Academic Journal of Modern Philology

essays, Reviews & polemics

doi: 10.34616/ajmp.2023.20.31

ISSN 2299–7164

Vol. 20 (2023)

Special Issue

Open Access. Published by Committee for Philology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Wrocław Branch and College for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Wrocław. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Shahzaman Haque

PLIDAM, INALCO, Paris

shahzaman.haque@inalco.fr

ORCID: 0000-0002-9351-569X

Emotions and Family Language Policy: Some Case Studies of Immigrant Families from Europe

Abstract

This paper examines the family language policies in five case studies of immigrant families in Europe, focusing on the following emotions: Pride, Joy, Sadness and Fear. Families who immigrated from India and Laos to France, Sweden, Norway and Finland expressed their first and foremost emotions over the maintenance of their heritage languages in terms of language ideologies. The principal purpose of this paper is to explore critically the role of emotions of parents and of children regarding the maintenance or loss of the heritage language and the dominant position that the host language occupies in the framework of the family language policy. With an ethnographic approach, the principal tools were interviews, recording of conversations, participant observations and field notes, which yielded significant information on language attitudes, ideologies and practices toward the host-language and heritage language. Findings show that emotions of anxiety toward enfeeblement of the heritage language were common among parents, albeit not explicitly manifested in some families. Fear of losing the heritage language amounts to fear of losing linguistic and cultural identity over which some parents were frustrated, angry and helpless. Pride and joy were other affective displays, notably related to one’s command of the host languages or powerful languages like English.

Keywords: family language policy; Indian diaspora in Europe; socialisation of emotion; emotions in family language policy; Hmong family in France; case studies from France, Sweden, Norway and Finland; Urdu speakers in Europe

Introduction

Family has been considered an important domain for the preservation of multiple languages. Fishman (1965: 76) asserts that “multilingualism often begins in the family”. Joshua Fishman (1972) was among the pioneers who categorised “family” as an important domain1 for language use and maintenance, alongside four other domains, such as friendship, religion, education and work sphere. How can one have a sharp understanding of the role of language in society unless we inquire at micro-level, where the individual socialises at the meso-level (family as unit) in the language, at the infant stage2? Family is that linguistic factory where future individuals are trained to speak and are prepared mentally and ideologically for languages. Over the last few years, there has been an immense amount of work on family language policy, particularly in the context of immigration, in which the host language takes centre stage within the household and the heritage language is either relegated in favour of the state language or slowly loses its ground (Curdt-Christiansen and Huang 2020; King and Fogle 2016; Spolsky 2019).

Emotion has aroused interest among researchers in several disciplines, including sociology (Stets and Turner 2006), anthropology (Lutz 1982), psychology (Warren 1962), cognitive science (Scherer 1993), philosophy (Solomon 1993), linguistics (Argaman 2010) and so on, leading to different stances and approaches to understanding the dynamics of emotions perceived in humans. It would be a challenging task to define emotion in a way that encapsulates all disciplines under one umbrella, but what emotion embodies is its centrality on affect and motion and its three distinct characteristics – “physiological reactions, action tendencies and subjective experience” (Lazarus 1991)3. Its etymological origins lie in Old French, when, before the XVII century the verbs, mouvoir and émouvoir were used synonymously, but later on, émouvoir emerged as a real psychological verb (Zlatev, 2012)4. However, motion remained an inherent part of emotions. Sheets-Johnstone (2012: 45) drawing from the research studies by Darwin (1965), defines emotion as “affectively-charged kinetic forms of the tactile-kinesthetic body”, in which affects are the results of production through a process which involves neuromuscular sequence (Bull 1951: 79). From the empirical study viewpoint, and particularly in the family context, the notion of emotion and its significance can be grasped through the prism of “socialisation of emotion”, which Erickson and Cottingham (2014: 360) argue may serve as a key element. For them, the role of “socialisation of emotion” concerns the ability of “individuals … to understand their own and others’ emotions, develop values about which emotions are desirable and undesirable, and learn how to experience, express, and manage emotion in ways that reflect power-status relations (Kemper 1978)”. The socialisation of emotion could provide the conceptual theoretical framework within which to understand and advance the epistemology of the impact and significance of emotion at the micro-level, family, where language choices, practices and inequalities are reproduced, expressed, influenced and shaped in the verbal repertoire of an individual. Families form the bedrock of the primary emotions of infants, which are later “transformed as agentive selves” (Mead 1934, cited by Erickson and Cottingham 2014: 360).

