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Language ideologies and (im)moral images of personhood in multilingual family language planning

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Abstract

Scholars have demonstrated that small-scale relatively private family decisions about language are intertwined with parental language ideologies. Using data from the context of multilingual Central Asian families—including those living in Central Asia and those living abroad—this study employs socially situated analysis of discourse and narrative inquiry to show how parents invoke language ideologies in justifying their decisions about their children’s education and linguistic exposure. The notion of “chronotope” is used to demonstrate how parental ideologies are embedded in images of space, time and moral personhood. Focusing on these images, rather than only on language ideologies, allows an incorporation of the many social factors—both linguistic and non-linguistic—involved in bottom-up language planning, and facilitates increased attention to emic perspectives. This focus also illustrates how state discourses are internalized by participants through their understandings of morality relative to other issues such as language education.

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Notes

  1. Source: http://adilet.zan.kz/rus/docs/U1100000110/links. Accessed 12 September 2017.

  2. There are also mixed language schools where students can choose different tracks to determine the language in which they would be taught. In our data, our participants’ references to “Russian school”, “Kazakh school” and “Uyghur school” can be understood as the more prototypical understanding of schools which are taught in these languages.

  3. We have underlined words that were emphasized in conversation. If the conversation was not originally in English we have provided both the original text and the translation. Furthermore, in parentheses we have noted the main language of the interview.

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Acknowledgements

We express our gratitude to our study participants. This paper has benefited from Farzad Karimzad’s valuable feedback and conversations with Rakesh Batt.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 4080 Foreign Language Building, 707 S Mathews Avenue, MC-168, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    Lydia Catedral

  2. Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1025 W. Johnson St. Ofc 1282L, Madison, WI, 53706-1706, USA

    Madina Djuraeva

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  1. Lydia Catedral
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  2. Madina Djuraeva
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Correspondence to Lydia Catedral.

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Catedral, L., Djuraeva, M. Language ideologies and (im)moral images of personhood in multilingual family language planning. Lang Policy 17, 501–522 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-018-9455-9

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