Hesitant versus confident family language policy: a case of two single-parent families in Finland

Abstract

Abstract During the past decade, the field of family language policy has broadened its scope and turned its attention to diverse family configurations in versatile sociolinguistic contexts. The current study contributes to this endeavor by focusing on two single-parent families who live in Finland and who strive to support Russian as a family language. Applying nexus analysis as an epistemological stance and as an analytical lens, the study takes an emic perspective on family language policy. Furthermore, it examines how family language policy is manifested and negotiated during mother–child play and what discourses shape it. The findings reveal two contrasting ways in which family language policy is manifested and negotiated in the families. Confident family language policy in one of the families is informed by the mother’s historical body (i.e., prior experience of raising children bilingually), while in the other family, discourse in place represented by divergent language ideologies plays a significant role in shaping family language policy and is connected with hesitant decisions about language use in the family.