Although ample studies (Benesch 2017; Gkonou and Miller 2021, Richards 2020) have focused on the role of emotion in the field of language teaching and learning, it seems that the interplay of emotion with language under the lens of family language policy (FLP) has been marginalised. Curdt-Christiansen and Huang (2020) name emotion as one of the factors influencing family language policy, and they emphasise maintenance of the heritage language “for strengthening the emotional ties between family members”, citing De Houwer (1999, 2015), Okita (2002) and Pavlenko (2004). Emotion, considered as an intrinsic part of human nature, may have bearings on language ideology, language management and language practices; the three components of family language policy (Spolsky 2004, 2009). Emotion can bring forth many interesting epistemic contributions in the domain of family language policy. Sociologists Erickson and Cottingham (2014: 359) underlined the importance of family as an “ideal context for pursuing multilevel interdisciplinary research on emotion”. Recent studies on emotions and multilingualism in family language policy (Sevinç and Mirvahedi, 2022) have explored the critical role of emotions in the context of multilingual parenting and studied emotions as social constructs (see Wang 2022). Drawing on the understanding of emotions proposed by Ahmed (2004: 10), “it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects, that surfaces and boundaries are made”, and the notion of linguistic repertoire showing affective dimensions in the language practices expressed by Busch (2012, 2017), Gomes (2022) claims that emotions provide a theoretical framework for his study on parent-child interaction in two Brazilian-Norwegian families in Norway. Accordingly, Sevinç (2020) focuses also on negative emotions, such as anxiety, fear, frustration, anger, regret and shame, having consequences for multilingual language practices within the family.

This study aims to understand the emotions of the parents, on the one hand, considering their heritage language and the tussle to maintain it in the household in the face of the hegemony of the host language, and on the other hand, the emotions of children, who are under constant pressure to perform in both the language of the host and the heritage language. I will present reflections from my fieldwork conducted on immigrant families from different backgrounds, such as Indians and Hmong in Europe.

Literature Review and Theoretical Conceptualisations

The central thesis of this paper lies in the theoretical framework conceptualised by Spolsky’s (2004, 2009, 2019) tripartite components based on core empirical research: language practices, language ideology and language management. Spolsky has proposed studying the phenomenon of language maintenance and loss under the purview of ideological beliefs in the domicile, zooming in especially on the role of parents and grandparents. The shifting of dynamics from the national language policy to the family language policy has opened new vistas for empirical investigations in a domain less known to researchers.

Some researchers (Piller 2018; Quérol 2011; Tuominen 1999; Wilson 2020) have emphasised the role of child agency in the family language policy, which can be grasped through “a psychoanalytic approach”, as proposed by Tannenbaum (2012), implying emotional ramifications of the FLP. In a similar vein, Luykx (2005: 1407) argued regretfully that, in language socialisation research, children were classed as “recipients of socialisation, rather than its agents”. Some important studies (Kopeliovich 2010; Tuominen 1999; Piller 2018) on FLP have shown that the parents feel helpless and give away in the face of a child’s persistence in sole interest in the school language and refusal to learn or speak the parents’ language. It is the children who decide the home language of the families or resist the heritage language. Overall, the language policies imposed by the authorities have a tremendous influence on individuals and, though these decisions are based also on emotions, keeping state language ideologies in mind, the family is equally affected.

Heretofore, many scattered studies have been undertaken on the role of emotions in the field of language teaching (Benesch 2012; Hargreaves 2000; Zembylas 2005) or on language learning (MacIntyre and Gregersen 2012), but there has been an increasing interest in recent years on the role of emotions within the family language policy framework (Curdt-Christiansen and Huang 2020; Sevinç 2020; Tang and Calafto 2022). Tannenbaum (2012) was one of very few researchers who showed concern for emotional and affective displays exploiting the theoretical framework of the family language policy. She mentioned the works of Smolicz (1981, 1992), who took an interest in emotion as a central tool in the maintenance of language in the context of immigrant families in Australia. She also cited the doctoral thesis of Guardado (2008) who explored the importance of the Spanish language in Canadian Hispanic families, in which Spanish was linked with positive emotions, stories and songs for its transmission and for preserving the cultural identity. The dyadic parent-child relationship can also be explored through the prism of emotional factors (see Pavlenko 2004 for affective stances in multilingual families); I argue that, in some cases, as has been observed in this study, family members run a covert FLP (see Caldas 2012), either bowing to the host-country’s national language policy and preferring the host language, or resisting such a policy within the home arena. In some studies, home languages are considered to have strong emotional and cultural connections and values (Curdt-Christiansen 2016; May 2003). Ivanova (2019) examined the effects of positive “cognitive, emotional and affective predispositions” for successful transmission of the heritage language in her study on Russian-speaking immigrants in Salamanca (Spain). However, some families have narrow margins within which to save their heritage language, they begin to construct the identity of their children in a new manner, with new languages replacing the traditional home language.

