How Love Through Language Forges Family Bonds

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Valentine’s Day has truly become a celebration of love across the world. While love is indeed in the air, languages are also intertwined in Cupid’s bow and arrow. The relationship between language and emotions is a complex and intriguing one, as research has shown.

Scholars have highlighted the challenges and rewards that intercultural couples face. Love in a second language is indeed an adventure, but what happens when children enter into the equation, and couples form families?

A recent special issue of The International Journal of Bilingualism addressed this very question of emotions in multilingual families, especially in light of bi/multilingual parenting and caregiving. Language choice in the family may be guided by a family language policy, which has as its goal the development and maintenance of a home language other than the societal language; however, the individual’s emotions linked with a particular language can be positive, negative, and even mixed, and thus impact the goal of the family’s language policy.

The studies in the special issue contribute to a growing field of inquiry highlighting the language of emotions and emotions about language(s). This research illustrates how emotions and language are manifested and embedded in language socialization practices in the home, family members’ lived experiences, identities, ideologies about language, and most importantly, how they contribute to bonding in multilingual families.

The language of emotions

Everyone will have an idea of how they express their emotions linguistically through declarations of love, diminutives, or terms of endearment. And then there are the emojis that pepper our intimate social media chats. Moreover, our actual choice of language, or expressions, in various situations may have an emotional overlay.

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We are socialized into cultural and social norms through the language(s) we grow up with in the home and so these languages will have a particular emotional significance in our lives. A comparative study of two transnational communities in the UK, the Chinese and the Polish, showed how children acquire cultural norms through family communication in the home.

The use of language showing emotionality were consistent with findings in cross-cultural studies—Chinese culture tends to encourage emotional suppression where Polish encourages more openness in displaying emotions. Results indicated culture-specific strategies for the use of emojis, also taking the child’s age into consideration. Nonetheless families in both communities showed expressive use of endearments and hence how emotions are expressed in forging family bonds.

A study of interactions in Brazilian-Norwegian families in Norway indicated how each parent used emotional expressions in socializing their child into their respective languages.

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For example, in doing common activities in the home, such as cooking, the mother in one family regularly used the Portuguese term of endearment for "my love" to support the role of the helpful daughter, and in cases in which she had addressed her mother in Norwegian, to get her to use Portuguese. In other interactions, the mother would draw on Portuguese to soothe her daughter and be a caring mother, thus promoting positive emotions related to the mother’s language.

Emotions about language(s)

Drawing on previous research, a study of a Korean-American family in the US addresses emotions by distinguishing between linguistic well-being and general socioemotional well-being. The former relates to the development and use of a home language while the latter to family relations and general well-being, with both closely related to multilingual children’s sense of belonging and hence identity.

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The study focuses on a 13-year-old who revealed how she felt about English, Korean, and being bilingual. Previous studies of Korean American immigrants’ heritage language maintenance and use have highlighted intergenerational conflict and resistance. The teenager’s linguistic and socioemotional well-being, however, was shaped by a strong sense of belonging. She had a strong relationship with her parents and family, was involved in varied and inclusive spaces that valued multilingualism and multiculturalism, and was allowed to make her own language choices. This resulted in positive emotions in her using both languages.

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An innovative study of reversing language shift at the family level involves perspectives from both the mother and the child, especially in terms of emotion and identity construction. After a two-year break imposed by the son to the use of the mother’s language, German, to him once he had started school in the UK, the young boy decided he wanted to pick it up again. While his father was monolingual in English, German was linked to his mother.

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The mother, assisted by her son’s involvement, kept a diary highlighting critical incidents and key moments relating to her son’s language use and identity development, and specific emotional reactions. The initiative had its emotional toll from the perspectives of both mother and child. However, linking the child’s language use to his development of a sense of identity and acknowledging his emotions in the process proved to be a positive experience and formed a strong emotional link to the heritage language.

The study also gives hope to parents whose children have stopped speaking the heritage or home language—it is never too late.

Elizabeth Lanza

Love is in the air

Love is indeed all around us and as research on "love" sculptures in the public sphere, with the word spelled out, shows that while the word "love" may be used commercially, the sculptures have no apparent informational or useful function. Rather they exude a positive emotion in the viewer.

In families, such written wordings can also have the same function, and who knows? They may contribute to young children’s reading skills. Visiting his grandparents, 4-year-old bilingual Michael picked up a teddy bear with "I love you" on a heart to show his English-speaking mother on FaceTime, without saying a word. His message was clear.

So while love is in the air… so are languages!