Introduction: Family as a racialized space

Family language policy (FLP) has come a long way since its emergence as a sub-field of language policy in the early 2000s (King & Fogle, 2017; Luykx, 2003). FLP has evolved from looking into families’ language ideologies and practices and their impact on bi/multilingual language acquisition in typically western heterosexual nuclear families to including diverse family configurations with different lived experiences in different geographical regions with their own specific sociopolitical realities (e.g. Fogle, 2020; Mirvahedi et al., 2021; Nofal & Seals, 2022; Tannenbaum & Peleg, 2020). Despite the diversification of FLP scholarship in recent years (Wright & Higgins, 2022) and theorizing the impact of existing home-external broader sociopolitical and economic factors on families’ language policies (Mirvahedi, 2021a, 2021b), the analysis of raciolinguistic experiences of families and their impact on cultural/national identity (trans)formation, and language ideologies and practices across generations in migrant families remain under-studied.

Against this backdrop, I adopt a phenomenological approach and apply the notion of historical body to shed light upon the first- and second-generation Afghan refugee families’ lived experiences in their South-North forced migration to Norway. While showing the biographical formation of the participants’ linguistic repertoire (Busch, 2017; Purkarthofer & Steien, 2019), I focus on how the issue of race weighs heavy on both parents and children prompting emotive reactions, and affecting their sense of who they are. I would argue that racial awareness and identity that children develop in their interaction with the host society ultimately engages parents in racial socialization at home, thus turning family into a racialized space in which families have to balance messages about race and identity that are received from individuals, media, institutions, and social network.

In what follows, I first present phenomenology and historical body as an underpinning approach of the research to understanding family members’ lived experiences of races and languages. While historical body has been used as one of the components of nexus analysis allowing the researcher to analyze the individual’s beliefs, social status, and the like (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), and embodiment scholarship has a long history in sociolinguistics (see Bucholtz & Hall, 2016), a deeper reading of Kitarō Nishida’s (1870–1945) conceptualization of historical body shows the significance of emotions and accumulation of experiences in one’s life in his phenomenological approach to examining experience. Historical body puts forward an agency-based model of bodily experiences, allowing us to yield a “historicized and embodied understanding of how discourses and socialization trajectories become part of social actors’ ways of being” (Beiler, 2022, p. 6), something that is of paramount significance when we are investigating forced South-North migration and raciolinguistic ideologies and experiences, such as Afghan refugees in Norway. I would argue that language ideologies are linked not only to different “ideas, values, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, myths, religious strictures, and all the other cultural “baggage” that speakers bring to their dealings with language from their culture” (Schiffman, 2006, p. 112), but also their historical body that carries embodied experiences of race/ism replete with various emotions into new social encounters (cf., Scollon & Scollon, 2004). This entails examining how such lived experiences of race/ism across generations lead to certain language practices and identity (trans)formation across generations. Through such an analysis, I seek to shed light on the complexities of studying language ideologies and practices as well as identity (trans)formation among refugee populations and their integration into the host society.

Phenomenology and embodiment

The lived body has been a major subject of theorization in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy that has tried to understand the embodied experience of the world. Among the philosophers, as Krueger (2008, p. 213) argues, the Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida’s insights into the nature of action and embodiment are substantial enough to call him a “philosopher of the body”. For Nishida, body gains its significance for two main reasons. Firstly, body is considered a union point where self and the world meet and co-constitute one another, allowing the body to assume the role of both an active subject and a passive object (Nishida, 1998). As subject, body enters and creates the world, while it passively opens up to the world letting the world enter back into itself (Krueger, 2008). As such, body is not merely a biological/physiological entity, but instead a relation to “the historical world”, in which the human becomes “a creative element in a creative world” (Nishida, 2012, p. 145) that is “made by making” (Nishida, 1998, p. 40). For Nishida, body is a material locus for history itself making it concrete through what he calls the ‘historical body’ mediating between consciousness and the world (McManaman Grosz, 2014).

