Seeing from the North: a Critical Family Language Policy study of a peripheral European minority community

Family language policy research has been focused on migrants from the Global South, their linguistic resources and challenges in the Global North target countries. There has been less research on the countries of origin and of those staying behind. To fill this gap, we investigate a minority speaker community touched by intensive labour migration. The participants (n = 12) of this research were interviewed in Romanian-Hungarian bilingual villages in the Moldavian province of Romania. We investigate interviews with mothers through methods of interactional discourse analysis. The interviews include recurring narratives of language shift from Hungarian to Romanian and stories about migration as well as more recent narratives about participating in Hungarian language education. Our research questions are based on the Critical Family Language Policy framework: What is a family? what counts as a language? and how to define policy in this context? We conclude that the role and definition of family, the interpretations of what constitutes a language, and most significantly the role of community in discourses about language management are different from those typical in the Global North.