RESUMO
Each multilingual transnational family is unique and thus deserves to be carefully studied in terms of its family language policy (FLP). Speaker-centered approaches can provide a deeper understanding of linguistic diversity in a multilingual setting. The studied Russian-Italian family is raising a multilingual boy (8:2) in Finland. The multilingual repertoire includes Russian, Italian, Finnish, English, and Hebrew. In this case-study, an ethnographic approach is used to explore the multilingual family repertoire by presenting their lived experiences and language practices. I discuss the FLP and child's active role in shaping the family's linguistic practices (child agency). The following methods were combined: semi-structured interviews, language background surveys, written diary entries, self-recordings of interactions in the family, and a language portrait that depicts the child's multilingual repertoire. The interviews and other recordings were transcribed manually. The following research questions guided the study: (1) How do the family members describe their FLP? (2) How does the FLP evolve through everyday interactions (language practices)? (3) How does the child exercise his agency in the family setting? The results reveal that the family's language practices follow predominantly an one person-one language (OPOL) strategy; consequently, the child speaks a different language with each parent. However, the analysis of the language ideologies reveals positive attitudes toward both multilingualism and all the languages in the family's repertoire, which explains the multilingual practices having multiplicity and unexpectedness. FLP is shaping the family language practices. Evidence of language hierarchy can be explained by a number of family-external and family-internal social factors.
RESUMO
We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present a comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs. This comparison shows a consistency in the orders of ratings across the 25 languages. The data were then analyzed (1) to ascertain how the demographic characteristics of the participants influenced AoA estimations and (2) to assess differences caused by the exact form of the target question (when did you learn vs. when do children learn this word); (3) to compare the ratings obtained in our study to those of previous studies; and (4) to assess the validity of our study by comparison with quasi-objective AoA norms derived from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). All 299 words were judged as being acquired early (mostly before the age of 6 years). AoA ratings were associated with the raters' social or language status, but not with the raters' age or education. Parents reported words as being learned earlier, and bilinguals reported learning them later. Estimations of the age at which children learn the words revealed significantly lower ratings of AoA. Finally, comparisons with previous AoA and MB-CDI norms support the validity of the present estimations. Our AoA ratings are available for research or other purposes.
