‘Ikke snakke norsk?’ – Transnational adolescents and negotiations of family language policy explored through family interview

Abstract

Multilingual families and their language policies have attracted considerable attention in recent sociolinguistic work. Adding to this line of research, this article focuses on a case study of a transnational Polish family living in Norway and investigates the role adolescent children may play in the formation of family language policies. To this end the article analyses stances towards language practices at home taken in an interaction between the father and one of the adolescent daughters of the family. The article argues that the perspectives of adolescent children may be of crucial importance for the establishment of family language policies and thus deserve scholarly attention. Methodologically, the article draws attention to family interviews as a useful tool in generating sociolinguistic data for studies of Family Language Policies and advocates an interactional approach to interview data.