Australian parents. They do not quite know how to do it and they will undoubtedly struggle turning their aspiration into a reality as their daughter grows up and starts to have her own ideas about bilingualism. Having to make language decisions part and parcel of all the mundane parenting and family decisions that we all make all the time will be a challenge – just as it is for Australian parents.

But that is where the similarity ends.

New Zealand parents do not have to face the challenges of raising their children bilingually alone – in contrast to Australian parents. We all know that it takes a village to raise a child. Parents need the support of the wider community. This holds even more so when it comes to bilingual parenting. Specifically, bilingual families need institutional support, particularly from schools, in order to thrive.

New Zealand’s te kōhanga reo or “language nests” are preschools that operate through the medium of Māori and have been highly successful in supporting bilingual proficiencies in Māori and English. Additionally, there are now plans to make bilingual education in Māori and English universally available in all public schools by 2025.

In Australia, our policy makers have so far ignored the aspirations of an ever-growing number of families for meaningful language education that fosters high levels of linguistic proficiency in English and another language. In fact, the overbearing role of English in academic achievement often means that schools actively conspire against the wishes of families. As a result, those best able to raise bilingual children in Australia are those who have the means to afford specialized private schools, extended overseas holidays or bilingual nannies.

When will our leaders end the disconnect between families’ linguistic aspirations and the education system? When will we see an all-of-society effort to help put the bilingual proficiencies needed to thrive in the 21^st century within the reach of all?

Reference

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [if you do not have institutional access, you may download an open access version here. The number of OA downloads is limited, so, institutional users, make sure to leave this link for readers without institutional access … An OA pre-publication version is available here].

Dr Sabine Little during her guest lecture at Macquarie University

When my daughter was five years old, she one day solemnly informed me that, from now on, she was no longer going to speak German because it was not good for her health. “German hurts my throat”, she explained. The statement showed astute phonetic and psychological judgement. She had identified the kind of argument that would carry weight with her parents (in a way that “I don’t like German” or “Everyone else speaks English” might not have).

My response was to explain the basics of articulation to her and to conclude my explanation with the assertion that, because German is more guttural than English, German-speaking kids get to eat more lollies than English-speaking kids do. For the time being, that was the end of that attempt to change our family language.

For bilingual children, the early primary years are a common point of linguistic rebellion. At that time the dominant language starts to make its weight felt through the school and children begin to see their family from the outside for the first time in their lives. The combined discovery of a stronger language and of social difference may lead them to reject the home language.

For parents, children’s linguistic rebellion can be profoundly confusing and challenging.

A common experience is for bilingual children to ask their parents not to speak the home language in public, in the school or in front of their friends. For many parents such a request can be deeply hurtful. It may feel like a rejection not only of the language but also of the parent who speaks the language.

As a parent, how do you respond to that? Do you respect your child’s wishes, even if it may come at the cost of language loss? Do you insist on the home language because you know that eventually the child will be grateful for the bilingual proficiencies you have instilled in them? Do you force them to follow your choices because you believe that the home language is an important aspect of your identity and their identity? Do you give in sometimes and stand firm on other occasions?

There are probably as many variations on the answer to these questions as there are families, and it is always helpful to learn from the experiences of other families.

How would you feel about inheriting this vase? (Source: veniceclayartists.com)

The research of Dr Sabine Little (Sheffield University, UK) addresses precisely such questions and asks how bilingual parents and children jointly negotiate language policies in the family. As part of the Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University, Dr Little conceptualized the home language as heritage language and likened it to “Great Aunt Edna’s vase”.

When Great-Aunt Edna passes on and leaves her treasured vase to her nephew, all kinds of scenarios are possible. He may have exactly the same taste and love the vase because it is a fantastic vase. He may not care much for the vase but treasure it because it reminds him of his love for Great-Aunt Edna. He may care neither for the vase nor Great-Aunt Edna, and therefore let the vase gather dust in a corner. Or he may find the vase so atrocious that he wants nothing to do with it and gives it away. A further complicating factor may be other members of his family who have their own views and preferences about the vase.

In short, the inherited vase may be a source of pride, guilt, conflict or disregard. Not all of these emotions may be talked about openly: some people love kitschy vases but may be ashamed to admit that; others may hate them but are afraid to be judged disrespectful of Great-Aunt Edna.

