1.1 Motivation for the Research
I first became interested in attitudes towards languages other than English (henceforth LOTEs) in linguistically intermarried couples when an English language student asked me anxiously what language she should speak to her daughter. It was 2011 and I was working as an English language teacher at a university in Sydney after taking some time off to have my first child. Negotiating with my partner about our new roles and responsibilities as parents was at the top of my mind. My student, a model learner with a great attitude, was looking at me anxiously, wanting my opinion on her family’s language choices in raising their child. Her husband, she told me, was from the United Kingdom and they had met in Thailand, where she had run her own business. They married there and had a child. Their recent migration to Australia had also brought about an unexpected challenge to their ideas about the value of using their different first languages at home. In Thailand, where she had a large social network and was a successful businesswoman, her use of her first language, Thai, with her daughter was not an issue. However, in Sydney, that same linguistic practice had become the subject of disagreement with her monolingual English-speaking husband who wanted her to speak English.
I told her she was right to insist on speaking to her daughter in her preferred language and she seemed happy with my reply. However, the conversation stayed with me as it revealed a domain where different language beliefs and practices meet—the linguistically intermarried couple. Along with negotiations about whose turn it was to wash up or do bedtime, it seemed this couple had to also negotiate in which language bedtime happened. Although I was the child of a couple with different first languages myself, I do not recall such interactions from my childhood. My parents and grandparents spoke to me only in English; a language choice I—along with them—came to see as “natural” in Australia, even for a family such as mine which used to be characterised by multiple migrations and multilingualism. My mother’s family is Czech Jewish and my grandparents and their cousins spoke Czech, Slovak, German, Hungarian and probably many other European languages. My father’s family are Anglo-Australians of English, Irish and Scottish heritage. Yet despite my family’s rich linguistic diversity, only English was passed on to me and I cannot help but wonder how and why my family arrived at the decision to make English their sole family language and what kinds of negotiations and conflicts were involved in implementing that decision. I was intrigued by all the previously invisible aspects of language beliefs and choices behind linguistically intermarried couples and their families.
While developing my research proposal I worked as a research assistant on the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) Longitudinal Study, a three-year Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) funded study into the relationship between language training and settlement outcomes of newly arrived migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds. I found stories in the research which echoed the experience of my Thai student, such as the following:
Anne, from the Philippines, reported that her husband asked her to use English at all times in the house so that his children from a previous relationship who do not share her L1[first language] know what is going on, and she has become linguistically marginalised in the family as a result. (Yates et al. 2010)
Anne’s son, who used to speak to her in Tagalog, now only spoke to her in English and the authors of the study warn that “this is potentially a very distressing situation for a migrant, usually a mother, and for the family as a whole” (Yates et al. 2010). It seemed that motherhood in Australia presented an extra burden to these migrant women. But the issue of a difference in language skills was not only present for mothers. Another participant, Lucia, reported that:
…she felt that she in some way had ‘a reduced personality’, since she had to express herself through a language in which she was not fully proficient. She noticed that her partner spoke differently to her than to his friends and he had told her that he did not like to correct her language because he thought her mistakes were cute. (Yates et al. 2010)
Being in a linguistically intermarried couple in Australia seemed to amplify some of the gendered power relations which I was experiencing first-hand as a new mother. Moreover, there were stark differences in the ways each couple member saw language and language learning . The English-speaking background (henceforth ESB) partners seemed not to see the language challenges of their migrant partners as issues of language proficiency and language learning , rather they were seen as choices about ways of speaking which were particular to the individual. Why were language proficiency and learning so invisible to these partners and how much did the English-speaking background partners’ attitudes and expectations affect the migrant partners’ choices and decisions about language use? How did language negotiations work in these couples and how important was language as a site of contestation to them? In other words, going beyond language maintenance , what does language mean to these linguistically intermarried couples?
Having outlined the original inspiration for the research, this chapter will address some of the key background to the research and define key concepts in the book. The first section discusses why the linguistically intermarried couple is a relevant object for sociolinguistic study. The second section gives a brief outline of the history of the linguistic diversity in Australia as a result of migration. I then describe the current levels of linguistic diversity and their causes , moving to linguistic diversity in education and outlining the importance of the “monolingual mindset” (Clyne 2005) to understandings of language in this context. In the next section I show that the rate of linguistic intermarriage in Australia is increasing, using place of birth as a proxy for linguistic repertoire. Finally, I will outline the book as whole, previewing the conclusions found. This research is situated in multilingualism and migration studies. It deals with migrant language issues from a new perspective, that of a majority language speaker in a relationship with a bilingual minority language speaker. It engages with the idea of language difference being part of the challenge of migration and that how multilingual language practices are seen is relevant to how they are experienced by speakers.
1.2 Linguistic Intermarriage as an Object of Sociolinguistic Study
In the literature mixed-language couples are referred to in a number of ways, as intercultural, exogamous, cross-cultural, bilingual, intermarried, interracial, mixed or migrant marriages or marriages with foreign spouses (Pauwels 1984; Penny and Khoo 1996; Lim 2010; Luke and Luke 1999; Piller 2002; Gonçalves 2013; Heller and Lévy 1992). The term ...