From language maintenance to bilingual parenting: Negotiating behavior and language choice at the dinner table in binational-bilingual families

This article contributes to the study of language maintenance as an everyday activity in binational-bilingual families. By embedding the question of language maintenance into a language socialization framework and adopting a conversation-analytic approach to language alternation, three excerpts of mealtime interactions in Russian–French speaking families are analyzed. Their analysis shows that in bilingual families situations focusing on the interactional definition and negotiation of children’s behavior simultaneously involve the negotiation of language choice. It reveals how parents in binational-bilingual families accomplish bilingual (language) socialization in daily practice while dealing with the complex task of combining educational goals with language maintenance.

Russian language maintenance through bedtime story reading?: Linguistic strategies and language negotiation in Russian-French speaking families in Switzerland

This article proposes an interactional approach to the question of Russian language maintenance through the activity of bedtime story-reading in Russian-French bilingual families in French speaking Switzerland. Reading stories appears to be a language maintenance strategy commonly employed by the Russian speaking parent. The ritual and recreational moment of story-reading therefore becomes an opportunity for language learning. Drawing upon a language socialization perspective, this paper proposes an interactional analysis of the language use in the activity of story-reading. It shows how the language choice of the participants may be requested, negotiated and challenged during the interaction. The analysis further informs us about the language choice pattern and the bilingual competences in these families. We will gain insight into (Russian) language maintenance as a daily social and linguistic practice.

Individual socialization or politocultural context? The cultural roots of volunteering in Switzerland

Volunteering rates in Switzerland vary substantially across language regions. In this article, we investigate the cultural roots of this variation by presenting and empirically testing two different conceptualizations of how linguistic culture is related to individual volunteering. Whereas the first perspective perceives the individual as belonging to a particular language community and its norms and values as crucial for individual volunteering, the other sees the linguistic culture mainly as an important context in which an individual lives and which therefore influences individual volunteering. Empirically, we base our analysis on new survey data from 60 Swiss communes and apply a Bayesian multi-level analysis in order to disentangle the linguistic group from contextual effects. Our analysis supports the view that cultural patterns of civic self-organization can indeed explain regional volunteering behaviour in Switzerland. Whereas the propensity to volunteer is generally highest in German-speaking Switzerland, our findings reveal that it is the group of French speakers that exhibits the highest propensity to volunteer when controlling for language region.