Emotions in family language policy – Five case studies

If language as a means of communication, in any of its forms (see particularly Hymes 1972: 39–40), has always been an important tool since the birth of human civilisation, it may be argued that emotion holds the same primordial place in human nature, and it is intrinsically interrelated with language, as are related “subjects and objects, as well as people and things” (see Kockelman, 2015: 154). Is emotion a factor in the decision-making related to language choices and practices? It may be underlined that the decision-making process on the choice of languages to maintain within the household and the languages in which to educate the children is grounded objectively in weighing the pros and cons, particularly in a diasporic setting for immigrant families, where they have few or no choice about opting for the host language. However, as Blommaert (2017: 6) puts it, “we are very subjective when we believe we are objective, and can get emotional when we discuss «the facts»”; the subjectivity of parents in relation to their heritage languages may temper the omnipresence of the host language in all domains and a less friendly approach or weak infrastructural support for the heritage language. It is undoubtedly true that nation-state mono- approach ideologies based on language or religion or culture might not give enough space for other local indigenous languages, and particularly immigrant languages, to prosper or grow to the same level as the official language.

Many studies (Barkhuizen 2006; Pavlenko 2004) have attested to the affective attachment to their own heritage language in the diaspora, but fewer have also shown the child’s affection in the later stages of adolescence. Though the child may not manifest the same degree of emotional attachment as his or her parents, there might be an overwhelming emotion of empathy toward the parental language which has been suppressed in an unfriendly language environment. Interviews from first-generation immigrants in this study point to the ambiguous positioning of the heritage language and over-valued importance of the host language.

Methodology

This paper is based on five case studies (2006–2019, see Haque 2012, 2019), which adopted a qualitative ethnographical approach in the fieldwork in order to collect and analyse the data. A total of five families were included, as follows: 4 families from India, who immigrated to France, Sweden, Norway and Finland, and 1 family from Laos, immigrated to France (see Table 1 hereafter). Participants were recruited on the criteria that the families must be originally from the North of India and Laos and speak one of the languages which I speak as a researcher (Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, English and French), and with the condition that the family would give me shelter in their home so that I could record conversations and observe the language practices at different intervals of time during the day. In addition, they must have a minimum of one child, without any condition on the genders of the parents.

Participants

I focussed, in particular, on households in the category of middle-class, assuming that the parents were educated with higher degrees from a university, such as Master’s level5. Only one family, originating from Laos, had parents with little or no schooling, whereas all the parents in the other families were highly qualified and the fathers had Master’s degrees. In all the five families, though the mothers did not have professional backgrounds, most of them possessed Bachelor’s degrees, while the mother in Norway and the one of Laos origin attended school till the age of 18. The age of the parents ranged between 35–55 (lowest for mothers, highest for fathers) and the children interviewed were 24 years (Laos origin in France), 20 years (Indian origin in Sweden), 16 and 14 years (Indian origin in France) and 16 years (Indian origin in Norway).

Table 1. Language practices and social-biographical variables

Number and Country of Origin

Country of Immigration and year of arrival for parents

Family composition

Languages

Social Background

India

France

Father – 1982

Mother – 1990

Father, mother and two children (1 girl and 1 boy)

Parents: First language Haryanvi, fluent in Hindi. Working knowledge of English & French.

Children: First language Haryanvi and French. Fluent in French and English.

Father – Businessman

Mother – English Teacher

Both children enrolled in school (French and English as medium of instruction).

India

Sweden

Father –

1982

Mother – 1986

Father, mother and four children (3 girls and 1 boy)

Parents: First language Punjabi, fluent in Hindi. Working knowledge of Swedish.

Children: First language Swedish. Learnt English and Spanish in school. Very little knowledge of Punjabi.

Both Parents run a grocery shop.

All children were enrolled in school (Swedish as medium of instruction).

India

Norway

Father – 1996

Mother – 1996

Father, mother and four children (2 boys and 2 girls)

Parents: First language Urdu and Hindi. Working knowledge of English and Norwegian.

Children: First language reported Urdu. Fluent in Norwegian and English.

Father – engineer

Mother – housewife

All children were enrolled in school (Norwegian as medium of instruction, daycare was in English).

India

Finland

Father – 2001

Mother – 2001

Father, mother and two children (2 boys)

Parents: First language Urdu. Working knowledge of English. Mother fluent in Finnish.

Children: First language Urdu. Fluent in English and Finnish.

Father – engineer

Mother – school assistant

Both children were enrolled in school, (English medium of instruction for elder, Finnish for the younger).

Laos

France

Father – 1981

Mother – 1981

Father, mother and seven children (2 boys and 5 girls)

Parents: First language Hmong. Working knowledge of French.

Children: First language French. Notional in Hmong.

Father – retired.

Mother – housewife.

Eldest child, a young man, works in a private telephone company; all other children were enrolled in school with French as medium of instruction.

Data Collection Procedure

Prior to undertaking the investigations with the families, ethical clearance was obtained from each family member who was interviewed, particularly from the parents and children who participated in the study, complying with the guidelines issued by The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity6. Likewise, participants were clearly informed of the option of withdrawing from the research at any stage without having to give any reason.

