Sally Boyd

Unity in Discourse, Diversity in Practice: The One Person One Language Policy in Bilingual Families

When parents with different first languages have a child, and want the child to become bilingual in both languages, many parents adopt the one person – one language (OPOL) strategy. This chapter uses nexus analysis (Scollon R, Scollon SW, Nexus analysis. Discourse and the emerging internet. Routledge, London, 2004) to carry out a discourse analysis of ways in which this strategy is motivated by parents and ways it is enacted in conversations between parents and children, in three Swedish-Finnish bilingual families with 3–4 year old children in Finland. We also look at how the children participate in the negotiation of family language policy. Parents were interviewed about their own language backgrounds and education and their explicit strategies of communication in the family. They were also asked to record family interactions. Interviews and interaction were transcribed for further analysis. The results of the nexus analysis show similar parental discourses indicating that the family language policy was a result of both explicit planning and non-planned practices. They described the OPOL strategy as a “natural” one to use to raise their children bilingually, although all of them were themselves raised in only one language; they were concerned by the dominance of the majority language (Finnish) in the surroundings and found it important to increase the amount of the minority language (Swedish) used around the child; and they all referred to personal experiences, lay theories as well as research to motivate their policies. The discussions of FLP showed that this policy was in constant flux and subject to minor re-negotiations. The analysis of the interaction showed that details of the FLP were furthermore mutually constructed and negotiated upon; the children had an important role in this process. The study shows that the one person – one language strategy can imply different practices, in different families and different contexts.

Communication and Community: Perspectives on Language Policy in Sweden and Australia since the Mid-1970s

In the interval from the mid-1970s and through the 1980s, Australia and Sweden developed quite progressive multicultural and multilingual policies.1 The purpose of this chapter is to outline some of the background for these progressive policies and to see how language policy in both countries has been formulated, carried out and subsequently changed since these policies were initiated. These developments will be viewed with several global changes as a backdrop. One is economic globalization, which has accelerated since the break-up of the Soviet Union and the East bloc beginning in 1989. Another important development is regionalization, such as (for Sweden) the expansion and strengthening of the European Union (EU), and (for Australia) greater economic interests in trade with regional partners in Asia. A third development which has some bearing on my discussion is the apparent weakening of the nation state and of nationalism as a viable political ideology (Billig, 1995; May, 2001; Oakes, 2001; Hegelund, 2002). My purpose is to see how these sweeping changes in global economics, politics and ideas have impacted the progressive language policy developed in Sweden and in Australia prior to the acceleration of these changes during the 1990s and after. My aim is to look not only at official, explicit policy, but also to take a critical look at how different groups in each society think and write about language and language diversity as well.

Language Maintenance and Language Shift among Four Immigrant Minorities in the Nordic Region: A Re-evaluation of Fishman's Theory of Diglossia and Bilingualism?

In his (1972) book, The Sociology of Language , Joshua Fishman presents his often-cited typology of language contact situations in the form of a four-cell table: + or − diglossia and + or − bilingualism. Although criticism has been made of this typology and particularly of the predictions based on it, in this paper we operationalize Fishmans concepts of diglossia and bilingualism as presented in this book. We then examine results from a comparative study of language contact among four immigrant minorities in the Nordic region – North Americans, Finns, Turks and Vietnamese. Each of these groups was studied in at least two locations in the region, making a total of nine informant groups. By comparing the results for the generations, it is possible to see if there is evidence to support Fishmans predictions in the cases studied. The relatively stable levels of bilingualism found among the Americans and the Turks are not predicted by Fishmans typology, at least as we have operationalized it. The “stability” would seem to result more from the way these minorities have been received by the host societies than from the pattern of language use within the groups.

Children’s ongoing and relational negotiation of informed assent in child-researcher, child-child, and child-parent interaction

Contemporary considerations of childhood research ethics recognize children’s competence and agency, their rights to be informed about research and their capabilities to negotiate participation. There is also a recognition of children’s assent as ongoing and formed in the relationship with the researcher. Drawing on two different data sets, we investigate information and assent as they appear in child–researcher, child–child and child–parent interactions. We argue for the need to pay attention to participants’ own meaning-making with regard to informed assent, and show how the presence or non-presence of the researcher in data collection may affect information and assent.

A tale of two cities (and one vowel): Sociolinguistic variation in Swedish

Previous studies of language contact in multilingual urban neighborhoods in Europe claim the emergence of new varieties spoken by immigrant-background youth. This paper examines the sociolinguistic conditioning of variation in allophones of Swedish /e:/ of young people of immigrant and nonimmigrant background in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Although speaker background and sex condition the variation, their effects differ in each city. In Stockholm there are no significant social differences and the allophonic difference appears to have been neutralized. Gothenburg speakers are divided into three groups, based on speaker origin and sex, each of which orients toward different norms. Our conclusions appeal to dialectal diffusion and the desire to mark ethnic identity in a diverse sociolinguistic context. These results demonstrate that not only language contact but also dialect change should be considered together when investigating language variation in modern-day cities.

Young children as language policy-makers : studies of interaction in preschools in Finland and Sweden

Young children as language policy-makers : studies of interaction in preschools in Finland and Sweden

Children’s agency in creating and maintaining language policy in practice in two “language profile” preschools in Sweden

Abstract This paper presents results from an ethnographic study of language policy as it is enacted in everyday interaction in two language profile preschools in Sweden with explicit monolingual language policies: English and Finnish, respectively. However, in both preschools, children are free to choose language or code alternate. The study shows how children through their interactive choices create and modify language policy-in-practice. We analyze extracts from typical free play interactions in each setting. We show how children use code alternation as a contextualization cue in both settings, but with somewhat different interactional consequences. Children in both preschools tend to follow the lead of the preceding speaker’s language choice. Code alternation is also a means to manage conversational roles, for example, to show alignment. While the staff give priority to the profile language, the children show through their interaction that skills in both the preschool’s profile language and in Swedish are valuable.

Adult monolingual policy becomes children’s bilingual practice: code-alternation among children and staff in an English-medium preschool in Sweden

ABSTRACT Parents, teachers and institutions often attempt to implement monolingual policies in bilingual settings, believing that they thereby facilitate children’s bilingual development. Children, however, often have their own communicative agendas. In this study, we investigate how the twofold language policy of an English-medium preschool in Sweden is put into practice in everyday interaction. The results show that children (aged 3–4) develop a broader range of code alternation practices than the staff uses in their interaction with the children. The paper analyses several examples of spontaneous interaction either between staff and children, or among children playing with each other in the preschool. We show how the preschool’s English language profile in practice becomes a bilingual policy, which encourages children not only to acquire English and Swedish in the preschool, but also to learn different ways to manage their bilingualism in the school context.