It is easy to see that a vase can be a complicated inheritance. Now imagine how complicated things can get when the inheritance is not an object but a language.

In her research with 212 bilingual families in the UK, Dr Little found that parents often failed to talk about these complicated feelings with their children. If conflicting emotions around language choice were left to fester, this could easily turn language into a battleground for the family and a source of tensions between parents and children.

In fact, attempting to raise children bilingually may not only impact on the parent-child relationship but can also put a strain on the couple relationship, as Livia Gerber and I found in new research just published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

In data from an online discussion forum about bilingual parenting, we found that mothers were much more invested in their children’s bilingualism than fathers. Mothers often perceived fathers as uncooperative or incompetent obstacles to enacting a bilingual family policy.

Taken together, both pieces of research warn of the dangers of letting language choice become a source of tension in the family.

One way to overcome such problems is to keep renegotiating language choice with children as they grow up. Dr Little recommends talking as much about language choice and the home language as in the home language.

That is certainly sound advice.

Connecting this research with the research about linguistic habit formation by Professor Maite Puigdevall we heard about in a previous lecture in the series suggests that there is another possibility, too: the transition to primary school is a key moment when linguistic habits are subject to change. What may seem like rebellion on the part of the child may in fact be the overwhelming influence of a new world with its new habits. It is not so much that they rebel against the home language but that the dominant language is taking them over.

Acknowledging the force of habit can be another way to escape the impossible choice of letting go of the home language or turning the home language into an ongoing source of tension. As so often in life, the road to success is through the formation of good habits.

Instilling good bilingual habits in their children is, of course, not something parents can do on their own. In addition to strong home language habits in the family, they will need the support of the community. Home language support in the school is ideal and lobbying for home language support in the school may be one of the most effective ways in which parents can support their children’s bilingualism.

Where school support for the home language is not feasible, it is important to seek out other forms of community support. After all, it takes a village to raise a child. Parenting cannot be done alone but needs community support, and this is even more so the case when it comes to bilingual parenting.

References

Little, S. (2017). Whose heritage? What inheritance?: conceptualising family language identities. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-15. doi:10.1080/13670050.2017.1348463

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [if you do not have institutional access, you may download an open access version here. The number of OA downloads is limited, so, institutional users, make sure to leave this link for readers without institutional access … An OA pre-publication version is available here].

Now imagine that, on top of all that, you want to raise your child bilingually. If ‘bilingualism’ is one of your considerations, you are left with a minuscule number of facilities … in many countries anyways and most definitely in Australia.

Or maybe ‘bilingualism’ wasn’t on your list at all but, as luck would have it, a bilingual childcare centre round the corner from where you live just happened to offer you a spot? What would you think about that? How do other parents in the centre feel about the bilingual programme? What are their reasons for sending their children there? And what are the odds that your child will really become bilingual in a bilingual preschool?

My book Bilingual childcare: hitches, hurdles and hopes provides answers to these questions through the voices of parents who enrolled their children in a bilingual German-English childcare centre in Sydney. I examine their expectations for the language learning of their children, the importance they place on bilingualism (or not), and also their hopes for their children’s bilingualism beyond the early years.

Any childcare centre is a dynamic hub, where people from different backgrounds (economic, educational, attitudinal, linguistic, you name it) and with different expectations come together. Catering to these diverse backgrounds and expectations is a difficult job. To understand educators’ perspectives, Bilingual childcare: hitches, hurdles and hopes also highlights the voices of educators working in bilingual childcare – voices that often remain unheard. Readers will find out about the ways in which they implement the bilingual programme, how they are trained, prepared or qualified for their job, their attitudes towards early language learning and how they perceive parental attitudes about this very topic (and how this affects their work).

All of this is framed by and explained through Australia’s monolingual mindset and the hegemony of English. It is alarming to see how heavy these weigh on the implementation of the bilingual programme – from the inside and from the outside. The outside refers to issues on a larger socio-political scale, for instance to the hostile policy environment towards bilingual daycare. Issues from the inside refer to educators, directors, and internal structures as well as the centre’s clientele, the parents. The dynamics between the factors parents, centre and language policies is what creates major hitches and hurdles, but also enormous potential for future development: hope.

