Wednesday 21 May 2025: Dr Kaisa Pankakoski

Interdisciplinary Seminar: Wednesday 21 May 2025 (Exam period, Week 2) 1.10-2pm

Multilingual Family Language Policy in Wales and Finland
Dr Kaisa Pankakoski (Cardiff University)

Superdiversity (see Vertovec, 2007; Rock, 2017), migration, and globalisation have led to an increasing number of potentially multilingual children growing up worldwide. Many children born into transnational homes do not grow up speaking all their languages.

This seminar paper presents my PhD key findings. The sociolinguistic, multiple case study looks at 14 multilingual families’ ideologies, language strategies, and experiences. The case study children are growing up in two bilingual capital city areas of Finland and Wales (Helsinki and Cardiff) and speak a foreign language as well as a national minority (Swedish or Welsh) and majority language (Finnish or English).

The primary data consist of interviews with parents and children. Secondary data include observations, and online questionnaires.

The paper shows that parents were driven by several ideological motivations to pursue multilingual language transmission, and they used a variety of language strategies. Despite children feeling pride in their heritage and multilingual identities, all participants found some parts of multilingual upbringing difficult (see Müller et al., 2020; Gorter & Berardi-Wiltshire, 2025); particularly foreign language transmission was considered challenging and nearly impossible without the support of a local language community.

I am about to expand this research among my case study families. I will present my plans and ask for the audience’s view of the directions it could take.

References

Gorter, M., & Berardi-Wiltshire, A. 2025. Heritage Language Maintenance and family relationship dynamics: A children’s perspective. International Journal of Bilingualism, in press.

Müller, L.-M. et al. 2020. Bilingualism in the family and child well-being: A scoping review. International Journal of Bilingualism 24(5-6), pp. 1049-1070.

Rock, F. 2017. Shifting ground: exploring the backdrop to translating and interpreting. The Translator 23(2), pp. 217-236.

Vertovec, S. 2007. Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and racial studies 30(6), pp. 1024-1054.

This session will take place at 1.10pm in Room 3.58 of the John Percival Building at Cardiff University or can be accessed online using this link.