Abstract Employing ethnographic tool of inquiry, we explore Azerbaijani-speaking parents’ decisions on their own language practices and their children’s trajectories of language development in Ardebil where Azeri is the heritage language and Farsi enjoys official status. To this end, interview sessions up to 200 minutes were held with fourteen families from different socio-economic background. The criteria for the classification of the families were the geographical places of their residence in the city, occupation, and level of education. Interview questions revolved around the themes, namely, parents and children’s language knowledge and practices, literacy practices within families, attitudes towards the speakers of mainstream and heritage languages, the effect of media on language ideology and behavior, solidarity with minority language and identity, and parents’ prospective strategies to maintain Azerbaijani. The results suggest that on the one hand, in spite of the participants’ disparate socioeconomic background, they had a strong attachment to their heritage language, Farsi is value-laden, and Azerbaijani is the dominant language of the families and society. This, however, does not entail that family intra-communications occurs in vacuum as the invisible forces projected on the families by nationwide language policies oblige the families to conform to the mainstream education and official language policies (Curdt-Christiansen, 2013a). In this respect, families’, particularly mothers’ language practices and accordingly ideologies as well as management strategies are touched and worked for the upward social movement and economic advancement of the children. On the other hand, when social class is taken into account, inclination toward mother tongue increases as the social class rank with proletariat. This implies a relationship between parents’ education, social, and economic background and their surrendering to the mainstream government policies. Ad interim, children’s actual language practices fluctuate based on gender and the social situations; besides, they sometimes go counter to the predispositions hold by the parents (Fogle, 2012).
References
Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2013a). “Editorial: Family Language Policy: Realities and Continuities”. Language Policy, 13(1): 1-7.
Fogle, L. W. (2012). Second language socialization and learner agency: Adoptive family talk. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
