Agency through conversational alignment in transnational families: shaping family language policy

In this paper I analyse agency through conversational alignment within trilingual transnational families living between the Antioch region in southern Turkey, where the eldest members were born, and France or Germany, where they migrated and where the members of the youngest generation were born. Focusing on language practices across three generations, based on conversational analysis of multilingual corpora recorded during ethnographic fieldwork, I explore agency within family language policy. The language repertoires of the members of these families include resources in Arabic, Turkish and the national languages of the country where they live (mostly French or German). In this transnational context, participants present varied profiles and asymmetrical language resources in their different languages. The analyses of their intergenerational conversations show the use of all languages, even the heritage language Arabic, by the youngest participants, encouraged by mutual alignments of language and of choice of varieties between grandparents and grandchildren.