Multilingual Families in a Digital Age (Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism)

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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.

Kristin Vold Lexander, PhD, is a researcher at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, and a former postdoctoral fellow at MultiLing Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan, University of Oslo. She has worked on digital interaction in Senegalese contexts since 2005 and has published a range of articles and book chapters on the subject.

Jannis Androutsopoulos, Dr. Phil., is Professor of German and Media Linguistics at Universität Hamburg, Germany, and from 2016 to 2023 was a research professor at MultiLing, University of Oslo. His research interests include the sociolinguistics of mediated communication and multilingualism online. He is editor of Polymedia in Interaction, Special Issue of Pragmatics and Society 12:5 (2021), and Digital language practices: media, awareness, pedagogy, Special Issue of Linguistics and Education 62 (2021).