By Silvia Nunez
Every multilingual family implements its own strategies and dynamics to include different languages in their daily life. Based on their ideology, attitudes, and experiences, members of each family decide when and how to use the resources included in their whole repertoire. Usually, these decisions emerge from the family language policy established at home.
There could be families more open to mixing languages, others that would avoid the use of some languages in specific contexts, and others that would try to follow closely the policies promoted by the larger society. But in the end, it is important to keep in mind that each family is trying to do their best to make meaning of their world. ( More about Language policy in the Family)
From my experience, as a Mexican woman living in Montreal and raising a trilingual family, I have noticed that some aspects of our family language policy have changed during the past year. First of all, our monolingual bias has moved towards a multilingual mindset in which we use three different languages in our daily lives. We try to use Spanish most of the time at home or to contact family members living abroad, we use English to communicate with friends or at school and work, and we use French to interact in society and accomplish daily routine tasks. As we use Spanish, English, and French every day, the boundaries between these languages are not clear anymore, and sometimes, expressions are being reshaped, and even new words are being created.
MY FAMILY’S NEW GLOSSARY
| New Word | Languages used | Meaning |
| Arretear | French (arret) and Spanish (“_ear” infinitive verb conjugation) | stop |
| Bisos | French (bisous) and Spanish (besos) | kisses |
| Grapear | English (wrap) and Spanish (“_ear” infinitive verb conjugation) | Wrap something |
| Includen | English (include) and Spanish (incluyen) | they include |
| Patientia | English (patience) and Spanish (paciencia) | patience |
| Turnear | English (turn) and Spanish (“_ear” infinitive verb conjugation) | turn the page. |
| Capa | English (cap) and Spanish (tapa) | bottle cap |
We are conscious about the creativity that we are using to reinvent the ways we communicate but, besides mixing languages, this new family language policy plan will also directly impact our children’s multilingual identities and therefore, as parents, we have the responsibility to understand where our language ideologies and attitudes are coming from to be aware of the messages that we are sending to our kids and the roles we are modeling for them. (Curdt-Christiansen, 2009). That’s a big task, isn’t it? Are there any suggestions that you could give to parents experiencing a similar situation? What would you, as educators, advice multilingual families that are establishing their family language policy?
Resources:
Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2009). Invisible and visible language planning: Ideological factors in the family language policy of Chinese immigrant families in Quebec. Language Policy, 8(4), 351– 375.
