Negotiating Family Language Practices: Polish Migrant Mothers’ Accounts of Preschool Children’s Agency in Norway

This article examines how Polish migrant mothers in Norway describe and interpret their children’s agency in shaping family language practices. Drawing on a language socialization perspective and relational model of child agency, the study analyses retrospective accounts from semi-structured interviews with six Polish migrant mothers. The study does not seek to reconstruct children’s intentions or interaction as it unfolded, but to examine the forms of agency mothers attribute to their children and the meanings they attach to these practices. Mothers describe children as choosing the interactional language depending on who they are addressing, correcting adults’ Norwegian pronunciation and use, bringing languages and routines home from ECEC, and participating in the regulation of family language boundaries. The study also shows that mothers receive and make sense of children’s growing linguistic agency in markedly different ways, attributing to it amusement, pride, worry, or discomfort. This interpretive and affective dimension is foregrounded through retrospective interview data and constitutes a central contribution of the study to research on child agency in family language policy.