‘And since she was born, I’ve been like this’: biographical ecological transitions and family language policies from the perspective of Brazilian fathers living in Germany

Lecture given by Pr Silvia Melo-Pfeifer (Univ. Hambourg), as part of the doctoral seminar "Pratiques langagières - terrains, méthodes, théories" led by Isabelle Léglise (CNRS, SeDyL) and Valelia Muni Toke (IRD, SeDyL).
Jeunes gens au bord du fleuve - St Laurent du Maroni, Guyane
Pratiques langagières - St Laurent du Maroni, Guyane © L. Puren, 2005‎

In this presentation, I will show how Brazilian fathers living in Germany have experienced parenthood and how this biographical “ecological transition”, in the sense from Bronfenbrenner (1979), has influenced their involvement in defining family language policies. 

The corpus consists of three narrative interviews with three Brazilian fathers who have accumulated various experiences of mobility and currently live in Berlin in multilingual couples. The analysis of the results challenges the caregiving role generally attributed to mothers, highlights the agency of fathers in the transmission of the heritage language and unveils some stereotypes present in the cooperation between school and migrant fathers.

About the seminar

The aim of this seminar is to support M2 and PhD students interested in the use of language practices in contexts such as the family, school, work, health or justice, traversed by issues of power and inequality. An important place is given to relevant methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks (interactional sociolinguistics, critical sociolinguistics, sociology of language, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, political anthropology etc.) and to the circulation of knowledge from varied geographical areas and academic traditions in order to link the study of language practices with contemporary socio-anthropological and political issues.

With the support of the Inalco Doctoral School and UMR SeDyL.