Completion Seminar

You are warmly welcomed to join Marco Espinoza Alvarado at his PhD completion seminar: Intergenerational indigenous language transmission and family language policies: the case of three Pewenche families in south Chile.

Most studies of intergenerational language transmission (ILT) have been interested in finding correlations between a variety of sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, political and cultural factors and levels of ILT. There is a lack of studies that incorporate families' own views of their language dynamics and that seriously take into account their role as agents in determining their desired outcomes of ILT. In this talk, I will present key findings from my study of ILT in three Chedungun-Spanish bilingual Pewenche families in south Chile through the lens of the emerging field of Family Language Policy (FLP) (King et al., 2008). Data come from recordings of naturally occurring interactions in each family, interviews with parents, and participant observation.

The status of ILT for each family was determined in terms of predominant language use, number of active users of the indigenous language (Chedungun), and their age (Lewis, 2008). Then, following Spolsky's model (2004, 2007, 2009, 2012), the language policies in these families were analysed on the levels of parental language ideologies, intrafamilial language practices, and language management efforts. Results suggest that the different levels of ILT identified for each family can be closely related to each family’s own language policy on these three levels, and where the language ideological component appears to play a central role. A critical reformulation of the FLP framework is suggested, including the incorporation of notions such as "parental ethnotheories" (Fogle, 2013) and "chronotopes" (Catedral & Djiuraeva, 2018) in order to better grasp the micro and macro factors involved in FLP, the rationale behind parental language decisions, and how these translate into language practices and levels of ILT.

Date: Tuesday, July 24 2018
Time: 3.15 pm
Location: Room 407, Babel (Building 139)