Language practices in Swedish-English families

Abstract: This dissertation examines the family language practices of Swedish-English families using an interdisciplinary and mixed-method approach. The principal aim is to empirically document what these practices are, as well as how practices interact with various ideological, conceptual, and contextual factors.The dissertation is composed of four empirical studies and a comprehensive summary with seven chapters. In order to engage with the complex, multidimensional nature of bilingual family language practices, the empirical studies adopt four different theoretical and methodological frameworks. Study I uses a large-scale quantitative approach to investigate the connection between declared family language practices and macro societal factors. Study II adopts a conversation analytic approach to examine the local sequential context of family language practices. Study III uses a rhizomatic discourse analytic approach, which considers how family language practices can be conceptualised as an assemblage of semiotic resources, objects, space, and time. Finally, Study IV focuses on the affective and psychological dimensions of language practices by adopting an interpretative phenomenological approach that explores participants’ thoughts, feelings, and their lived experiences with language.The chapters of the comprehensive summary discuss the four empirical studies in relation to an expanded theoretical framework and in relation to each other. Although the epistemological and theoretical perspectives adopted in the four studies are different, they all consider how language practices are fundamentally situated in the local context of occurrence. Each study illuminates a portion of this local context, which, when triangulated, leads to a richer understanding of language practices than would be obtained with a single approach alone. In addition, the findings emphasise and exemplify how the context-sensitive dimensions of agency, identity, and emotion are inherently connected to language practices in bilingual families.