The second important element in Nishida’s conceptualization of the agency-based model of the body concerns the fact that somatic affectivity is of paramount significance for understanding the nature of our worldly embeddedness. For Nishida, when the body “is entirely focused into one activity—when the self is one with its world” (Nishida, 1978, p. 227), our affective relatedness to the world flourishes, not through the intellect, but rather affectivity, the feeling, active body, that melds us to the world. Allowing us “to ‘feelingly’ negotiate our continually-changing world and the different interpersonal relationships that structure our communal existence” (Krueger, 2008, p. 228), the body’s affective tonalities reflect its central role in developing our sense of self. In Nishida’s words, such affectivity in bodily experiences of the world removes the “fundamental distinction between internal and external in [pure] experience,” and thus, “what makes an experience pure is its unity, not its kind” (Nishida, 1990, p. 7). The body consequently becomes a “rich complex of living narratives,” some of which the individuals create, many more of which are “authored by others,” the individuals “simply come to inhabit and live through” (Krueger, 2008, p. 228).

The application of phenomenological theorization of experience through notions such as historical body in understanding (refugee) migrants’ language ideologies and practices as well as their identity (trans)formation across generations finds its legitimacy here for a number of reasons. First, with its emphasis on affectivity, it can yield insights not only into how past, present, and future experiences and aspirations inseparably inform parents’ and children’s ideologies and practices, but also what emotions, feelings, and concerns are intertwined in such a life trajectory. While migration has shown to be a site in which a level of anxiety as well as other emotions can build up in relation to proficiency in heritage and societal languages (Sevinç, 2018, 2022; Sevinç & Mirvahedi, 2023), the origin, roots, causes, and the implication of such emotions for FLP in the home and society remain under-researched. Secondly, with a focus on embodied experiences of race/ism across generations in this paper, applying historical body within phenomenology as an analytical tool allows us to examine how migrant (refugee) families’ language ideologies and practices are intertwined with such embodied experiences of race/ism not only in their new place of residence but also across different times and spaces, and for both the parents and their children. In doing so, the present paper addresses a gap in FLP scholarship by highlighting every migrant family member’s embodied raciolinguistic experiences across times and spaces that are replete with affectivity and their impact on language ideologies and practices and identity (trans)formation across generations. This is, in particular, of great significance for forced migrants, as the magnitude of identity (trans)formation is more pronounced given the spatial, temporal, economic and cultural dislocation (Hack-Polay et al., 2021).

Research methodology

Context of the study

Norway, being one of the countries accepting refugees and asylum seekers, is currently home to 18,163 Afghans immigrants, a community that now has 5307 Norwegian-born children (Statistics Norway, 2022). In contrast to voluntary migrants who may move across borders to study, work, and live in another place, Afghans experience forced migration (Castles, 2003), for many of whom learning the language(s) spoken in the host society could be a matter of survival (Steien & Monsen, 2022). To address this in Norway, every newly-arrived refugee, such as the parents in this study, who is granted residence permit is entitled and obliged to attend the government’s special introductory program offering Norwegian language and social studies courses to prepare them for their new life in the country. Although these programs have been critiqued as a form of neoliberal governmentality (Deumert, 2022), they help the refugees to not only learn the Norwegian language and culture, but also, in some cases, they offer primary education for adults with no formal schooling, or with degrees that are not usually evaluated as meeting the level of education in the Scandinavian countries, or who lack official documentation of primary education from their country of origin or country of first asylum (see Steien & Monsen, 2022).

Participants

The participant families in this study including three couples with different life trajectories and their Norwegian-born children (see Table 1) belong to a large population of displaced Afghans who have had to seek refuge outside Afghanistan because of a decades-long, unending sociopolitical turmoil in the country (Afghanistan Justice Project, 2005; Gossman & Kouvo, 2013)—an arduous and tortuous journey that often begins with fleeing to neighboring countries such as Iran and Pakistan with a common language and religion. While the Hazaras who are typically Shiite Muslims and speak Farsi choose to go to Iran, Pashtuns, being Sunni Muslims and speaking Pashto, choose Pakistan as their first destination (I use Farsi in this paper to refer to the variety that the Hazaras speak as the participants used Farsi and Dari interchangeably; for further explanation, see Spooner (2012)). It is often the case that Afghans living in Iran and Pakistan either move to their next country such as Turkey, placed in another country by the UN, or move to another country through marriage and family reunion schemes in the host refugee-receiving countries.

