Negotiating family language policy: the interplay of Arabic and English in Manchester

Recent research on family language policy (FLP) has called for critical approaches that capture the interactional nature of language policy, negotiated among parents and children (Palviainen, 2020). This paper presents an ethnographic study on language practices, attitudes and policies in the context of migration, focusing on a Syrian family who arrived in Manchester (UK) as refugees in 2017. The article not only explores how family members manage their multi-layered language repertoires, including forms of English as well as standard and colloquial forms of Arabic, but also describes how linguistic resources are used to negotiate power positions within the family and in the wider diaspora. The article finds that, along with language users, their language ideologies, expectations and policies ‘migrate’ to the new setting, where they are subject to renegotiation. Drawing on notions of language policy as inseparable from practice (Spolsky, 2009), this paper proposes an understanding of FLP that emerges and operates within wider interactional regimes (Blommaert et al., 2005), taking into account explicit as well as implicit (practised) language ‘policies’, imagined hierarchies of repertoire resources (cf. Karatsareas, 2020), and interpersonal relations of power. Methodologically, long-term ethnographic observation and participation are combined through the researcher’s perspective as language learner (Abercrombie, 2020) with family members’ self-reports expressed during a ‘family focus group’ and photographs of ‘private’ linguistic landscapes. The paper has theoretical as well as methodological implications, addressing gaps in research on family language practices and policy.