After receiving ethical approval from the parents of the participating families, all of them were first sent a questionnaire, which was followed by semi-structured interviews. Parents were asked to fill up the questionnaire on the part of their children if they were not willing to respond themselves. None of the measurement tools for reliability, such as the coefficients alpha and omega, were used, mainly because the study focused on in-depth fieldwork, where ethnographic tools were employed, such as triangulation, participant observation and long-conversation recording of family members. Furthermore, several “mundane small-talks7” over tea and meal-time with family members dissipate some misconceptions about the data and increase the chances of its authenticity. Field notes, on their part, served as another important tool to note down many crucial elements of language presence within the household which were not reported in the questionnaire or during interviews or recorded conversations. All these different tools, producing different sets of data, show characteristics of coherent results. Emotions expressed by family members are interpreted as an integrative analysis, because different sets of data show the same emotions conceived either as positive or negative.

Interpreting Specific Emotions in the Five Case Studies

Under the dynamics of migration and mobility, languages in the verbal repertoire of the first generation are subjected to a change taking into account of the host country, and additionally, if there is a second-generation, further complications may occur to determine which language one has to maintain and which one to forego or for which new language, one has to make space in the family sphere. All these processes might witness considerable emotional reactions from each of the family members. I propose here to underpin some of the emotional aspects through which one may apprehend ramifications for the family language policy. The four emotions Pride, Joy, Sadness and Fear were the ones whose presence was most commonly sensed during interactions and interviews with the family members in the five case studies analysed in this article. It may be noted that these mentioned emotions may also play a pivotal role in maintaining the language or revitalization of language after its potential loss in a migratory context.

In all the cases mentioned hereafter, the notion of pride is interpreted on the basis of core empirical techniques of ethnography, which “formulates research problems and conceptually defines its objects” (Matera and Biscaldi 2021: 2). I argue that such interpretations are based on a thorough comparison of different sets of data, identifying each emotion as authentic.

Some Emotions Identified in the Case Studies

I intend to analyse primarily some of the emotions which could be regarded as central elements in the matter of language policies within the family, which may overlap with language acquisition, maintenance and practices. Overall, it may also be reflected as a token for the language decisions made within the family arena. Pride may signify, on the one hand, the maintenance of the heritage language, but also linguistic integration in the host country. Citing the landmark work of Cooley (1902) and Scheff (1988), Turner (2014: 189) emphasises that “those who are successful at garnering resources will generally experience quiet pride (…) and they will likely avoid guilt because they have met moral mandates of being successful in securing key resources”. Joy underlines the positive emotion in practising a language which may not necessarily be the parents’ language, but it may offer high satisfaction related to success in achieving career goals. As for Sadness and Fear, these may encapsulate the emotion of loss of the heritage language leading to the creation of fissures between the family members or rejection in the host society over not commanding a particular language.

(a) Pride

Ross & Stracke (2016) acknowledge pride as a positive self-perception. In the context of language practices, pride may be identified as one of the hallmarks of the achievement of mastery of the desired or target language at some competency level. From the viewpoint of language practices within family settings in a diaspora context, the concept of pride may lie in the maintenance of the heritage language and how it has shaped or constructed or accompanied a certain historic cultural identity of the speakers from previous generations.

The notion of pride was intertwined with the English language for most of the Indian immigrants settled in Europe on whom the fieldwork was conducted. English occupies a significant place in India, being the joint official language of the Union of India (Article 343.3(a), The Constitution of India8). Pride, as argued by Heller & Duchêne (2012: 4), is the notion which has crafted the idea of building the modern nation-state and “constructing homogeneity and boundaries, bringing some people into citizenship through language learning, and excluding others”. English became a prestigious language, and the only language elevated to the detriment of Indian languages. Learning or knowing English imbued the emotions of prestige, value and pride in India, and this emotion seems to have a discernible influence in the global world. It is, therefore, important to note that English is an important staple in many households under the FLP of Indian parents. Their mobility to non-English speaking EU states like France, Sweden, Norway and Finland (in my case studies, see Haque 2011a; 2011b; 2012) has not changed their perception of English in the foreign lands, but on the contrary, it has grown manifold because they find that English has a particular special role in these countries as well which gives them an edge over the local citizens and it has the ability to promote upward mobility in India if they ever return.

The Indian immigrant family in Finland took pride in transmitting English to their two sons as part of FLP, focusing on their careers in the long run. Moreover, both of these children were initially enrolled in an English-medium school in Helsinki. Likewise, in Norway, the Indian immigrant family sent their children to an English daycare centre before they were enrolled in a Norwegian-medium school. It was important for the family heads to build a solid foundational base in English for their five children during the first few years. Both fathers, from Helsinki and Trondheim, were the sole breadwinners of the family and both had English as their only professional language. All these families manifested a sense of pride, not as an explicit token which I could sense through interviews or observations, but with an emotional satisfaction from knowing English and tying their FLP in line with English, making it the central language of the verbal repertoire of their children. English was associated with the needs of the global market. Most noteworthy, their pride was linked with the prestigious language, like English in the case of these families, or with the host language like French (for Indian immigrants in France). The family in Sweden, too, showed immense pride in speaking Swedish:

For the Swedish language, they should speak it better than the locals. If my children pick up the phone, the locals must not think that they are in conversation with children of immigrants.

