Abstract：Family language policy, as bottom-up language planning endeavours in relation to language use among family members, provides a lens to examine parental language practice. This study takes an ethnographic approach to explore the role of parents as mediators in intergenerational language transmission in thirteen families in Wuhan, China. Everyday communication data were collected from these families, including dinner table talks, homework tutoring interactions, and interactions in children’s playtime. Through comparative conversation analysis, the study shows that medium translation was a de facto parental language practice observed in these three-generation households where fangyan (dialect) and Putonghua (standard Chinese) were used for daily communication. Medium translation involved translation from fangyan to Putonghua or vice versa when parents engaged in family conversations between the grandparent generation and the grandchild generation. Although the grandparents played a key role in grandchild care and the grandchildren were exposed to fangyan since their births, few children could effectively speak fangyan. As the parents acted as “medium translators” between the grandparents and the grandchildren, language shift to Putonghua is ‘talked into being’ with the parents shielding their children from fangyan. This paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for fanyan transmission in family language planning in China’s sociolinguistic context.
汪卫红，张晓兰. 方言代际传承中的父母媒介转译行为[J]. 语言战略研究, 2019, 4(2): 12-22.
Wang Weihong and Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen. Parents as Medium Translators in the Intergenerational Transmission of Fangyan. , 2019, 4(2): 12-22.