An example of policies that are hostile – or, at best, indifferent – to languages other than English comes from the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), the early childhood curriculum which governs the provision of early childhood education in Australia. Language-related learning outcomes in the EYLF are very vague: while educators are expected to ‘respect’ and ‘support’ home languages, no implementation guidelines are provided.

By contrast, the requirements for starting primary school are very explicit – explicitly monolingual: the NSW primary school entrance test ‘Best Start’ is focussed on testing literacy in English only.

For early childhood educators, monolingual English measurements of school readiness and vague EYLF references to home languages create a conflict of interest: it’s either bilingual development or English literacy. This conflict obviously creates a barrier to the use of any language other than English, even in a ‘bilingual’ childcare centre. As long as English is tacitly equated with ‘literacy’, educators will always struggle to implement bilingual programmes.

Bilingual childcare: hitches, hurdles and hopes shows how bilingual early childhood education ‘works’ (or doesn’t work) in practice in an environment that is notorious for the barriers it puts up against bilingual learning. The multiple perspectives on bilingual early childhood education it features also show potential pathways to solutions that will help improve the bilingual education experience for parents, educators, policy-makers and, above all, for the young learners who are at the heart of this enterprise.

Our newest PhD, Dr Shiva Motaghi Tabari (3rd from left)

The Language on the Move team is proud to announce another freshly-minted PhD in our midst! Dr Shiva Motaghi Tabari graduated from Macquarie University yesterday and was awarded her PhD for a thesis about “Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families“. The thesis is available for open access via our PhD Hall of Fame. Congratulations, Shiva!

Abstract

The process of migration to and settlement in a new country entails linguistic, cultural and identity changes and adjustments. These changes and adjustments at an individual level are related to changes and adjustments in the family. This thesis offers a qualitative exploration of such changes and adjustments in migrant families in Australia by focusing on their language learning and use processes.

Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the study draws on concepts from family studies, particularly the notion of ‘bidirectionality’, as well as sociocultural theories related to second language acquisition within the poststructuralist paradigm. The emphasis is on the ways in which language learning and use in the family relates to wider social and political contexts and language ideologies.

Data for the study come from semi-structured in-depth interviews with nineteen migrant families of Persian background in Australia, including thirty-three parents and twenty-one children.

Overall, the findings of the study show that language socialisation processes within the family in migration contexts are complex and intricately interwoven with parental and child language beliefs and attitudes, which in turn are influenced by language ideologies and attitudes prevalent in the wider society.

Specifically, the research addresses four research questions. First, parents’ experiences of language learning and use before migration are examined. Findings demonstrate how participants’ multiple desires for English learning were socially shaped, and how they invested into English language learning at different points in time, particularly with the prospect of an imagined future in Australia and upward socioeconomic mobility. Second, parents’ experiences of language learning and use after migration are explored. Findings suggest that under the influence of ideological forces in the wider society, particularly those related to the ‘native/non-native speaker’ dichotomy, learners may perpetually be perceived, by themselves and by others, as deficient language speakers and peripheral members in the new society.

After analysing parental language learning and use experiences, children’s experiences of language learning and use are examined. Children’s English language learning trajectories are diverse and relate to the degrees of English competence and the age of participants at the time of arrival. Children exercise their agency in different ways to learn the new language and to become a legitimate member in their new communities of practice. Finally, the thesis explores how parents’ and children’s language learning and use intersect. Language ideologies and the imbalanced values attributed to languages along with inequitable power relations determine the conditions under which parents struggle to achieve bilingual outcomes both for themselves and for their children.

Overall, the study argues for a holistic approach to investigations of language socialisation processes in migrant families and problematises the ways in which language beliefs, attitudes, and practices of parents and their children are shaped by the wider social and ideological context. The study has multiple implications for both adult and child language learning, parent-child interactions in migration contexts, and Australian migration studies.

Advances in sociolinguistic knowledge

Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families advances sociolinguistic knowledge in at least three distinct ways:

Conceptually, the focus on bidirectionality in language learning is highly innovative given that language learning continues to be widely seen as something the individual undertakes. Usually, where language learning directions are considered, they are seen to flow from teacher to student or from parent to child. By examining how families engage in language learning as a group and by also considering child influences on parental language learning the thesis breaks new ground conceptually.

Methodologically, the holistic approach to data collection from children and parents, both individually and in groups, extends qualitative interview-based research to include an interactional dimension that is often missing from this kind of approach.

