English as a Lingua Franca in the Family

About FamiLingo

The project explored the role of English in families of non-native English-speaking parents with different L1s. For that purpose, data from introspective interviews, language portraits and dinner table conversations was collected. The families live in Europe (to date: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland). The languages spoken at dinner – other than English – are:
Afrikaans, Czech, Dutch, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Kyrgyz, Liechtenstein dialect, Lithuanian, Nepali, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish. How do the families communicate? Which roles do the first languages of the parents and the majority languages play in comparison to the English language? Which languages do the children speak, in what way, and which languages do they identify with? These and other questions revolving around the current debates in English as a lingua franca and multilingualism research were tackled within this project.