Table 1 The participants’ profiles
Full size table

Family 1

Family 1 consisted of three members. The father, 35 years old, has been in Norway since 2003. Prior to his arrival in Norway, he spent about 2.6 years in Iran. He can speak Farsi, Norwegian, and some English. With a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, he now works as an engineer. His wife, 34 years of age, grew up in Pakistan, and moved to Norway in 2010 after their marriage in 2008 in Pakistan. Besides Farsi, Norwegian, and English, she also knows Urdu. With a bachelor’s degree, she is now working in a kindergarten. They have a 4.5-year-old son who has been attending kindergarten since he was 18 months old. Despite his immersion in a Norwegian-medium education, my observation and the analysis of the recordings suggests that he has developed just enough skills to understand Farsi and respond to parents, though his utterances are characterized by code-mixing and switching.

Family 2

Family 2 included four members—a 38-year-old father, a 34-year-old mother, and two children. The father had spent a year and half in Iran and Turkey before he arrived in Norway in 2004. He speaks Farsi, Norwegian, and some English. With only 5 years of primary education in Afghanistan, he works as a warehouse staff today. The mother grew up in Pakistan, and she had spent about 5 years in Iran where she received her high school diploma. She moved to Norway in 2011 right after their marriage in Iran in 2010. With a bachelor’s degree from a Norwegian university, she works as a medical lab staff. She knows Farsi, Urdu, Norwegian, and English. The family has a 6-year-old son, and a 5-months-old baby girl. While their son has been also to kindergarten since he was 2 years old, he can speak Farsi with the parents, though with constant switching to Norwegian.

Family 3

Unlike the two first families with young children, family 3 has three older children aged 8.5, 10, and 14. The father had been to Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Greece for different periods of time before he arrived in Norway in 2004. He is 46 years old and speaks Farsi, Norwegian, English, and some Pashto. With a master’s degree from a Norwegian institution, he works as an assistant in an office. The mother, 43 years old, arrived in Norway in 2001. Having been to Pakistan and Iran on her way to Norway, she also speaks Farsi, Norwegian, Pashto, and some English. With a bachelor’s degree from a Norwegian university, she is working as a government employee. Their three daughters are in school, and can speak Norwegian and English besides some Farsi.

Data collection

The data presented below come from a project investigating Afghan refugee families’ language policies and integration patterns in Norway. The data were collected through a qualitative inquiry which seeks to “see things as they are undertaken, experienced and narrated by people” (Heller et al., 2018, p. 9). Three families with their Norwegian-born children were recruited through a “friend of a friend” approach (Milroy, 1980, p. 47). The data included 10 hours of recordings of family interactions in each household, carried out by the parents, interviews with parents, and brief observations conducted by the researcher. The interviews were undertaken in Farsi/Persian as it was the common language between the researcher and the parents, while the parents were made sure that they could use other languages. This was the case in some instances where the parents used some Norwegian words, presented in bold below. The data were transcribed in Farsi by an Afghan research assistant in collaboration with the researcher to assure accuracy. Then, the transcriptions were translated into English by the researcher.

The present paper is based on the interviews that were carried out after the parents were done with recording the family interactions and sending them to the researcher, which helped design further questions about the families’ language policies. The interview questions revolved around the parents’ life trajectories since birth, linguistic repertoire, and their language ideologies and practices in their present life in Norway. After the interviews were transcribed, a thematic analysis was applied to identify, analyze, and report themes that “capture something important about the data in relation to the research question” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 82). The main findings that emerged from the data are presented here under three main themes, (a) Parents’ embodied identity in light of forced mobility; (b) The Second-generation’s embodied raciolinguistic experience; and (c) family language policy. The findings suggest a strong link between the parents’ own perception of their identity, which was strongly shaped by their forced mobility, and their ideal identity for their children, which in turn, influenced their language ideologies and practices.

Findings

Parents’ embodied identity in light of forced mobility

One important theme that readily emerged from the interviews concerned how the parents’ forced mobility and living in different places informed their perceptions of who they are (or are not), which in turn, shaped their ideal cultural identity of their Norwegian-born children. As shown in the parents’ remarks below, rather than having an essentialist view of identity linking their belonging to a fixed Afghan and/or Norwegian culture, with an unchanging nationality, ethnicity and worldviews (Zilliacus et al., 2017), the parents’ lived experience of forced mobility shapes their identity that is of an ambivalent and fluid nature.