Sociologically, the research advances our knowledge of Persian-speaking skilled migrants to Australia, an emerging but rapidly growing community. By examining pre- and post-migration language learning experiences the thesis illuminates the ideological and practical bases for the language learning trajectories of this group once they have settled in Australia.

Background

In 1994, when I was in kindergarten, as part of a project on multiculturalism, my primary school in Newcastle, NSW, conducted interviews with pupils from immigrant backgrounds. My family had only arrived in Australia a few months prior: my parents knew very little English, and I knew none. As part of the project, a picture book was made by the school, with photographs and descriptive captions telling the story of each pupil’s previous life in far-away places; Switzerland, in my case. On the very last page of this picture book, there is a photo of myself, proudly wearing my first school uniform during my first Easter Hat Parade. Below the photo, a short note, obviously dictated, and copied in the unsteady hand of a five-year-old. In the note, I thank the children in my class for taking care of me and for ‘writing for me all the words I need’. Although my primary school was evidently interested in making its multicultural students feel welcome, their focus, unsurprisingly, was primarily on my (linguistic) integration: the ‘words I needed’ were English words. This obviously left the maintenance of my mother tongue to my parents. At the same time as the local school was pressuring my parents to make certain I learnt English as quickly as possible, my mother was relentlessly pressured by my grandparents to ensure their grandchildren would not forget their Swiss-German roots.

Bilingual child-rearing in an English-dominant environment is not an easy task. In a society that largely sees English monolingualism as the norm, promoting a language other than English, often with little community or institutional support, can be a daunting undertaking. The paradox of my five-year-old self’s thank-you note in a book celebrating multiculturalism and multilingualism, sparked my interest in the tension between the dominance of English and the valorisation of diversity as it is experienced by families.

Giving your child the gift of bilingualism (Image source: babybliss.com.au)

Abstract

My thesis seeks to explore the ideologies underpinning parental decisions on family language policies in a predominantly English monolingual environment. Focussing on how the notion of ‘good’ parenting is linked to bilingualism as a child-rearing strategy, the discursive construction of bilingual parenting is explored in one of the largest online parenting communities in Australia, essentialbaby.com.au, using critical discourse analysis. The corpus consists of 15 discussion threads totalling 266 comments posted between 2007 and 2014 by parents and carers seeking and giving advice on bilingual child-rearing. This forum was chosen for three reasons: first, with over 255,000 members it is one of Australia’s largest online parenting forums and it enjoys a broad audience. Secondly, this is a ‘mainstream’ forum that is not a priori concerned with language. It is not specialised in bi-or multilingualism, so members are largely non-experts, making it possible to analyse peer advice as opposed to expert advice. Lastly, an investigation of parental beliefs about bilingual child-rearing in a general parenting forum will reflect more widely popularised discourses within the wider public. Therefore, these – mostly anonymous – conversations can be understood as a manifestation of public knowledge about bilingual parenting. Specifically, the online parenting forum is seen as an environment to explore how parents talk about bilingual child-rearing, and the language ideologies that underlie parental advice on ‘good’ bilingual parenting.

The Bilingual Bonus

Findings suggest that raising a child in two or more languages is often associated with providing the child with what I term the bilingual bonus. Bilingual competencies are associated with a range of cognitive, health, personal, and economic benefits that are unavailable to monolingual peers. Therefore, the increased dissemination of the benefits associated with bilingualism, particularly in the popular media, valorises parental decisions on bilingual child-rearing. Additionally, bilingual family language policies, such as the ‘one parent – one language’ strategy, have become incorporated into mainstream parenting strategies due to the increasing valorisation of bilingualism in general discourses. As a result, parents strongly believe that bilingual competency can only be achieved by implementing a bilingual language learning strategy that promotes double monolingual language acquisition. Overall, parental efforts in raising children with an additional language positions parents as ‘good’ caregivers who are providing their children with an advantage in life. Nevertheless, this study finds that parents are often faced with contradictory bilingual child-rearing realities that inform their language-related parenting decisions. These contradictions indicate that the same tension exists today that existed over two decades ago when I wrote my thank-you note: the tension between the dominance of English and the valorisation of bilingualism. The research extends existing literature on how the monolingual mindset operates on an individual level, and has implications for language policy at individual, institutional and state levels.

