‘Our family’ as discursive and biographical space: notes for a sociolinguistics of family

Abstract In this paper we aim to articulate an interdisciplinary research agenda for the study of multilingual families that draws upon and transcends existing theorisations in the fields of language socialisation and family language policy. We understand family as a discursive space, where members negotiate not only what counts as valid knowledge, that is, the language repertoires that matter to them, but also who they are, the social relations they establish, and how they want to be seen socially. Family knowledge is transmitted through everyday communicative practices, mostly rituals and shared family stories. This transmission entails a continual renegotiation and adjustment, according to the different life circumstances each family member is experiencing. We argue that the notion of discursive space enables a socio-historically situated understanding of family as a social space of both consensus and dissensus where members’ trajectories ultimately shape what and how knowledge is distributed. Methodologically, family as a discursive space is captured through the longitudinal/biographical ethnographic study of the situated idea of ‘our family’. This notion is mobilised by family members either to align or misalign themselves with what others aim to transmit. We illustrate how ‘our family’ is done and displayed by drawing on Clara’s case. Clara, a Catalan-speaking mother decides to raise her children in English. She engages in a set of family activities to expose her children to English from birth. Being an English-speaking family in a Catalan context becomes a family project in need of discursive normalisation, to which even the husband, who does not speak the language well, agrees. Our analysis brings together data collected from a virtual ethnography conducted during the pandemic. With this paper, we aim to contribute a new research programme to studies of multilingual families that places centre stage a thorough understanding of the notion of family, and how it is done and displayed.