The father told me that he was proud that their children speak such perfect Swedish that no one could guess on the telephone if they were children of an immigrant. His main concern was that their children should not have any traces of Punjabi influence in their Swedish accent9. The competency in Swedish language of their children, and their knowledge of English and Spanish further enhanced their pride by knowing powerful, prestigious global languages.

However, there is also an emotion of loss in the case of immigration, recalled by Tannenbaum and Berkovich (2015: 290). This sense of loss, or “real losses” in the words of the authors, pertain to loss of “one’s significant nation and culture, loss of an internal sense of harmony, […] and quite often, loss of one’s mother tongue”. All these major upheavals in the lives of parents might have consequences for language choices and maintenance with respect to the second-generation. We may argue that pride associated with competencies in prestigious and host languages might compensate for the loss, but the manifestation of loss would be with different emotional aspects, like sadness, grief, sorrow or slight revulsion.

Only two families, one settled in Norway (Indian origin) and the other settled in Chartres, North of France (Ethnic origin Hmong, from Laos) took immense pride in the maintenance of Urdu (Norway) and Hmong language (France) within the household. Though the Indian family in Norway took some pride in English language teaching and transmission to the second-generation, their pride was much higher in maintaining Urdu as the sole language of communication. Norway was my second fieldwork location after France and I had the impression that I was in a house in India when I noticed that no one was speaking in English or Norwegian. This might be the effect of my presence as an Urdu speaker but limiting principally to one language like Urdu in the home premises within the Norwegian society attests further that it was playing an important factor in consolidating the language practices of the family. When I told the eldest son, Rafid, that it seemed that I was in India watching everyone speaking in Urdu, he replied with great pride:

Oh, you have this impression! This is very important for me. It is true that, on the one hand, we don’t have so much relation with India, and on the other hand, we cannot have that relation any further.

The sense of pride was also for the revival of the heritage language, Hindi in the case of the Indian family in France. I have later cited this under the emotion, Joy. In a similar vein, thanks to the field notes, I saw twenty or more video-cassettes stacked under the cupboard, on which Devanagari was inscribed. These were religious videos of the Mahabharata, one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. When I asked the father of the family about the video-cassettes, he proudly mentioned them as an important marker of heritage which he had brought from India.

In the case of the Hmong-origin family in the North of France, the parents and the grand-parents had never gone back to Laos or to China since they came to France in the year 1981. However, the father took great pride in the maintenance of the Hmong language among some of its family members. It was spoken by the parents, by the grandmother, and by only the eldest son among seven children. The father emphasised that to preserve his culture and his heritage language in a foreign environment is a battle. This battle is fought on two fronts: first, from the external pressure of the society, where Hmong is not supported, and second, within the family, where most of his children no longer speak Hmong and are fluent in French. For the mother of the family, they do not “leave away” the language because it is the only way of connection with the past, of which Hmongs are known to be proud:

What is important that we do not lose our ancestors.

Shamanism appeared to be the perfect traditional practice for the parents as a recourse to preserve the Hmong language. The act of “soul-calling” or “shamanic trance” (mentioned by Lee (1986: 75) in the Hmong community in Australia, and the same pattern was found in France) or invoking gods is performed in Hmong, which had helped to preserve the language and disseminate it among them successfully. The FLP has partially worked, in particular for the eldest son, who embraced it willingly to inherit the lineage.

(b) Joy 

Joy could also be an indicator of the success of the FLP within a household. The families investigated expressed affective displays such as non-verbal gestures, like facial expressions or a gleam in eyes indicating happiness, particularly for the maintenance of the heritage language, or in the form of nostalgic joy when the parents’ mother tongue was the common language of all the family members. This was evident in the case of the Indian immigrant family settled in Sweden who had recourse to the grandmother invited to the parents’ house as another member to speak Punjabi in home. As long as the children were small, or under 5 years old, Punjabi was the common language of everyone. Both parents expressed their joy when they remembered how they used Punjabi at home for that period of time. With the enrolment of the children in school, Swedish started to invade the home space, and with the return of the grandmother to India, Swedish completely replaced Punjabi.

Likewise, other families, like the one in France, also had this emotion of joy when they remembered that Haryanvi was the common language of the parents with the eldest child until she was 5 years old. The same child, who switched completely to French during her school, learnt Hindi when she was enrolled in an Indian school at the age of 16. During my fieldwork, which started in 2006 before her school admission in India, I was often told about the rapid progress the girl was making in Hindi, according to her father. Once, he outpoured his mixed emotion of pride, relief and joy with this sentence:

Today, my daughter has written an essay in Hindi. I am very proud of her. (translated from Hindi)10

The decision by the father and mother to send both their children (girl, 16 years and boy, 13 years) to India in order to transmit their linguistic and cultural heritage through school and environment, where the kindred microsystem had not succeeded, finally achieved the desired goal.

