Translanguaging in the Family Context: Evidence from Cyprus, Sweden and Estonia

Extract 20. Situation: two siblings are working on their home assignments. A Russian-speaking grandmother has come to visit her daughter (their mother). She enters the girls' room.

Daughter 2: ara pane seda ldppu “DO NOT PUT THAT ENDING.” %com she means that a case ending chosen was wrong.

Daughter 1: Miks “WHY?”

Grandmother (entering): Ну, куколки мои, опять миксим “well, my dolls, we mix again” %com миксим is a new creation from Estonian miksima “TO MIX” and a Russian ending of the verb that tells us that it is the “we” form (first person plural).

Daughter 2: Ta grammatikat ei oska “SHE DOES NOT KNOW THE GRAMMAR.”

Daughter 1: Miks “WHY?”

Grandmother: Oska соска “[DOES NOT] KNOW nipple” %com word play with a bilingual rhyme.

Daughter 2 (starts to laugh): Соска ei oska “a nipple DOES NOT KNOW.”

Daughter 1 (explains to her grandmother): Она меня грамматике учит. Говорит, что я не умею -- ei oska -- а теперь ещё и соска... ise oled “She is teaching me grammar. She says that I do not know -- DO NOT KNOW -- and now also there is a nipple ... YOU YOURSELF ARE.”

Among the youngest members of a family, TL exists naturally and often compromise or in-between forms are used to increase the similarity between Russian and Estonian and maybe even to become some sort of a “family language”. Here we see that the grandmother used the word миксим “mix”, which is a new creation, where an Estonian stem and a Russian ending can be separated (if we still wish to rely on a monolingual yardstick for the analysis of bilingual grammar).

It is evident that the code-switching produced by participants in the study depended a lot on the speakers' metalinguistic capacities and increasing competence in both languages. Functions and patterns of code-switching might change over time but their current manifestation communicates the idea that TL might serve as actual messages or even the unmarked language of a family interaction. communication interlingual russian family

Conclusion

The aim of our paper was to describe and analyse the patterns of TL in the three Russian-speaking communities. This was a huge and challenging task, considering the diverse sociolinguistic situations and demographic compositions in Cyprus, Sweden and Estonia. Also, because of official language policy and regulations regarding minority languages, there is the impact of mass media and education and top-down attitudes towards societal and individual bilingualism, as well as bottom-up bilingual practices. Therefore, our results should be taken as strictly synchronic, representing a snapshot that does not reflect actual dynamics in TL processes.

Our results show both differences and similarities among Russian-speakers in the three countries, not only in their family language practices, but also in their attitudes towards the fluidity of languages, language repertoires and TL.

The Swedish data show that even though TL was a common practice in many families, it was still not always a fully acceptable strategy among the parents. The parents did not see it, in Garda's view (2009), as a choice of bilinguals, but were often still stuck in the language separation myth and saw language separation and balanced bilingualism as a necessity in order to be a real bilingual. Even though many parents wanted their children to separate their languages (Ringblom et al. 2018), the second generation (or young heritage speakers) were more relaxed about linguistic purism, seemed to see language as a means of communication and expressing their thoughts and ideas, used what seemed to be available to them at the moment, and did not think about the particular language (я говорю как хочу “I speak as I want” as 14-year-old J put it).

In Cyprus, TL seemed to be a frequent phenomenon among the Russian-speaking families, though some of the participants expressed a very strong negative view about code-switching and language mixing. A lot of participants had very good metalinguistic awareness and could control the implementation of TL for semantic and pragmatic reasons in particular contexts and situations. Others used TL subconsciously, just because that was the easiest way for them to communicate, especially under the pressure of time. TL could also be an expression of solidarity with the interlocutors of a specific social group or network.

As our paper demonstrates, in Russian-speaking families living outside Russia and a Russian-language environment, one may find a highly complex linguistic reality. When looking at the role of language dominance in the direction of the switch, in Sweden, Swedish, Russian and English were used by children who were educated in English; in Cyprus, this involved Greek (Cypriot Greek/Standard Modern Greek), English and Russian, while, in Estonia it was Estonian and Russian. New loans, slang words in particular, might be inserted from English, but these were often Estonianised in terms of their phonetic realisation (this is a general trend for Russian-speakers in Estonia; see Zabrodskaja, 2009).

There is no one single FLP, but rather a number of policies that individuals use to cope with the demands of the linguistic environment and sociolinguistic realities. Russian-speakers incorporate a wider range of language repertoires in their everyday lives. Sometimes, such language contacts generate power struggles and the language ideological dimension becomes a key terrain to explore how speakers feel about the need to effectively attain a degree of multilingualism. Multilingualism and TL are usually encouraged and parents often support them at home.

We demonstrated how FLP and child-directed TL can support, expand and enhance dynamic bilingualism/multilingualism, and reinforce and integrate Russian as a minority language in a wider context: societal and educational. It is our hope that our research will enrich sociolinguists' understanding of TL, which occurs so frequently in bilingual Russian-speaking families.

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