Registers in family language policy? Self-evaluations of multilingual family registers in a longitudinal perspective

Abstract More often than not, multilingual families are met with expectations concerning their language use and policies, from society at large, from educational institutions and from their different communities. However, families also hold opinions about their own languages, their language use and how this corresponds to ideologies, aims and expectations. This contribution discusses language as situated practice along with language ideologies, as biographically shaped lived experience and also as an attempt to organize different scales of languages in use in the form of registers. In focus are thus self-evaluations of family registers , in particular the ways to repeat, reframe and rekey language experiences linked to family languages among parents and children. In this way, family language policies (FLP) and register are discussed as interacting and intersecting concepts from a longitudinal perspective. The relationship between FLP and registers is exemplified by drawing on empirical data from multilingual family interviews that took place in Austria over the course of 15 years and evolved around multimodal collaborative building tasks, including parents and over time also their children. Self-evaluations contribute to one aspect of register in particular, namely the awareness of speakers about register organization in society, inquiring what can be learned from small-scale self-evaluations about macro-level language policies and ideologies.