Nizaqete Bislimi (Source: DuMont Verlag / Franz Brück)

Some of the most striking images from the refugees who have been trekking across Europe are of families and children. Beyond the immediate perils of their journeys, migration inevitably changes families. As children are usually much quicker to learn new languages and adapt to new circumstances than adults, children and youths often inevitably become mediators between their parents and the host society.

Adults – migrant and local – often feel rather ambiguous about children as linguistic and cultural mediators: is a child that translates at a parent-teacher interview at school really to be trusted? Parents and teachers may feel apprehensive that the child is not interpreting “the truth” but may be representing their academic performance in a more favourable light than is actually warranted. Should not children be kept away from medical examinations? Parents and doctors often struggle with the fact that, where children act as mediators in a medical encounter, the child may gain knowledge of their parents’ bodies in ways that might be considered inappropriate or premature. And does not the balance of power overall shift in favour of the child? Are migrant parents “losing control” as the supposedly clear power hierarchy between adult and child breaks down when a migrant adult depends on a child to help them interact in the wider society?

A recently published autobiography shows a different side of child mediators. The autobiography titled Durch die Wand (“Through the wall”) is by Nizaqete Bislimi, a German lawyer in her mid-30s. Nizaqete’s story has been well-published in Germany for a number of years: born in Kosovo in 1979, Nizaqete’s family fled to Germany when she was fourteen years old. For thirteen years the family failed to achieve a secure legal status and lived under the constant threat of deportation. Even so, Nizaqete finished high school and graduated as one of the top students in her class. She went on to study law and is today partner in a law firm specializing in migration and citizenship law and also the president of the German Romani Federation.

Given the family’s precarious legal status over many years, it is not surprising that a typical experience during Nizaqete’s early years in Germany should have been that she needed to mediate between her mother and their (pro bono) lawyer. Nizaqete was ambitious, determined and, obviously, smart, and learned German quickly. Even so, “Amtsdeutsch” (“bureaucratic German”) and the legal register were beyond the teenager.

During one of their meetings with their lawyer, Nizaqete said to her mother “One day I will understand all this. I promise.” The lawyer explained that the only way for this to happen was for Nizaqete to study law.

Her career adviser had a different idea and recommended that she get married instead of going to university. Nizaqete’s ambitions clearly did not fit his stereotype of a young Romani refugee woman from the Balkan.

But Nizaqete had promised her mother, and she has succeeded.

The anxieties about child mediators mentioned above notwithstanding, Nizaqete’s experience deriving strength from acting as a linguistic and cultural mediator for her parents may not be unique.

Research with child language brokers has examined cognitive development, academic performance, parent-child relationships, emotional stress and moral development.

Nizaqete Bislimi with her parents on the day she was admitted to the bar (Source: Spiegelonline)

Cognitive development: because acting as linguistic and cultural mediator entails involvements in more complex situations than a child would normally encounter, for instance in legal or medical contexts, child mediators may develop higher problem-solving skills and better decision-making strategies (Morales & Hanson, 2005).

Academic performance: some studies have shown that acting as linguistic mediator is associated with higher scores on standardized tests (e.g., Dorner et al, 2007). Be that as it may, analysis of recorded parent-teacher interviews where the child interpreted between parent and teacher showed that children certainly did not lie to present their academic performance in a more favourable light than warranted (Sánchez & Orellana, 2006). On the contrary, they were likely to downplay praise from the teacher in translation.

Parent-child relationships: despite the common assumption that parents who have to enlist their children’s help to communicate outside the family are losing power and status, the evidence suggests otherwise. A US study, for instance, found that language brokering “may provide opportunities for communication and contact with parents that may contribute to adolescents feeling trusted and needed by parents” (Chao 2006, p. 295).

Emotional stress: there is concern in the literature that it may be traumatic for children to interpret for parents in contexts, particularly of a medical nature, where violence is under discussion or where they will gain insights into taboo topics such as parents’ sexuality. An interview study in the US found that practitioners in such cases often rejected the child as mediator in order to protect them from emotional stress (Cohen et al. 1999)

Moral development: some studies view linguistic and cultural mediation as a form of “required helpfulness” similarly to having to help out with domestic chores, and required helpfulness has been associated with maturity and moral development (e.g., Bauer 2013).

