ABSTRACT
This chapter, accepting that Family Language Policy (FLP) is contextually determined, qualitatively reflects on discussions and interviews with African migrants in South Africa, considering the choices families make regarding the language resources they have and which to prioritize in various social situations. It discusses diverse migrant family language positions and practices against the background of overt and a covert national language policy which ostensibly protects multilingualism, yet privileges English, in the national education policy as well as in other public domains. Continuing along the critical trajectory other studies have undertaken, we consider a specific dynamic in the formation and maintenance of family structures, namely temporality, suggesting that time is not only a variable in family language planning but also a determinant of family structure and the resources – material, institutional and otherwise – that are available to families. We briefly consider what language planning and policy might mean in a contemporary world of enormous diversity and mobility, given that the basic framework for language planning on which FLP studies rest, emerged out of a much less complex context of diversity and human movement. Also, we elaborate on the construct of ‘time’ and temporality and its relevance to agency and choice in migrant families in often inherently chaotic, multiplex, intensely fluid and precarious life situations. This study introduces the notion of ‘vulnerability’, suggesting this has implications for planning and policy. Our chapter adds to the field by considering how the concept of FLP would be enacted and which critical features are pertinent in migrant families whose recent histories are ones of south-south migration.