In other two cases, the family in Finland and the family in Norway, religious language transmission was successfully carried out. Qur’anic Arabic was taught to all the children in order to perform the basic Islamic rites, such as offering prayers or occasionally reading the holy Qur’an. The families in Finland and Norway had some kind of gratification that their children could perform their religious duties in Arabic. Though this positive emotion was not expressed by the parents in both cases, as it seemed a given for a practicing family that their children should know the religious language, there is another dimension which is not clear at first sight. It happens that, by performing the religious duties, the children’s involvement is observed in the interactions or togetherness with other people of the same linguistic community. It can be understood through the prism of rituals, which Wulf (2017: 40) described as “social practices in which people learn how to create familial stagings and performances that make other people and themselves happy”. There is an emotion of shared identity and values to which the second generation can aspire with their parents, whether they are in the host country or in their country of origin.

(c) Sadness and Fear

The emotional aspects of sadness, sorrow and fear indicate the loss or deprivation of the parental heritage language, which would have a huge detrimental effect on the shaping of the identity of the second generation. One may feel that sadness and fear has crept slowly over the loss of their heritage language in many immigrant families, owing to the great space the host language occupied. In her useful case study on four families, Samata (2014) illustrates the example of Julietta, a second-generation woman in her sixties whose father migrated from Italy to England in 1940s. Emotions of regret and sadness were expressed by Julietta during her interview for her lack of fluency in Italian (parental’s first language, PL1) and for the reason that Italian was suppressed as part of home language policy in order to avoid any impediment in education in English. This also accords with our observations in the case of the present study where mostly the education in host languages proved to be a major hindrance for the transmission of PL1 leading to the emotions of sadness and fear either among the parents or in the children or in the both. The case of the Indian-origin family in Finland is an exemplar. Both parents had different views on the potential loss of Urdu from the verbal repertoire of their children in competition with English. A strong emotional reaction was triggered by the mother when she felt that her husband was not supportive:

Mother:

As you make him work in English language, one must work for his improvement in the mother tongue, otherwise it is a shame, it affects culture and identity.

Father:

But there will be no change in identity. Areeb will be Areeb.

Mother:

There will be lots of effects on their identity if they do not learn it.

Father:

They should learn only because if they return or come back (to India), they should not face any problem. (Translated from Urdu)

The mother pleaded in favour of Urdu with mixed emotions of sadness and fear that the loss of Urdu for her son, Areeb, and for the second son would have an effect on the culture and identity which she had imagined for her children. Her sadness seemed to have burgeoned, finding no support from her husband to maintain Urdu at home, and furthermore, a different view in which her husband draws a line between language and identity. It would also be important to note that the eldest son, Areeb, did not have a particular affection for Urdu at the age of 11 years old when he participated in the study. However, later when he was 23 years old (in 2018), it was found in another study that “Urdu had a significant impact on him as the basic creed of the Islamic faith” (Haque 2020: 417). Urdu turned out to develop positive emotions of pride and attachment with the country of origin and with the religion of his parents. Tannenbaum (2012: 61) mentioned that immigrant parents “who are typically members of minority groups, may experience stress, alienation, discrimination or inherent gaps with the majority group […]”. We find these features within this family expressed consciously by the mother and less by the father, who coped with the environment and did not show any remorse at language loss. The mother, on the other hand, later started learning Finnish out of the fear of alienation and discrimination from the society, and she enrolled her second child in a Finnish daycare centre. This enraged the grandmother of the child, creating an emotion of fear in her, as reported by the mother in the interview:

My mother-in-law was very upset when I broke the news to her that I had admitted our youngest child in a Finnish daycare. For her, the Finnish language would serve no purpose in his career, as it was uncertain how long we would stay in Finland. She feared also that learning Finnish would further alienate him from Urdu. (Translated from Urdu)

Previous studies have shown that the role of grandparents is important and they are involved in childrearing (Curdt-Christiansen 2013, 2016; Spolsky 2021). The grandmother in the case of the family in Finland was residing in India. She had little contact with her grandsons and she was conscious that, if Urdu was not spoken or taught to them, she might further lose contact with them. She expressed her displeasure over Finnish daycare enrolment in the context of her fear for the loss of the family’s heritage language. Although Urdu was maintained in the home, the children were finding themselves more comfortable in English and Finnish.