figure a

F1: To be honest, we don’t know ourselves either, whether we are from Norway, Afghanistan, or where. Now, we have lived half of our life here, we have learned the culture here more, but I feel we do not know it as much as we should. I know Norwegian … I have no problem. But I do not know the culture related to this language. For example, these social codes between us and them are very different. I felt the same problem in our last visit to Afghanistan. We thought we knew everything there, but there you realize that you don’t know everything. It’s been fifteen years now since I left Afghanistan for Iran.

figure b

M1: For me, it is even more mixed. It is difficult to say what [who] I am. As we have been in Norway long and we have learned a lot, that is true. But we don’t know as much as we should. I do not know much about Afghanistan anymore. It was only two years ago I visited Afghanistan, and I leaned a little about how things are. In Pakistan, I did not feel that I was from Afghanistan because we were just doing Pakistani culture, but the language we had was saying that we were Afghan. There I felt that we, for example, have not known our culture much.

figure c

F1: This is what happens when you don’t have a country of your own.

These parents’ remarks which were similarly repeated by other parents point to how the families’ journeys through different countries and their final settlement in Norway over a decade ago without a regular visit to their homeland play an important role in informing their cultural identity. A war-stricken country which is not a secure homeland to return to makes it difficult for the families to identify strongly with Afghanistan. Although the nostalgic feelings of returning to homeland may not generally apply to diaspora communities in the contemporary globalized world (see Canagarajah & Silberstein, 2012), the impact of the existence, or lack, of a stable homeland one could regularly visit on transnational populations’ identification processes cannot be neglected. As the comments above show, because of having had to leave Afghanistan with no hope to return to, the parents have become alienated in their homeland.

The other remarks in the interviews suggest that the parents’ historical body filled with certain emotions also trickle in and ultimately affect their ideal view of their children’s identity. The mother from the third family, for example, wished that their children had a 100 percent sense of belonging to Norway so that the children could have an easier life.

M3: I think it is easier if they [children] consider themselves to be part of this society. It’s been 25 years since I left Afghanistan and I have never been back even once. Our kids were born here; they don’t know anything about its [Afghan] culture, and they don’t know much about the language. Because it is easy for them to think that this is my country and I relate to it, I have tilhørighet (sense of belonging). I think it is a little trist (sad) that you don’t feel you belong to a place where you were born. It is like a lost country, you are between two countries, where are you from? You can’t be an Afghan here, and you don’t know much about the Norwegian culture. I think the second generation has its own problems. If they go to Afghanistan, they will be foreigners, because they have neither the culture nor language of an Afghan child there. And they cannot be 100% Norwegian here either… We have accepted that we came here as grown-ups, we are the first generation. But it is painful for them too that they are the second generation. They were born here, they are from here, but they don’t have hundre prosent tilhørighet (100% sense of belonging).

F3: We try to make our children understand that this is your country. But you may be different from white Norwegians. But you are Norwegian with something added, and added value. The added value is that you have both this, and in addition to this, you also have another root. Our main view is that you belong to this country.

The mother in the third family here draws on her lived experience of being away from Afghanistan for 25 years, and admits the difficulties of being a first generation refugee. However, what seems to be difficult and sad for her to accept is why the children who are born in Norway cannot develop a 100% sense of belonging to Norway. The mother’s acknowledgement that their children cannot be Afghan because of their unfamiliarity with the language and culture of Afghanistan suggests that she understands, or at least wishes to view, identity as something that is socially constructed in relation to the world, across time and space, and with a glance at future possibilities (Darvin & Norton, 2015). She accordingly appeared to expect their children who were born in Norway to ‘become’ Norwegian much easier as they would know the language and social norms of a Norwegian life. However, while suggesting that forming and reforming identities are part of forced migrants’ struggle to ascertain belongingness, the mother’s use of ‘painful’ to describe their children’s experience of being a second generation implies that such process could be charged with certain emotions, disconcerting and painful. The mother’s expectation for their children to develop a 100% sense of belonging to the Norwegian society can be understood through what Hack-Polay et al. (2021, p. 5) call “psychological healing.” They argue that forced migrants may construct new identities as psychological healing to navigate new social spaces so that they can forge a future for themselves. In this case, the mother seems to have imagined such a scenario for their children, which does not readily materialize as the children grow up (see below).