Overall, in migration contexts, it is often inevitable that children take on the roles of linguistic and cultural brokers between the adults in their family and the wider society. Given that this is the case, overburdening the activity with all kinds of anxieties is not helpful. In fact, child mediators may “make it possible for their parents to live, eat, shop and otherwise sustain themselves as workers, citizens and consumers in their host country” (Orellana 2009, p. 124). Conversely, they provide an important service to the host society which might be struggling to provide professional translators and interpreters in all the contexts where they might be necessary.

For many children contributing in this way to their families and societies is normal and will give them the strength to succeed against the odds. We should aim to help them with their brokering roles by developing their multilingual proficiencies and skills and by smoothing their paths; so that we’ll see many more success stories like that of Nizaqete Bislimi.

References

Bauer, E. (2013). Reconstructing Moral Identities in Memories of Childhood Language Brokering Experiences International Migration, 51 (5), 205-218 DOI: 10.1111/imig.12030

Chao, R. K. (2006). The Prevalence and Consequences of Adolescents’ Language Brokering for Their Immigrant Parents. In M. H. Bornstein & L. R. Cote (Eds.), Acculturation and Parent-Child Relationships: Measurement and Development (pp. 271-296). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cohen, S., Moran-Ellis, J., & Smaje, C. (1999). Children as Informal Interpreters in GP Consultations: Pragmatics and Ideology. Sociology of Health & Illness, 21(2), 163-186. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.00148

Dorner, L. M., Orellana, M. F., & Li‐Grining, C. P. (2007). “I Helped My Mom,” and It Helped Me: Translating the Skills of Language Brokers into Improved Standardized Test Scores. American Journal of Education, 113(3), 451-478. doi: 10.1086/512740

Morales, A., & Hanson, W. E. (2005). Language Brokering: An Integrative Review of the Literature. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 27(4), 471-503. doi: 10.1177/0739986305281333

Orellana, M. F. (2009). Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press.

Sánchez, I. G., & Orellana, M. F. (2006). The Construction of Moral and Social Identity in Immigrant Children’s Narratives-in-Translation. Linguistics and Education, 17(3), 209-239. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001

Further reading

Bislimi, N. (2015). Durch die Wand: Von der Asylbewerberin zur Rechtsanwältin [Through the Wall: From Asylum Seeker to Lawyer]. Köln: Dumont Buchverlag.

Jessen, J. (2015, 2015-10-02). Nizaqete Bislimi – Vom Flüchtlingskind zur Anwältin. WAZ.

Michaelis, S. (2015, 2015-10-03). Nizaqete Bislimi startete vom Flüchtlingsheim aus eine Karriere als Anwältin. Wiesbadener Tagblatt.

Michaelis, S. (2015, 2015-09-21). Von der Asylbewerberin zur Anwältin. Der Spiegel.

Peters, F. (2013, 2013-05-30). Die Roma, die unbedingt nach Oben wollte. Die Welt.

Yordanova, Y. (2013, 2013-12-13). Nizaqete Bislimi – Wiedergefundene Identität. Deutsche Welle.

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken (Source: quotesnpoems.com)

It is not unusual for bilingual parents to experience a sense of bewilderment when it comes to language choice in the family. When raising a child in a language different from the one parents were socialised into, old truths and certainties quickly disappear. Studying language choice in migrant families, Pavlenko (2004) found that parents’ confusion can be related to language ideologies that see the first language as the language of emotions and the second language as the language of detachment. Consequently, parents are often torn between speaking their first language because it is supposed to enhance the emotional connection with their children and speaking the second language because it is supposed to be the language of the new country.

This sense of bewilderment is often expressed by Iranian migrant parents to Australia who I interviewed for my ongoing doctoral research into bidirectional language learning in migrant families. Mina and Mahmoud (all names are pseudonyms), for instance, adopted a monolingual Persian-only policy with their primary-school-aged daughter, but, at the same time, speak about their intention ‘to change the plan’:

مینا: چون اصولا در خانه قانون کردیم که همه فارسی حرف بزنیم.

محمود: فکر کنم برای improve زبان فارسی‌اش [دخترمان] خیلی عالی بود، ولی برای ما نه، از نظر انگلیسی خیلی و اتفاقا اخیرا ما=

مینا: =تصمیم گرفتیم تغییر بدیم این برنامه را.

محمود:مطمئنا من زبان انگلیسیم در حدی نیست که بخواهم خیلی ازاحساساتم را به زبان انگلیسی به خوبی الان بیان کنم براش.

