ABSTRACT

This book offers new insights into transnational family life in today’s digital age, exploring the media resources and language practices parents and children employ toward maintaining social relationships in digital interactions and constructing transnational family bonds and identities.

The book seeks to expand the boundaries of existing research on family multilingualism, in which digital communication has been little studied until now. Drawing on ethnographic studies of four families of Senegalese background in Norway, Lexander and Androutsopoulos develop an integrated approach which weaves together participants’ linguistic choices for situated interaction, the affordances of digital technologies, and the families’ language and media ideologies. The book explores such key themes as the integration of linguistic and media resources in family repertoires, creative practices of digital translanguaging, engagement in diaspora practices, and opportunities of digital communication for the development of children's heritage language skills.

With an innovative perspective on ‘doing family’ in the digital age, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in multilingualism, sociolinguistics, digital communication, language and communication, and language and media.

chapter 1|7 pages

Introduction

Doing family and language in a digital age

chapter 2|38 pages

Multilingual families online

Repertoires and practices

chapter 3|24 pages

Media and language use in multilingual families

An ethnographic study in Norway

chapter 4|21 pages

Visualising languages, modalities, and media

From language portraits to mediagrams

chapter 5|15 pages

Analysing mediagrams

Mediational choices in polymedia environments

chapter 6|29 pages

‘Doing family' online

Translocality, connectivity, and affection

chapter 8|34 pages

Heritage language repertoires

chapter 9|7 pages

Conclusions