Abstract
This chapter presents a multilingual autoethnography that emerged in the process of doing a research project on heritage language maintenance in Canada. This autoethnography is about a culturally and linguistically mixed family where a young child is trying to navigate and intuitively use the right language with the right people at the right place, at the same time developing her insatiable desire to experiment with new words, sentences, and narratives. Using all three languages from her linguistic repertoire, this child illustrates some possibilities of translanguaging at a very young age. Besides significant and well-documented pedagogical benefits of translanguaging, the author's attempt in this chapter is also to present a new aspect of translanguaging as one of the possible heritage language maintenance strategies among immigrant families.
TopPrologue
This chapter presents a multilingual autoethnography that emerged in the process of doing a research project on heritage language maintenance in Canada1. In order to connect with the participants’ experiences and challenges on a personal level, the researcher was simultaneously keeping a personal journal noting a multilingual development of her own child. The main purpose of this project was to explore the strategies, challenges, and motivations for heritage language maintenance among immigrant families from Ukraine. Most of the case studies illustrated the complex intersection of three languages (Ukrainian, Russian, and English) in the participants’ personal narratives and parental experiences in a host country. Sharing the same cultural and linguistic background with her interviewees, the researcher decided to also engage in a self-reflective writing analyzing the complexities of her own daughter’s linguistic repertoire which was very much contextualized by her physical environment. The researcher’s personal autoethnography helped to contemplate a myriad of questions trying to untangle some convoluted narratives of the research participants. Journal writing offered the principal investigator a possibility to ruminate about her personal stories regarding everyday linguistic and parenting experiences. Unlike in narrative inquiry, the personal stories in this autoethnography have a more descriptive and interpretative function rather than intervention (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007).
The journal stories included in this chapter were often multilingual and fragmented, resembling sometimes diary entries or observations, and other times there were complicated ideas and thoughts loosely connected. Neumann (1997) emphasizes the importance of stories but acknowledges that they may not always emerge as complete stories:
Stories, to me, are the sense and meaning we derive from ourselves and our lives, for ourselves and for others. They appear less in the clear, hard, textually rendered lines of setting and event, action and plot, movement and sequence, plan and accomplishment, than in the often fragmented, even wordless expressions of experience and emotions. (p.109)
As a first-time mother, the researcher kept a journal to record all changes and milestones in her daughter’s vocabulary and speech development in order to track how three languages may potentially be accommodated at a very young age. This autoethnography is about a culturally and linguistically mixed family where a young child is trying to navigate and intuitively use the right language with the right people at the right place, at the same time developing her insatiable desire to experiment with new words, sentences, and narratives. Using all three languages from her linguistic repertoire, this child illustrates some possibilities of translanguaging at a very young age. Translanguaging is described as “the process of making meaning, shaping experiences, gaining understanding and knowledge through the use of two languages’’ (Baker, 2011, p. 288 as cited in Lewis et al., 2012, p. 641); however, in this chapter translanguaging transpires via means of three, not two, languages. The researcher noticed that children do indeed have this awareness of dealing with more than one language, but that they simply cannot name the language they are speaking. Consequently, while children may lack particular pragmatic awareness as to why they switch languages, this is not a sign of language loss or inadequate vocabulary, but simply a way of experimenting with the languages they are still learning.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Language Loss: A gradual process when a child can no longer use a first language proficiently or another language replaces the functions of a mother tongue.
Code-Switching: A term in linguistics that refers to abilities of multilingual individuals to alternate between languages depending on the context and their interlocutors.
Multilingualism: An ability to function in more than one language or proficiency in languages other than one’s first language.
Language Maintenance: Efforts to continue using one’s first language despite influences of the dominant/mainstream languages or other external, internal, and societal factors.
Immigrant Parents: Caregivers and parents who have to bring up their children in the country different from their place of origin.
Linguistic Repertoire: All languages that a person can use for communicative purposes even though the individual may not have full proficiency in each language.
First Language: A language that a child acquires naturally since birth (sometimes referred to as a “mother tongue” or a “native language”).
Multicultural Families: Families where parents do not belong to the same cultural and/or linguistic background.