IMS talk: “Transnational migration and multilingual families in the 21st century: Policies and practices” by Elizabeth Lanza
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Elizabeth Lanza, Professor Emerita of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway, and Founder and Past Director of the Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan (MultiLing), a Center of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Norway gave a talk on “Transnational migration and multilingual families in the 21st century: Policies and practices” for IMS on Georgetown campus on Tuesday November 8th, 2022.
Description: With increased migration in recent times, raising children with more than one language has become more and more common as people cross borders, integrate into new cultural-linguistic landscapes, form intermarriages and partnerships, and create multilingual families. Contemporary globalization has, furthermore, brought about widespread social, cultural and linguistic changes with new communication technologies and changes in the political and economic landscape, all of which renders home language maintenance and development in multilingual families increasingly complex. Family language policy research draws on theoretical frameworks of language policy, language socialization, literacy studies and child language acquisition, with a focus on language ideologies, hierarchies, linguistic vitality and the impact this has on language development and use. Indeed a family’s language policy evolves through everyday practices with a variety of practices documented across various contexts. More recently, attention has been given to research methods that attend to meaning-making in interaction as well as the broader context, as families are anchored in sociopolitical, historical and economic realities. In my talk, I will present and discuss new directions in the study of multilingual families in the 21st century, as demonstrated in the evolving field of family language policy.
Bio: Elizabeth (Liz) Lanza is Professor Emerita of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway, and Founder and Past Director of the Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan (MultiLing), a Center of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Norway. Her Ph.D. in Linguistics is from Georgetown University. Her Oxford University Press book, Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective, (1997/2004) was based on her doctoral dissertation. Her research addresses various issues of bilingualism and multilingualism; she has published extensively on family language policies and practices among transnational families, language socialization of bilingual children, identity in migrant narratives, language ideology, linguistic landscape, language policy, and research methodology. Her work has appeared in numerous international journals and edited volumes. Liz Lanza is an elected member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.