The father similarly speaks of their attempt to inculcate a Norwegian identity in their children, despite the difference between them and the “white Norwegians”. While mentioning race here may seem out of the blue, the father’s awareness of the interplay between race, language, and identity can be found in his description of the embodied experience of race/ism and language in different places he has been, shedding light on how certain knowledge has become sedimented over time in light of his forced mobility.

F3: I think language is one the most important elements of social identity. When you have a common language, however badly you treat each other, you may not view it as a big deal because of that common language. I did not realize this until I fled outside Afghanistan. Perhaps some actions and treatment here may not be as racist or violent as it is sometimes in Iran, but because there are no common things such as language, culture, clothes, food, etc. we may consider such actions quite huge. I believe this is very important. In Iran, especially the Hazaras to which I belong, went to Iran after the war for two main reasons, language and religion. Language made it possible for them to find work without any training and communicate with people despite all the hardship and difficult circumstances. And religion, it was natural that they chose Iran as a holy land because of the 8th Imam’s shrine, for example. Many Afghans went to Iran. Pashtuns, Uzbeks and others who are Sunni Muslims went to Pakistan. Few of them went to Iran. Almost all the Hazaras went to Iran. But the problem was that the Hazaras with their Mongolian-looking faces were easily recognized as Afghans because of their faces but Pashtuns look like Iranians and they were not readily discriminated much unless they spoke. They were recognized then … This is very interesting that the Hazaras, on the one hand, felt close to Iran because of the common religion and language, but on the other hand, their faces caused difficulty for them.

Illustrating that racialized embodied experience exists even within the same ethnic groups (see also Curdt-Christiansen & Huang, 2021, for similar phenomena among Chinese migrants), this excerpt clearly shows how the father’s knowledge of the interplay between language, race/ism, and identity has been formed over time during his life and experiences in different countries. To him, a common language and cultural practices, such as what exists between Iranians and the Hazaras, play an important role in levitating the differences, and even when occasional racism takes place (see Christensen, 2016). As the parents carry over such a historical body to their new social encounters, slightest difficulties they experience in the Norwegian society may seem ‘huge’ due to the lack of a common language and cultural practices. With this awareness, the parents thus encourage their children to feel a strong sense of belonging to the Norwegian society.

The second-generation’s embodied experience

As noted above, the parents’ hope to have children with 100% sense of belonging to Norway is not realized. One main reason for this is the children’s embodied experiences that are quite different from their parents’. As someone born in Norway, they attend kindergartens and further education from an early age. While schools in migratory contexts are often considered and examined as a strong force in encouraging families to invest in the societal languages, the parents in this study did not discuss that as much. Instead, they focused on how schools become a site where their children become aware of their Afghan identities, something that they did not appear to be very appreciative of.

M3: I think as long as the children are young they identify with Norway. My younger daughter, when she was eight, I always told her to learn Dari when she was younger and she used to say, no you should learn our language [Norwegian]. She always said we are norske (Norwegian). But unfortunately, as they grow older, gradually they find that they are not the authentic (originally) Norwegian- ethnically. That is why they distance themselves from the culture. We do not want them to have cultural distance because ultimately this culture and language is easier for them to integrate into. They have integrated. Not that we integrate them. But unfortunately, now our oldest daughter is after knowing more about her culture. She says she is Afghan. She has grown up particularly sensitive; whenever she sees on TV that princesses are all white, she asks why they don’t look like us. Why isn’t their hair black? She says it is diskriminering (discriminatory) even here. We live in Norway. She understands that she is second generation. She has found her role and position as a second generation. All children born here are Norwegian until they start primary school. When they go to videregående (secondary school) or college, they become second generation and foreigners, for example, norske pakistaner (Norwegian Pakistanis) or Norwegian Turks. The society kategorisere (categorizes). It is difficult for them, I think.

M2: When we came here [this neighborhood], there was Corona in the last few years, so we did not feire (celebrate) the Eids, we did not tell him [the child] much about the Eids, as Turks or Pakistanis do. But then he would come home and ask when the Eid would be. He glede (looked forward to it). He brought those from barnehage (kindergarten). We did not tell him these things, we thought he would not understand, but he learned a lot in the kindergarten. And later, he asked about Muslim and Kristen (Christianity). The school had told him about these. One day he came home and said we are muslimer (Muslims), and we don’t eat that kind of kjøtt (meat).

F2: We met two Turk children the other day. I asked one of them, who did not look to be Turkish, she said she was from Turkey. She asked us where we were from, and my son said we were from Norway. She laughed, and then he said, no I am from Afghanistan.