مینا: من فکر می‌کنم قدری برایم سخت است بخوام switch کنم، تو خونه انگلیسی حرف بزنم.

Mina: Because, basically, we have set a rule at home that everyone should speak in Persian.

Mahmoud: I think it was excellent for [our daughter’s] Persian language improvement, but not for us, in terms of English, and in fact, recently we=

Mina: =we’ve decided to change this plan.

Mahmoud: Certainly my English is not at a level so that I would want to express many of my emotions to her in English as well as I am doing now [in Persian].

Mina: I think it’s a bit hard for me if I want to switch into, talk in English at home.

Like many parents in Pavlenko’s (2004) study, Mina and Mahmoud construct Persian as the ‘language of emotion’; their preferred language choice to ensure an intimate parent-child relationship. While this discourse reflects the perceptions of many parents, some parents may use their second language for various reasons such as making closer connections with their children or to be in control of the situation, as in Farhad and Farah’s case.

فرهاد: من کاری که کردم، دلیل اینکه من گفتم توی خارج از خونه، یا حداقل، تو خونه شاید اوایل یه زمان خاصی باهاشون [بچه هام] انگلیسی حرف بزنم، همین بود، بخاطر اینکه نمیخواستم از دنیای اینها فاصله بگیرم. میخواستم، همانطور که خب فارسی، اینا که خب حله، انگلیسی هم هست. بدونم اینا چی میگن، حرفاشون چیه.

فرح: ما خودمون را به اونا نزدیک میکنیم در عین حال سعی می‌کنیم که از اونطرف هم اینا رو بکشیم سمت خودمان.

Farhad: What I did, the reason that I said that I spoke English with [my children] outside the home, or at least, at certain times at home when we first came, was this, because I didn’t want to distance myself from their world. I wanted, similar to Persian, well, which is ok, there is also English. I wanted to know what they were saying, what they were talking about.

Farah: We make ourselves closer to them, while, at the same time, trying to attract them towards us.

Nevertheless, I could feel a sense of hesitation – if not to say guilt – about using English with his children in Farhad’s talk. This sense of hesitation can also be inferred when he tries to rationalise his use of English at home, and to redress its ‘unacceptability’ by stressing ‘at certain times when we first came’. This uncertainty about parental language choice, is often increased when parents receive contradictory advice, particularly from those who are deemed to be ‘experts’, such as educators, pediatricians, or speech pathologists. The excerpts below illustrate instances of this kind of advice given to parents.

رامین: اول که اومدیم همه به ما می‌گفتند در خانه انگلیسی صحبت کنید. من واقعیتش یک مدت دچار تردید شده بودم که واقعا باید این کار را بکنیم یا نه. بعد به این نتیجه رسیدم، “نه”.

Ramin: When we first came, everybody told us to speak English at home. Honestly, I began to feel dubious about it for a while, whether to do it, really, or not. Then I came to the conclusion that, ‘no’.

 

آذر: اوایل که آمدیم معلم امیر خیلی تأکید می‌کرد امیر در منزل انگلیسی صحبت کنیم، بعد من به او گفتم شاید خیلی نتوانیم با او انگلیسی حرف بزنیم ولی سعی می‌کنیم امیر را لغت یاد بدهیم.

Azar: When we first came, Amir’s teacher emphasised so much that we should talk in English with him at home. Later I told her that maybe we would not be able to speak that much English with him, but we would try to teach Amir more [English] words.

 

ایمان: ما حتی یک سری مشاوره گرفتیم، نزدیک مدرسه، که رفتیم principal مدرسه را دیدیم. ما حتی ازش پرسیدیم که ما چکار کنیم. گفت “اصلاً شما به انگلیسی این کاری نداشته باشید. شما تا میتونید فارسی را باهاش کار کنید.” گفت “شما انگلیسی‌اش را به ما بسپرید، شما باهاش فارسی.”

Iman: We even sought some advice, close to school, when we went and saw the school principal. We even asked her what to do. She said, ‘Don’t worry about her English. You work on Persian with her as much as you can.’ She said, ‘Leave her English to us, you use Persian with her.’

