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.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my supervisors, Åsa Palviainen and Karita Mård-Miettinen, for their guidance and valuable feedback during the preparation of this manuscript. The text was shaped into its final version thanks to the feedback by the two anonymous reviewers. I would also like to express my gratitude to Anna, Sofia, Maria and Oscar for sharing their time with me. Any shortcomings or mistakes are my own.
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