These accounts provide further evidence to previous research findings on the dialogical character of identity showing that identity is not merely something that one may claim, but it is also dependent, at least to some extent, on how one’s identity is recognized and accepted by the larger society (Valentine & Sporton, 2009). Accordingly, as Taylor (1995, p. 34) argues, because of this dialogical interplay between “inwardly derived, personal, original identity” and society, such self-claimed identities do not enjoy this recognition “a priori”. Thus, attempts to gain such a recognition in exchange with the society can fail.

The excerpts here illustrate how the parents’ ideal for their children’s identity and total integration with the Norwegian society does not realize as the children come to observe and understand such an interplay. While the parents, as the first generation seeking refuge, accept the pain and suffering they have been through, they do not want that for their children. They consequently come to believe that their children being identified as Afghans would exacerbate the situation for them, and hence, they do not raise their children’s awareness of their Afghan roots (see also below). However, as the children grow up and start school, in interaction with other children as well as the institutional policies, they become aware of their Afghan identity, which includes not only racial differences, but also cultural and religious practices such as celebrating certain Eids related to Islam or not eating some types of meat. As seen above, young migrant children are very aware of such differences to the extent that when one non-Norwegian child (an Afghan boy here) claims to be Norwegian, he is faced with laughter implying surprise and disbelief. This, in return, led him to accept that he was from Afghanistan.

What is also of great importance here is the repeated use of “unfortunately” by the mother in discussing her daughter’s identification showing how upsetting the mother finds it to see their daughter experiencing such conflicts. Because language, identity and race, as noted above, are closely intertwined, such embodied, emotionally-charged experiences of race/ism, language and identity were found to affect family language policy with an implication for the acquisition of languages.

Family language policy

As I noted above, issues such as language in Afghan refugee families are complicated by their embodied experience and knowledge. The father’s remark in the first family sheds light on such complexity:

F1: This child was born in this country; he must be Norwegian and live like a regular Norwegian citizen. It doesn’t matter, if he knows an extra language from his parents, it is better. In case we have an Afghan relative in Afghanistan or other countries, he can establish a better communication. This (the child) would grow up like other children; he may drink, he may or may not fast, he may have a girlfriend, or not. He will live like the other children.

This remark by the father in the first family illustrates how the children’s different historical body including their birthplace and growing up in Norway coupled with the parents’ own history of dislocation presented above seem to ultimately affect the parent’s language ideologies. Rather than approaching language as an indispensable element of cultural identity (Smolicz, 1981) and taking a strict measure to make sure of their children’s learning Farsi, the parents aspire to see their children to be like Norwegian children in every aspect, which could open new opportunities for their children. In this sense, as Li Wei (2018, p. 605) puts it, such “imagination provides a site of hope and new beginnings”. Thus, the parents have a more relaxed approach to passing on their Afghan linguistic and cultural heritage to the children. Such new beginnings, however, may come at a cost in the form of shifting to the societal language at home and various types of emotions related to it.

F3: There was a time when we decided to speak only Farsi at home, but that’s easier until the children start kindergarten. When they enter kindergarten, their Norwegian skills expands… Gradually over time, the children’s Norwegian becomes strong. This takes place very slowly but steadily. Imagine, the walls of a house gets damp, it doesn’t suddenly lead to leakage, but over time. It is like that; suddenly a time comes when you feel Norwegian has become dominant at home in a way that if in the past children spoke Norwegian and I’d say ‘I don’t know Norwegian’, now if there is a serious discussion, and even if the children ask questions in Farsi, I answer in Norwegian.

M2: Some of the issues are our own fault. We did not speak Farsi. For example, when it comes to feelings, he does not understand them well in Farsi. If we express them in norsk (Norwegian), he understands better. If we say in Farsi ‘you look sad today’ he does not understand it much. When we say it in Farsi, he says ‘hva mener du?’ (what do you mean?)

