In the terrain of multilingual family studies, the interaction between language and family seems to be always lying at the heart of socio- and applied linguists’ interests. However, due to the nebulous understanding of the ingrained complex processes in so-called ‘non-normative multilingual families’, a plethora of linguists have avoided this intriguing topic. This volume provides grist for this mill by delving into critical family language studies of the subtle kinship process in some historically marginalized families, namely, single parent, adoptive, and queer-identified families.
Serving as the foundation of this volume, chapter 1 provides a much-needed overview of the existing scholarly work closely bound up with this topic. Under the framework of language socialization and family discourse, the remaining thematic chapters further unveil the distinctive and complicated chemistry of different family configurations in detail.
Chapter 2 explicates the unique interactions in single-parent families, where the seemingly disadvantaged situation contributes to high frequencies of both father-children communications and children's involvement in family decisions. Following this topic, chapter 3 depicts minority language use on the way to school in building the harmony of a mother-daughter relationship, through which discussions about the mother's childhood are delicately connected with the daughter's current life. These two chapters help to explain why single parents are more successful in cultivating bilingualism in their children.
In chapter 4, the focal point transfers to the adoptive families. Different from the pervasive assumption that the unknown past of children could be detrimental, it is argued that parents who use language in an ingenious way can not only understand the experience and competence of their adoptive children but also make the best of them to form kinship. In chapter 5, however, inclusion and exclusion in the queer-identified families’ language use are investigated, in which linguistic identities are intertwined with sexualities and genders to create a sense of belonging.
Drawing on data in public spheres, chapter 6 analyses media reports on the Trump family to uncover how dominant family norms are constructed in monolingual nuclear families. It is noted that the careful wording of kinship terms in media reports that blast Trump's immigration policy erases the family's multilingualism, exerting great societal pressure on children. In addition, chapter 7 calls for more well-designed experiments that are ethical, inclusive, and contextualized.
In a nutshell, this book is well constructed by Lyn Wright with her perspicacious eyes and empathetic heart. It creatively combines frontier linguistic approaches and invaluable private and public data to show a bigger picture of how kinship and multilingualism are subtly constructed in diverse multilingual families. This groundbreaking study not only lends itself to the first-hand empirical pool of knowledge about multilingual families, but also opens a new window for researchers to detect the dynamics, and even the nuances, of language development at the societal level.