In multilingual contexts, such either-or propositions undergirded by monolingual ideologies oversimplify the reality of multilingual existence in the emotion-laden context of family interactions where members have more than one linguistic resource at their disposal. A reality which is depicted by Emad, a father for whom family multilingualism is not a new experience that came with migration. Emad had himself grown up with multiple languages back in Iran.

عماد: می‌دانید یک نکته است که در فارسی و انگلیسی- خواهرم که با او هم انگلیسی صحبت می‌کردیم و هم فارسی، بعضی وقت‌ها می‌خواستیم احساساتمان را خیلی دقیق بگوییم. بعضی وقت‌ها مجبور می‌شدیم، با هم صحبت می‌کردیم، من یادمه با خواهر برادرم فارسی صحبت میکردیم. می‌گفتیم این چیزی که می‌خواهم بگویم، آن حرف دل من است، این کلمه است که در ترکی هست که در فارسی نیست، یا در انگلیسی هست که در این دوتا زبان نیست. می‌خواهیم بگوییم بعضی وقت‌ها آن کلمات کمک می‌کند که آدم اون اصل حسش رو خود را درست بیان کند.

Emad: You know, there is a point that in Persian and English- with my sister who we spoke in English and Persian, sometimes we wanted to express our feelings very precisely. Sometimes we had to, when we spoke together, I remember that we spoke Persian with my sister and brother. We said that what I want to say, that is the word of my heart, it is this word which exists in Turkish, but not in Persian, or that, it exists in English but not in those two languages. What I mean to say is that sometimes those words help you express precisely the spirit of your emotions.

Emad is one of the parent participants who embrace the fact that a multiplicity of languages can be developed as resources to convey emotions. Therefore, while recognising the different context of his child’s English learning to that of his own, Emad allows a natural flow of emotional communication by his child.

عماد: مثلا، اونروز به مادرش میگفتش که، مامانش رو صدا کرد شب میگفت،‘!Just give me a hug’ مثلا این احساسش را داشت بیان می‌کرد. ولی، خب، احساس میکنم، ما فکر می‌کردیم که این احساس، در واقع، با یک زبان native دارد ساخته می‌شود نه با یک زبان مصنوعی که ما یاد گرفتیم.

Emad: For instance, [our daughter] was saying to her mother the other day, she called her mum at night and said, ‘Just give me a hug!’ She was, for instance, expressing her emotions. But, well, I feel, we thought that, in fact, this emotion is being made through a native language, not through an artificial one that we learnt.

All in all, the emotional primacy of the first language is a reality in migrant families. However, at the same time, the development of ‘emotional multilingualism’ is another reality that needs to be acknowledged. In migration contexts parents may be particularly concerned about maintaining emotional ties with their children. As migrant families become socialized into a new society, the relationship between language and emotions is bound to change.  The dilemma of which language to choose may well be the product of a monolingual mindset that unnecessarily denies the reality of families’ linguistic and emotional growth.

Pavlenko, A. (2004). ‘Stop Doing That, Ia Komu Skazala!’: Language Choice and Emotions in Parent—Child Communication Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 25 (2-3), 179-203 DOI: 10.1080/01434630408666528

Visit the Bilingual Avenue!

Bilingual Avenue is an insightful and entertaining new website devoted to bilingual parenting and bilingual education. Bilingual Avenue features weekly podcasts, a blog and a resources section.

The weekly podcasts feature interviews with parents, teachers and experts about their language journeys, bilingual parenting and language learning generally. So far, six podcasts have been published. The very first podcast introduces the language learning journey of the curator of Bilingual Avenue, Marianna du Bosq. Marianna speaks about the challenges she faced as a teenager moving from Venezuela to the USA. The experience of having to learn a new language and a new culture has shaped not only her career trajectory and personal journey but has also inspired her to start Bilingual Avenue.

A fascinating parent interview is with Andrey Kneller, who moved to the USA from Russia as a ten-year-old. Now an adult, Andrey is a high school maths teacher who writes bilingual poetry in English and Russian in his spare time. He is also raising a three-year-old daughter and speaks about the challenges the little girl, who is currently Russian-dominant, has encountered on American playgrounds.

One of the first expert interviews on the show is with our very own Ingrid Piller, who speaks about the hallmarks of a good language program and how to identify a good school for bilingual and multilingual children.

A full list of the Bilingual Avenue podcasts can be found on itunes. Check them out! And see you on the avenue, as Marianna says.