Whether it is in indigenous, ethnic minority contexts or a migratory settings, schools and education in a language other than the home language has been known to be a major influence in language shift. Parents are either encouraged or find it necessary to speak the societal language at home to “ease their children's integration into school” (Spolsky, 2011, p. 153), or the language of school trickles into family through children (Mirvahedi & Cavallaro, 2020). In all the participant families in the study, children started kindergarten at an early age mostly because of the fact that both parents had to work, or they decided consciously to do so to ensure their children’s faster integration. Having been socialized in and through Norwegian in the kindergarten for several hours a day, my observation of the family recordings show that the children have been able to develop just enough proficiency to understand simple conversations in Farsi. Thus, when it comes to serious topics and/or to express and understand emotions and feelings, the children fail to communicate efficiently. In sum, in terms of FLP, the findings suggest that the parents’ language ideologies and practices are informed by different factors such as their own life trajectory and identities and having no hope to return to their home country (see also Revis, 2021) as well as their children’s continually-changing raciolinguistic identities. The outcome of such ideologies and practices in terms of language maintenance could be understood through Fishman’s (1991) three-stage model of language shift. The second generation is bilingual with the societal language being its dominant and commonly used language. To what extent the second generation with such proficiency in Farsi will be able to pass it on to the third generation remains to be studied in the future.

Discussion

We began this article on the premise that raciolinguistic experiences of migrants, especially refugees coming from the Global South, and their impact of language ideologies and practices of families should be systematically incorporated in our analysis of FLP. To do so, I have argued that the understandings of embodied experiences developed in phenomenological philosophy, such as Nishida’s notion of historical body, could be one way to examine how parents’ lived experiences inform their perception of who they are and what they would like for their children, and how that in turn, shapes their language ideologies and practices at home. This way, we can avoid approaching embodiment as what Flores and Rosa (2019, p. 147) call “a deceptive phenomenon rooted in a metaphysics of presence that positions bodies and their perceived practices as self-evident”, and rather, study embodiment as “phenomena constituted by historical formations of power.” Researching raciolinguistic ideologies in families from the Global South can particularly advance theoretical and methodological debates around multilingualism and (forced) migration, shedding light on “the intersectionality of the power dynamics across axes of social class, gender, and race” as well as how “discursive and material structures of inequality shape their everyday lives” (Lomeu Gomes & Lanza, 2022, p. 291). Furthermore, examining embodied experiences as such in relation to FLP highlights temporality in understanding parental agency, stressing that agency is “a temporally embedded process of social engagement” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 962), which is informed by the past, engagement with the here and now, and orientation to the future.

The data analyzed above yielded several findings. Firstly, we observed that the parents’ ethno-cultural identity has been under strong influence of forced dislocation from a war-stricken country with no hope to return to, and their embodied experience and knowledge of language and race/ism shaped en route to Norway. Rather than having a strong feeling of attachment to their country of origin, the parents who have had to flee to other countries at an early age expressed a sense of ambivalence with respect to their cultural/national identity. This could be explained by looking into their homeland, Afghanistan, which has been stricken by war and different sociopolitical turmoil for decades. As a result, on the one hand, the country has not had well-established modern nation-state apparatus, such as education system, to instill a strong national and cultural identity (see Althusser, 1969). On the other hand, the participants’ forced mobility and short stays in various countries before they were placed by the UN in Norway or come to Norway through family reunion program (through marriage) with no hope and/or desire to return to Afghanistan seem to have contributed to their in-flux identity. While any moving across borders may bring about changes in one’s identification (Young et al., 2015), compared to other groups such as Iranian families in the UK who come from a more stable state with established institutions (Gharibi & Mirvahedi, 2021), such ambiguous identities among these Afghan parents differ to a great extent.

Unlike the Persian-speaking mothers from Iran in the UK who resisted their children’s British identification, another finding of the study hinted at how the Afghan parents in this study hoped that their Norwegian-born children would feel 100% Norwegian. The reason for the parents’ desire for Afghan children to ‘become’ Norwegian lies in their wish that their children would not experience similar painful experiences that they, as the first generation, have had on their journey to get to Norway. As most parents, if not all, wishing the best for their children, parenting in these Afghan families is also entangled with emotions and concerns, wanting their children to have a complete sense of belonging to Norway to avoid all the pain and difficulty, suggesting the significance of affectivity in examining historical body in our analysis.