The Indian family in Norway spoke Urdu at home, as mentioned above, but the atmosphere seemed gloomy, with the constant fear that the mother tongue of the parents would wither away and be replaced by Norwegian. Although, as mentioned above, there was the emotion of satisfaction, pride and joy in maintaining Urdu in home, the mother would rationalise its importance as the crucial safeguard of preserving the heritage culture and religious affiliation. She cited numerous examples, along with her eldest son, in many Pakistani families settled in Norway, where with the erosion of the mother tongue, the family ties with religion and its cultural heritage were completely lost. She said:

If we forget our language and religion, there is nothing more left. (Translated from Urdu)

Among the second-generation children, the eldest child Jessica (20 years) in the Indian family settled in Sweden, expressed regret and sadness for not knowing Punjabi. A similar kind of result is exemplified in the work undertaken by Samata (2014) in which it is mentioned that the “participant in the research reported here typically began the interview by stating «I cannot speak (PL1)»”. Jessica said in the interview that lacking competency in Punjabi creates a linguistic barrier for her when she meets the family members of her parents or any North Indian person coming to their home:

We always blame our parents that they have not taught us Punjabi. I suppose that they didn’t care about whether we should speak it or not and they thought that we shouldn’t learn it. I feel alienated from the family of my parents.

Jessica blamed her parents for not doing enough so that she or her siblings learned Punjabi, but, on the other hand, the parents said that they tried to transmit Punjabi to their children when they were small by inviting their mothers to stay in Sweden, and by finding from their own network a Punjabi L1-speaking teacher for their children’s school, but these language management efforts did not yield any fruitful result. According to Curdt-Christiansen and Huang (2020: 182), “While parents may have an essential/emotional attitude to their home language and view it as an essential aspect of their identity, children may struggle to identify with their parents and find it difficult to understand their parents’ deep emotional need”. The dyadic relation between parents and children over the non-acquisition of the Punjabi language creates a slightly tense atmosphere in the home but all family members know that they are paying the price of living an exiled life and, although support for Mother Tongue Instruction in Sweden is strong, it “suffers from various implementation problems” (see Ganuza & Hedman 2019: 109).

Another case of sadness and longing was found in Ly (24 years), the eldest son of the Hmong family. Though he speaks Hmong, his verbal repertoire is marked with French and he lacks the desired skills in his parents’ language. Ly often converses with his grandmothers (both are alive) and with his parents and he regrets that, among his seven siblings, only one sister has shown some interest in Hmong, and none of the others speak a word of it. Ly started travelling to Laos and then to the United States to meet some of his father’s family members, not only to reconnect with them, but also to master the language and gain a deeper understanding of his own heritage. Ly, as a third-generation child took extreme steps in order to preserve the Hmong culture, sensing the fear that after the passing away of his parents and grandmothers, there would be no one in the family to bear the torch of the rich Hmong heritage.

Summary

Some implications can be drawn from the case studies presented here. The findings show that emotions of anxiety toward the loss of the heritage language were common among parents, albeit not explicitly manifested in some families. Fear of losing the heritage language amounts to fear of losing linguistic and cultural identity, including religious affiliations, leaving some parents frustrated, angry and helpless. The elder children in three families (Indian and Hmong) showed concern and regret and were sensible toward the risk of permanent or partial loss of the heritage language from their repertoire. However, Pride and Joy were other affective displays, notably related to the command of the host languages or powerful languages like English (Pride), and the command of and adequate competency in the home language (Joy), possibly in the form of nostalgia in some families where the home language had lost its place when the children were over 5 years old. In the matter of religious languages like Qur’anic Arabic, the joy and pride were simultaneously observed but they were not expressed explicitly. English has appeared as a solace or compensating factor for the heritage language among immigrant families of Indian origin; in all its forms and varieties, including local indigenous varieties in India, it has become a vector of cultural heritage.

The implications of socio-biographical variables in terms of the age, gender and background of individuals cannot be underestimated in the domain of family language policy. Luykx (2003: 26) considers gender as central element in the language socialisation. All the mothers in the families studied played an important role in maintaining the home language, with their children manifesting a close emotional attachment, whilst the fathers had a pragmatic approach, leaning toward the host languages or English for work purpose. It was not the languages per se but the name of languages, such as Hindi, Urdu, English, French, etc., which made varied impacts on the minds of the speakers in this study. If the heritage languages of the parents bring an emotion of closeness, nostalgia, pride and joy among the first-generation speakers, it would or may trigger anxiety, glumness, alienness or create a social fracture within the family for the second generation or young adolescents who would be inclined to learn languages of power, like English or the language of host country, like French, Norwegian or Swedish.

