Emerging plurilingualism - evolving reflexivity : Monoligual mothers' experiences of family plurilingualism in a monolingual society
Abstract
Although the Czech Republic is by no means a linguistically homogenous society and has in the recent years gone through a transition from an emigration to an immigration country (cf. Drbohlav, 2011), the dominant language ideology strongly builds upon monolingualism and reinforced linguistic homogeneity (Sloboda, 2010).
The purpose of this paper is to show how the specific local context influences the way individual metalanguage reflexivity evolves and changes throughout time, including the varying attitude towards the dominant monolingual ideology. Our paper departs from an exploratory study of intergenerational language transmission in plurilingual families settled in Prague.
The data analysed in the paper consist of narrative, biographically oriented interviews (Schütze, 1984) conducted with Czech mothers of families where multiple languages are used and transmitted. Our data suggest that the plurilingualism emerging in families, where mothers with predominantly monolingual background bring up plurilingual children, can be identified as one of the sites where dominant monolingual ideology is contested and possibly substituted by more differentiated metalanguage concepts.