As shown above, such emotionally-charged parenting and identifications with their implications for FLP were rooted in the parents’ and children's different raciolinguistic experiences in different time–space configurations. The parents’ concerns and worries for their children living and experiencing race/ism, language, and identity in a different timespace configuration, i.e. chronotope, yielded raciolinguistic chronotope perspectives (Rosa, 2016), particularly drawing our attention to “raciolinguistic chronotope of anxiety” (Flores et al., 2018, p. 16). While the parents hoped their Norwegian-born children with their acquisition of Norwegian from an early age would help them easily integrate into the society, their wish inevitably did not realize. As the children grow up and enter school in Norway, a chronotope very different from that of their parents, their embodied self-identification, and perceptions of who they are develop in interaction with the Norwegian society.

Similar to Norwegian-born children of immigrants in Friberg (2021), racial awareness and identification were, in particular, found to be a major realization that Afghan children develop. Having surveyed 7627 students of 16–17 years of age, of which 2901 had an immigration background, Friberg (2021) found that although the students from African, Middle Eastern, and Asian backgrounds identified more strongly as Norwegian than those of European origin, they generally felt that others perceive them as being a far less Norwegian than young people with European immigration origin. According to Friberg (2021, p. 21), this “asymmetrical relationship between self-identity and ascription” is rooted in ethno-racial and religious affiliations of non-European origin who look different, and are thus, readily recognized as non-Norwegian—something that migrant students are fully aware of.

Family being a confluence of discourses suggesting its porosity against home-external influences (Mirvahedi & Macalister, 2017), the findings showed how the children’s racial awareness and identity outside the home ultimately trickled into the families leading the parents to engage in racial socialization of their children. Similar to Black families in the US (Minniear & Soliz, 2019), the Afghan families in this study had to also create narratives that could explain to their children the various racial issues, or even microaggressions, they may encounter in their lives in Norway characterized as a white-majority society. While the parents and children as passive objects find themselves inhabiting spaces authored by others, they as active subjects need to feelingly negotiate their continually-changing worlds (Krueger, 2008). This emotionally-charged negotiation that takes the form of racial socializations in the home inevitably turns family into a racialized space, highlighting the importance of racial literacy for parents, in particular, for those coming from the Global South. These findings here hint at how racial inequality could be organized spatially, the investigation of which could reveal fresh insights about race that we cannot know by other means (see Lukate, 2022; Neely & Samura, 2011).

Concluding remarks

With growing global inequality, shifts in socioeconomic and political power, as well as climate change and resource scarcity in different parts of the world, human migration and mobility is expected to continue in the future, posing important political, legal, socio-economic, and societal challenges for all involved. Suggesting that the lived experiences of migration and human mobility deserve more scholarly attention, the implications of the findings of this study can be considered significant for both migrant families and those involved in the governance of migration in the host societies.

For families and FLP scholars, the findings suggest that racial socialization and racial identity will be part of the family talk at some point in migrant children’s upbringing—especially those coming from the Global South. This would require a certain level of racial literacy on the part of parents so that they can better facilitate their children’s appreciation of their identities, e.g., the hyphenated ones prescribed by the society. Making sense of who one is will certainly have implications for not only investing in certain languages, but also how well one could feel included and be integrated in a society. Because these experiences are often new to transnational populations, programs designed to facilitate migrants’ and refugees’ integration can include training and education about such racial literacies.

For policymakers, dealing with linguistic and cultural diversity and raciolinguistic ideologies are complex and complicated by what Gal (2018, p. 66) calls “a cacophony of voices” that, among others, include “official declarations of governments, legal and legislative strictures, census categorizations,” and the like. While democratic societies such as Norway are encouraged to celebrate multiculturalism and multilingualism brought about by migration, this inevitably takes place through institutional policies and practices that involve giving recognition to migrant groups (Taylor, 1995), and consequently naming and labelling them, which is never neutral, bringing about certain positioning and stances (Erdoğan-Öztürka & Sağın-Şimşek, 2023). Thus, second generation migrant children are called ‘Norwegian-born’ children, and, as reported by the parents in this study, given a hyphenated identity. What deems necessary to be added to such a cacophony of voices is voices of the first- and second-generation migrants to express their opinions, feelings and emotions about their daily lived experiences. This will add yet another layer of complexity to the ever-challenging questions of how societies can celebrate cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity, and how policies can be inclusive to the extent that they facilitate all migrants’ integration into the society. More in-depth research is thus required to better understand what inclusivity, integration, and identities mean to different parties in the society, such as migrant parents, children, teachers, and policymakers, and how this may affect families’ language policies at home.