Conclusion

The emotional viewpoint appears not to have made yet an important epistemological contribution in the field of FLP. In her study, Pavlenko (2004) illustrated the importance of emotion in maintaining the language if strong emotions are expressed in L1 by the parents; the value of the language is considered as authentic. The findings of this paper on five case studies corroborate on the emotional aspect of preserving heritage language, expressed strongly in L1 through one or more features of Pride, Joy, Sadness and Fear; however, language maintenance and transmission did not work neither for the two families in France and one family in Sweden. Nevertheless, it worked in the case of two families in Norway and Finland whereas in the second family from Sweden, the child being an infant, I do not have the final result on the language transmission. Another important study on the role of anxiety in home language maintenance, by Sevinç (2020), shows intergenerational pressure, particularly from the grandfather, on the Turkish-Dutch bilingual third-generation adolescent. Likewise, anxiety was expressed in form of Sadness and Fear in the case of the family in Finland, where the risk of losing identity and cultural norms was feared by the mother for her son if he did not speak the L1. Negative emotions, anxiety and frustrations were evident in the general ambiance of the family in Norway; although Urdu was spoken at home, there was a fear that the heritage language could slip away from the children’s verbal repertoire. The four children were also not showing a good command over Urdu language, adding to the anxiety of the mother. In the case of the Hmong-origin family studied, there was a severe anxiety among parents over losing the “ancestors” (who are dead, though) reported by the mother, if their community does not speak the Hmong language. The L1 was successfully transmitted only to the eldest son among seven siblings, on whom the intergenerational pressure was enormous from grandmothers and parents, to keep the cultural tradition and shamanism alive and to be the torchbearer for the family. In the case of Canadian-Hispanic families, Guardado (2008) observed Spanish as a motivating factor for its transmission as L1 in terms of economic benefit. In contrast to this finding, the L1 was not linked with economic benefit in any of these five case studies. The motivating factor echoing in general emotions of Pride or Joy, as mentioned in this paper, was linked to the learning of English and the host languages, i.e., Swedish, French, Finnish or Norwegian.

The present study provides additional evidence with respect to previous studies (Curdt-Christiansen and Huang 2020; Guardado 2008; Pavlenko 2004; Sevinç 2020; Tang and Calafto 2022) that the emotion does play a crucial role in the family language policy. It appears also that the emotion was grounded behind every decision or ideological stance regarding a language, either heritage or host, on its role within the family domain. Emotions towards languages are regulated either at individual level, by members of the family, or collectively, by the society, but the meanings conveyed by the emotions in the ideology of the language may or may not converge. To promote the better understanding of parental needs in terms of language practices and maintenance, the importance of emotional aspects can thus help to create effective policies at the macro-level and provide fresh perspectives in the field of FLP scholarship.

A number of possible future studies regarding the implications of emotions and FLP would be worthwhile. It would be interesting to assess the cross-country comparative studies on immigrants along similar lines, but paying more attention to the interplay of emotions and multilingualism and its stakes, on the national discourses on multilingualism on the one hand, and on the marginal and subaltern discourses on the other hand. Likewise, there may be abundant room for further progress in determining the implications on heritage language from emotional viewpoint by drawing the notions of cultural shock theory by Oberg (1960) when individuals are exposed to a new culture, new feelings of anxiety, frustrations, confusion may occur encountering a different pattern of cultural norms. Another possible area of future research would be to investigate the emotional experiences of immigrants before their departures from their country of origin in order to grasp the linguistic attitudes and to make them address these through considerate macro policies so that the family language policies contribute positively to the maintenance of languages.

Disclosure Statement : The author reports that there are no competing interests to declare.

1 Spolsky (2019) termed it as “significant domain”. See also Spolsky (2021) where he devoted a whole chapter on the primary linguistic environment of the child entitled “The Family and the Home” (p. 16).

2 On family socialisation, see Bernstein and Henderston (1969: 1).

3 Van Kleef (2016: 4) observed that “countless definitions of emotion have been advanced, attesting to the difficulty of formulating one that is satisfactory to all …”. See also Montandon (1992), who points out the divergence and “battle of schools” among thinkers on emotion as a nugatory element because humans are considered “rational beings”.

4 As far as its philosophical origins are concerned under the European traditions, Aristotle used the term pathē in his text Nichomachean Ethics to signify emotions as the “«feelings accompanied by pleasure or pain», listing appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, love, hatred, longing, emulation, and pity as examples (1105b21)” (Schmitter 2021).

5 Robert Phillipson’s work mainly drew on the elite sections on English-speakers, as in Linguistic Imperialism (1992) or Linguistic Imperialism Continued (2009), by which I was inspired and which led me to take interest in the educated or qualified elements of the society.

6 https://www.allea.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ALLEA-European-Code-of-Conduct-for-Research-Integrity-2017.pdf.

7 See Hammersley and Atkinson (1983).

8 https://legislative.gov.in/sites/default/files/COI_1.pdf.

9 It has been likewise evidenced in another study on FLP where Mirvahedi (2020: 405) shows how Azerbaijani speaking parents in Iran “would not want their children to speak accented Persian as it may reveal their ethnic identity, stigmatised over the past decades […]”.

10 Unless otherwise indicated translations are those of the author.

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Received:

1/06/2023

Reviewed:

3/06/2023

Accepted:

7/07/2023